If Big Brother's expert psychologists' main role is to help create scenarios likely to result in 'entertaining' - read abrasive - behaviour, should ethics compel them to quit the reality TV show, asks David Batty
David Batty
Guardian Unlimited
Racial tension, sexual harassment, ********** with a bottle - this year's Big Brother has plunged to new depths in reality television. From self-loathing gay hairdresser Craig groping drunken geordie Anthony, to wannabe footballer's wife Saskia telling Zimbabwean nurse Makosi her Afro hairdo looked like "a ******* wig". All of which prompts the question: just what are the programme's psychologists doing?
According to the British Psychological Society's code of conduct, psychologists should "hold the interest and welfare of those in receipt of their services to be paramount at all times and ensure that the interests of participants in research are safeguarded". But can this duty ever be reconciled with the entertainment values of reality television? How is it in the "interest" of Kinga to allow her to ********** with a wine bottle on television while drunk? What benefit is there in someone so ill at ease with their sexuality as Craig - dubbed the "camp crimper" by the tabloids - being allowed to get away with fondling Anthony, the object of his increasingly obsessive affections?
None of the psychologists working on Big Brother are prepared to publicly defend their actions - and, more to the point, their inaction during the more worrying incidents in the current series. But a spokeswoman for Big Brother insisted that the psychological and physical welfare of the contestants is taken "extremely seriously". She said: "All housemates go through a thorough psychological assessment for the show by a chartered psychologist with postgraduate degrees in clinical psychology and psychotherapy. In addition enquiries are also made about their medical history, recent prescriptions and illnesses.
"All the housemates are deemed fit, well and psychologically robust enough to cope with the intense environment of this game show. The systems in place to protect the housemates include rigorous vetting procedures, 24 hour monitoring and on-site psychological and aftercare support. The identity of the psychologist is not divulged in order to protect the confidential relationship between them and the housemates."
To give them the benefit of the doubt, the Big Brother production team may have provided valuable off-camera counselling and advice to the housemates. But what we have seen on screen does raise concern about whether the priority has been to help the producers create entertainment or to safeguard the contestants' wellbeing.
David Wilson, professor of criminology at the University of Central England, claims that the Big Brother psychologists are effectively little more than casting agents, using their expertise to identify contestants with personality traits likely to spark conflict within the house. Prof Wilson, who briefly worked on last year's Big Brother, believes psychologists should refuse to work for reality TV shows unless they have an independent ethics committee to safeguard the contestants' wellbeing.
Prof Wilson quit last year's Big Brother after an outbreak of violence on set which triggered a police investigation. He was chosen to work on the series because of his experience as a prison governor but decided he could not be associated with a programme that provoked violence for entertainment.
The Big Brother producers dubbed the series "Big Brother gets evil" and redesigned the house to create tension and trouble. Endemol hoped that Prof Wilson would provide expert commentary on how the housemates were dealing with being locked in the smaller house and being divided into privileged and disadvantaged groups. But he objected to an experiment in which two of the evicted housemates were allowed to spy on their fellow contestants and then return to the house.
Prof Wilson says that that this went against good prison management, which dictates that cellmates who have fallen out should be separated to prevent further violence erupting. In the event reuniting the housemates provoked a fight with trays thrown, plates smashed and tables overturned.
He said: "I realised very quickly that they were putting housemates in situations that one would never have been able to do in academic research. On the first day when I went into the Endemol studio at Elstree, a psychologist came over and said, 'we've chosen a far more interesting bunch this year'. They had to react against the universally derided "boring" housemates from the previous series.
"It was like they were casting a play in which characters were chosen on the likelihood that they would clash. They are casting people who are exaggerated versions of normal - who are more verbal, physical and dominant. When you put them together then give them alcohol it is inevitable there will be conflict."
Prof Wilson is also critical of the way Endemol used his expertise as a prison governor. He said: "They had previously asked me about the design of the house - whether that influenced behaviour. As a prison governor I'd used design to give a sense of space, reduce noise pollution, pipe quiet calming music into the rooms to cut out disruptive background noise. But Endemol wanted to turn that on its head."
The criminologist admitted he got caught up in the glitz surrounding the programme. He said: "I was quite flattered to be asked to do it. One tended to ignore the more hardnosed questions about the show's ethics."
"I've worked with some of the most dangerous and violent offenders in the country and when I stood back from the excitement and questioned what Big Brother was doing, I thought it was absurd," he said. "My work has been about reducing tension and violence, now here I was involved in a programme designed to do the opposite. There was homophobia and crass insensitivity in terms of Ahmed having to wear combat fatigues when he'd fled the civil war in Somalia."
Despite his resignation, the criminologist received several offers to work on other reality TV series. He said: "One I remember was a cable TV programme about celebrity prisoners called "Heir Today, Con Tomorrow", which would have featured the likes of Lord Brocket and Jonathan Aitken."
He did work on the BBC2 reality series, the Experiment, which re-enacted an infamous psychology experiment where contestants were divided into guards and prisoners. But he said the participants' welfare was safeguarded because the show had an independent ethics committee and a team of counsellors on standby.
The professor is also critical of reality shows such as How Clean is Your House and the House of Obsessive Compulsives because he believes that they exploit emotionally vulnerable people. "Many of the people featured in How Clean is Your House clearly suffer from post traumatic stress or depression. Simply tidying their house is not going to deal with their underlying problems and exposing them to public censure could well make them worse. I think we have to ask the question: is it acceptable to present people who are damaged as entertainment? In my opinion it isn't."
He said: "All reality TV shows should have an ethics committee who would look dispassionately at what was being asked of the contestants to ensure it was fair. In the case of Big Brother that could include psychologists, counsellors, Ofcom regulators, and former contestants from the programme and other reality TV shows."
The professor said this should help to prevent some of the more disturbing and distasteful episodes seen in the last and current series of Big Brother. He said: "Big Brother was the kind of thing we could watch together as a family. I wouldn't even let my 14-year-old son watch it now. The ********** with the bottle was a new low. It's reinventing itself as soft porn - presenting behaviour we'd condemn as antisocial if we saw it in Faliraki or on the high street on a Saturday night as entertainment."
oh my, such thinking !