Reality TV Gets a Dose of Reality

Someone has fought back and won.

A family filmed being abruptly evicted from their home for Channel 5 series Can’t Pay? We’ll Take It Away has won a high court legal battle, which could force broadcasters to tone down the content of observational documentaries.

The episode of the show, which says it features “Britain’s favourite high court enforcement agents”, involved the filming of the eviction of a married couple for failing to pay rent.

On the occasions when I have observed snippets of these so-called reality programmes, I wonder why the victims cooperate as I most certainly wouldn’t. And let’s not get caught up in the reality nonsense, for they are nothing of the sort; they are entertainment and nothing else. Pure voyeurism.

Channel 5 defended the filming tactics as in the public interest as the show addressed real-life issues including personal debt and the dependence of tenants on benefits, and claimed viewing such scenes “was the best way to engage the public and stimulate debate”.

Nice try, but bollocks. This is not about stimulating debate, it is about abusing vulnerable people for the purposes of getting people watching TV and hence bumping your advertising revenue up.

My own approach to any such intrusion would be to demand a huge fee for my contribution (a six-figure sum being the minimum) – failure to pay would result in refusal to allow the footage to be used showing any recognisable details. But, that’s just me. I hate these things with a vengeance. They are no better than that vile Candid Camera of a few decades back where the team played nasty practical jokes on unsuspecting members of the public.

However, the production notes on the “story synopsis” showed capturing the drama of the scene was the main focus. It described the “eviction of a seemingly gentle tenant from hell and his very stroppy wife … the main drama here is the confrontation between the landlord and the tenants”.

Y’see? Scripted. This is about making cheap (and tacky) television designed to entertain the hard of thinking. To claim that it is about stimulating debate is a lie. In this instance, they filmed people without consent. That might be okay for a news story, but not for entertainment, which this is.

During the show, Paul Bohill, one of the eviction officers, tells the landlord to provoke the tenants and “say whatever you like, just give it some wellie”. He is heard twice saying that it made “good television”.

This man should lose his job as he is unfit to hold it. I would expect people doing this work to at least avoid confrontation as much as they can and to behave in a professional manner in what will always be a tense situation.

Mr Justice Arnold backed the couple, awarding them £20,000 and saying that Channel 5 went too far.

Just for once, the compo culture got it right. Channel 5 deserved to be punished for their behaviour.

“The focus of the programme was not upon the matters of public interest, but upon the drama of the conflict,” he said in a ruling handed down on Thursday. “The programme did contribute to a debate of general interest, but I consider the inclusion of the claimants’ private information went beyond what was justified for that purpose.”

Quite.

The ruling means that broadcasters will have to make sure they have a strong public interest argument for filming, or adopt a less intrusive approach.

Or better still, stop making prurient, voyeuristic programmes designed to humiliate the subject and titillate the observer and spend money making decent drama or factual documentary? Just a thought.

Oh, and before anyone dives in and starts to suggest that this couple were in the wrong for not paying their rent – yes, I know and the landlord should have the right to evict. That is not in dispute here. Doing it for entertainment is, however.

5 Comments

  1. Hmmmm, bailiffs. I don’t have any time for these bullying scumbags having had my car taken off my drive in the early hours a few years back. All for a debt I didn’t actually owe. If they had come at a sensible time they would have been shown the evidence that I didn’t owe anything but they tried the “possession is 9/10ths of the law” gambit. It didn’t work and I sued them for it….and won. If I could have afforded it I would have framed the cheque they paid me with. If a tv crew had been with them at the time I probably would have sued them as well. I don’t disagree with a single word you have written on this subject.

  2. It’s the modern day equivalent of the 18th & 19th century day out to laugh at the lunatics in Bethlehem Asylum (as it was then). An expansion of the Jeremy Kyle programme planning discipline.

  3. They say that you are what you read and, I’d suggest, what you watch. Such programmes just brutalise the viewer… and they’re all at it: I see trailers for Coronation Street and Emmerdale which used to be gentle soaps but now seem to be full of high drama showing people at their worst.

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