What’s this? A weekday post that’s not a review of Mastermind or University Challenge? Has the world gone mad? No, not really. You see by the end of school yesterday afternoon I’d developed a sore throat, bad chest and a splitting headache. I took a lateral flow test and the result was inconclusive. So I booked a test at my local drive in centre yesterday evening, and I’m waiting at home for the results to come back. If I was a betting man I’d say it’s just a cold, but it’s not a gamble I can afford to take. If I am positive the last thing I want to be doing is spreading it to classrooms full of kids. So I do have this little bit of unexpected time. It also means I won't be going to the rugby club quiz tonight.
I’d like to revisit the question regarding how much of a duty
of care, if any, a production company has towards the contestants participating
in their shows. When I say duty of care I’m not referring to physical safety,
since I’m sure that’s pretty much a given. But do production companies also
have a duty of care as regards the way that a contestant or a team come across
on the screen? Yes, alright, this is inspired at least a bit by the plight of
the Sussex team on this Monday’s University Challenge. But I think it’s a fair
question.
I can understand if you think that no, they don’t. After all,
nobody forces you to apply, do they? Either you’ve watched the show and so you’re
fully aware of the risks involved, or you haven’t watched the show in which
case you maybe deserve what you get for applying. Personally, I don’t think it’s
quite as simple as that.
I think you have to take into account the risk/reward ratio
of each different show. If you take a show like, let’s say for the sake of
argument, Tipping Point, I’d argue that the risk of appearing on the show is
small, while the potential reward is fairly substantial. After all, as much as
the show is about getting questions right, it’s also about the luck of the way
that the ‘coins’ fall for you. So you go out in the first round? It’s unlikely
that you’re going to face a Twitter storm about your assumed lack of
intelligence. Now let’s take Mastermind. The risk is – in terms of quiz shows –
about as high as it gets. You need to put a lot of work into preparing your
subject, and even then you don’t know how you are going to react to sitting in
the chair until you are in it, by which time it’s too late. Most contenders
manage decent or good rounds. However, on the relatively rare occasions when a
contender posts a low score, then there’s the embarrassment factor for the
contender, and often a barrage of unkind and ill-informed comments on social
media. And let’s be absolutely clear on this – a low score on Mastermind or University
Challenge or any other quiz show is NO REFLECTION WHATSOEVER on that contender’s
intelligence. Yes, I’d like to think that doing well on Mastermind shows that
you’re pretty smart, but really and truly, all it definitely shows is that you’re
good on quizzes like Mastermind. As for the reward – well, there’s only one
tangible reward, the winner’s bowl. While it’s very nice, and a great
conversation piece, it’s not quite riches beyond the dreams of avarice.
So saying all that then, when a show has such a high level of
risk with such a (financially) low level of reward, is it still reasonable to
say – you applied, no one forced you to, so what’s the problem? Well, to be
fair, I don’t think that the various production teams of MM, UC, OC have ever
been blasé about the fate of their participants. In Magnus’ book “I’ve Started
So I’ll Finish” he does talk about the selection criteria aimed at saving some
contenders from themselves. In my own audition in 2005 the 20 GK questions
formed an important part of the audition, as did a set of questions and an
improvised connections wall in our audition for OC. To my own regret I never
explored the possibility of going on UC when I was at uni, so I have no
personal experience at their selection processes, but I’m sure that they have
their own ‘quality control’ for want of a kinder term. So what happened on
Monday night? Who knows? As I said at the time, I have no doubt that the Sussex
team are highly intelligent people who are good at their subject. So maybe it was
just a perfect storm of questions to which they didn’t know the answers. I don’t
care who you are, there are questions to which you don’t know the answer, and
if you get twenty or thirty of them altogether on the same evening then you can
end up looking and feeling distinctly second or third rate. Maybe that was what
happened on Monday night. Whatever the case, I think it’s a shame that the team
were put in the position where it happened. I’m not going to reprint any of the
Twitter comments posted afterwards, but many of them weren’t pleasant.
5 comments:
I have a confession to make in regards to this, in which I suspect I was possibly a little unfair on someone. A while back, I put a post on social media in relation to someone on a celebrity show not getting an answer right which was directly related to what they're known for. It was the feminist writer Laura Bates on the Christmas series of University Challenge, who wasn't able to identify the year that Emily Davison was trampled by a horse. I said something to the effect of 'How on Earth can anyone take her seriously as one of the most prominent feminist voices in the country when she doesn't have even basic knowledge about feminist history, things that even I know?' Someone came back to me with, 'Have you considered the possibility that she probably did know it, but just doubted herself in the glare of the studio lights?' Which thinking about it, is fair enough - I've read more of Bates' work since, and I'm sure it says more about her knowledge and understanding of feminist issues than her ability to recall the year something happened in a stressful situation does. I read that situation wrongly.
I think this culture of judging quiz contestants very harshly started with Weakest Link; the whole purpose of that show was that Anne Robinson would try to catch contestants out and humiliate them, especially if they got something wrong that they really should have known. And I wouldn't exactly say that's a fundamentally wrong way to do a TV quiz - I'd hope the most of the people who went on that were good-humoured enough to be able to laugh at themselves, and apparently there were times when Anne intervened and told the production team not to use certain bits of footage if she thought someone was genuinely upset - but I fear it has contributed to a culture where we feel that TV contestants are fair game and that we can humiliate them. And of course, in a world of social media, which wasn't around when Weakest Link started, that increases the problem.
I'm not sure I agree about it being balanced against what kind of prize is on offer. On Love Island, the winners get £50,000 (no, I don't watch it, I just looked it up) and there's still been quite a spate of suicides and attempted suicides amongst past contestants - including I think one attempt by a winner. Winning a huge amount of money doesn't mean that you won't suffer as a result of your depiction on something. Truthfully I'm not really sure what the solution is, but I think production teams could do vastly more to call out bullying of their contestants online, to warn people about what they're expecting and to depict people in a positive way even if they do badly. You rarely hear about anyone on Bake-Off being bullied online, do you? Not even if they've done really badly on the show, everyone's always really sympathetic. What is it about that show that means people are more likely to be kind?
Hi George - I take your point about not agreeing about it being balanced about what kind of prize it is - as I often say you're welcome to disagree. As a long time devotee of Bake Off, though, could I remind you about Bin Gate? In 2014 a rather nice senior lady who was in that year's competition took a fellow contestant's ice cream out of the freezer on a particularly hot day when another of the freezers wasn't working. This resulted in it being unusable for said contestant, who then put the rest of his showstopper in the bin and was eliminated that week. As it happened, this was something I wrote about on the blog at the time, and I take the liberty of quoting - "In yesterday's heat, the final (and probably most important) baking challenge was to produce a baked alaska - for which the bakers had to make everything they needed, including the ice cream. The epsiode showed one of the bakers, Diana Beard, removing the ice cream of another baker, Iain Watters (nickname - the russet Gandalf), from the freezer to place her own in there. What we, the viewers, were shown then was Iain, in frustration, after his icecream was shown to be melted, crying out in anguish, then a little melodramatically throwing all he had made into the bin, and storming off set. In the climax of the show we saw Iain, like a naughty schoolboy, bringing his bin to the judging table to receive a lecture from Paul and Mary, reddening all the time with embarrassment, after which he was speedily ejected from the show.
(COntinued) The BBC received over 500 complaints after the show, and apparently Twitter exploded with indignation over Iain's treatment, with many sadly typically incendiary comments about Diana. Diana herself went on BBC Radio Shropshire this morning, tearfully saying that she feels she has been 'stitched up' by the programme makers. Judging by her remarks, and those left on Twitter by Paul Hollywood and Sue Perkins, she has a point. According to them, the ice cream was out of the freezer for about 40 seconds before Iain was called over to remove it to his own freezer, since space was limited. I haven't timed it, but it seemed to me that there was a darn sight more than 40 seconds between the programme showing Diana removing Iain's ice cream saying 'hasn't he got his own freezer?' or words to that effect, and Iain crying out in anguish over the state of his ice cream. What the programme also failed to do was to show any words of commiseration or remorse passing between the two, leaving people to draw the impression that even if this was not a deliberate act of sabotage, Diana couldn't have cared less about what had happened.
In my opinion - and as always - feel free to disagree - when you take the king's shilling by applying to go on a TV competition, then you know that you are in the hands of the production team, and if you don't quite come across as well as you'd like, well, sorry, that's part of the risk that you take. However, surely the production team must have realised that they had edited this particular show in such a way as to give people the impression that this perfectly nice lady in her late 60s is actually a heartless cheat, exposing her to abuse and vitriol from the more vocal sectors of the interweb. I am serious about this. Unless the production team actually did think that Diana was totally responsible for Iain's elimination, and heartlessly glad about it, they had a duty towards her not to allow her to come across in this way. I can only think that the team couldn't resist the furore that they must have known this would whip up. However the show doesn't need it - it has a huge and loyal audience anyway. It comes across to me as a cynical move, which shows no regard for the people taking part in the competition - without whom there would be no show in the first place."
As for why it happens so much on quiz shows - and arguably, the more testing quiz shows, I don't know, obviously, but if I had to speculate I'd say that it was maybe because when people watch a difficult quiz show and can't answer a majority of questions, there's a proportion of them who feel schadenfreude, and calling a contestant stupid relieves a little bit of their own feelings of inadequacy.
I quite agree with you Dave, and I think it's appropriate that you bring up that you bring up that Bake Off incident, which is a fine example of how TPTB editing footage out of context in the name of making explosive TV. Another example I've brought up many times before is a chap who was on Deal or No Deal many years ago, who only seemed to be offering cautious advice on the wings, only to then make a huge all-or-nothing final gamble in his own game.
It's one reason why I haven't put myself forward for any TV quizzes yet, the other being potentially unsavory social media response, which you also mentioned, and also have the upmost respect for anyone who does.
Admittedly I'd forgotten about Bin-Gate! Actually, Ian got off with a VERY positive exit that week, in which they implied it wasn't his fault. In reality, he was doing by far the worst out of all the contestants before that point and was highly likely to go anyway. It didn't help Diana's reputation that she never returned, for reasons completely unrelated - shortly after filming that episode, she had a fall and her injury resulted in her losing her senses of taste and smell, so she was forced to withdraw. If she'd come back, I daresay she'd have had the time to appeal again to the viewers.
I agree with you, the edit that week was completely irresponsible. I think my point still stands though - it was a one-off incident, normally everyone on that show comes across as really nice and likeable and the audience responds well to them (in fact, I think there's an argument that the reason Diana faced such hostility is because people felt so immensely sorry for Ian, so it came from a place of sympathy even if it manifested itself in a harmful way). Isn't this something we should be able to expect from TV producers and from the general public?
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