BB FANS

Mick Hume



January 21, 2005

Degrading acts on camera are the nightly fare of reality television
Notebook by Mick Hume



THE PICTURES of Iraqi prisoners being abused at a British army base near Basra seem so similar to the infamous photographs of grinning American soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison that you might assume that they are copycat photos. Yet it turns out that the Basra pictures were taken six months before the Abu Ghraib snaps — and a year before the American ones were published around the world.
If we want to discover what inspired these appalling images, perhaps we should start by looking closer to home, at the cultural elite that produces reality television shows such as Celebrity Big Brother. So far as I know, nobody has yet been forced to ********** or simulate anal sex on reality TV. But these programmes and the staged pictures of prisoner abuse all look like products of the same transatlantic culture: the decadent show-it-all circus of “look at me and my hang-ups”, which has made exhibitionism and voyeurism respectable. The photographs of Iraqis apparently being abused by British soldiers have been widely described as “the shame of the Army”. Yet the striking thing is that the soldiers in the pictures appear anything but ashamed. Like the US guards at Abu Ghraib, they are smiling and giving the thumbs-up to the camera, posing themselves and their victims for the pictures, revelling in the degrading spectacle. These are not hidden-camera exposés: the abuse was staged in order to be photographed.



Meanwhile, over in reality TV land, a growing army of shameless self-publicists is taken to ever lower depths of mutual degradation for the benefit the camera. It is as if anything goes, as long as it can be exposed on film. The line between public and private has been eroded so badly that even one’s darkest thoughts and fantasies can now be paraded. Indeed such exposure is not only allowed, it is positively encouraged.

Things have reached the point where humiliating yourself and other people in front of millions is celebrated as cool entertainment. Pack up that degraded culture in your kitbag and ship it into a warzone, and you can end up with a situation where, as one Iraqi victim from the American prison pictures put it, some soldiers stage and film acts of abuse “like it was theatre for them”. We await the broadcast of Abu Ghraib — The Opera on the BBC.