The Tube Has Spoken

Reality TV and History

Julie Anne Taddeo,Ken Dvorak

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780813139388
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Television History & Criticism

Featuring ordinary people, celebrities, game shows, hidden cameras, everyday situations, and humorous or dramatic situations, reality TV is one of the fastest growing and important popular culture trends of the past decade, with roots reaching back to the days of radio. The Tube Has Spoken provides an analysis of the growing phenomenon of reality TV, its evolution as a genre, and how it has been shaped by cultural history. This collection of essays looks at a wide spectrum of shows airing from the 1950s to the present, addressing some of the most popular programs including Alan Funt's Candid Camera, Big Brother, Wife Swap, Kid Nation, and The Biggest Loser. It offers both a multidisciplinary approach and a cross-cultural perspective, considering Australian, Canadian, British, and American programs. In addition, the book explores how popular culture shapes modern western values; for example, both An American Family and its British counterpart, The Family, showcase the decline of the nuclear family in response to materialistic pressures and the modern ethos of individualism. This collection highlights how reality TV has altered the tastes and values of audiences in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It analyzes how reality TV programs reflect the tensions between the individual and the community, the transformative power of technology, the creation of the celebrity, and the breakdown of public and private spheres.

PART I

Reality TV as Social Experiment

FRED NADIS

Citizen Funt

Surveillance as Cold War Entertainment

A New York City bus station phone operator receives a series of phone calls from an annoying customer. In the first call he asks the operator for the scheduled departures and the length of the trip. In the second call he asks if he will get a seat and if the bus drivers are good. The third call brings further questions: Do the buses ever get lost? Is Spring Valley a nice town? How many stops along the way? Can the driver make a special stop to pick him up at 114th and Broadway? When he calls the fourth time, he asks to speak to another operator. The exasperated operator responds, “I've told you all about the buses; do you want to know how often they clean them maybe?” The customer asks again the departure times. Then he asks if the buses have reclining seats.

Throughout the call we hear only the phone operator's voice, with its New York working-class accent; we sense her general good humor and the caller's difficulty flustering her, then her rising aggravation balanced by her fellow feeling for the caller, about whom between calls she wonders out loud to a coworker, “Where was he when they passed out the brains?” The caller was the thirty-three-year-old Allen Funt, and the recording was made in 1947 for his radio series The Candid Microphone. In this radio show he explored ways to provoke unrehearsed behavior that would eventually crystallize in the Candid Camera sequences he filmed off and on from the late 1940s until his death in 1999.

In provoking these unrehearsed responses, Funt thought of himself as a researcher, conducting experiments in human nature; in his sketches he dared his victims to act badly and dared his audiences to consider what “acting badly” meant. In the bus station operator sequence, we as listeners come to admire the phone operator. She is polite but nobody's patsy. By the sequence's finish, when he asks if he'll get lost in Spring Valley, she sings out, “Take a chance!” Along the way Funt has tested her character—or, to use a more old-fashioned coinage, her “virtue”—and, with her, the virtues of the working public in cold war America.

Allen Funt in his role as television “researcher” on Candid Camera. Courtesy of PhotoFest.

Frequently, Funt's surveillance “victim” would not fare as well as the bus station phone operator. For example, in one sequence for Candid Camera in 1963, Funt filmed a young man in a suit and fedora boarding an elevator crowded with Funt operatives. Before the elevator doors close, the Funt extras turn to the back of the car. The young victim notices this, then casually turns backward. Next the extras slowly turn forward; again the young man, baffled, does the same. They continue to put him through his paces, for example removing and then replacing their hats. The victim mirrors them. While Funt's voiceover commentary stresses the humorous nature of the young man's plight, he serves him up as a “treat” and a warning about conformity.

Concerns about privacy, conformity, decency, and American character were rampant in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when Funt's shows emerged on radio and television. This was the age of loyalty oaths, fears of un-American activities, Communist infiltration, organized crime, and public panics over comic books and juvenile delinquency. In 1947, just one year before Candid Microphone, the Truman administration had established the national security state apparatus, which included the formation of the National Security Council and the CIA, as well as an expanded FBI with authority to run background checks on federal employees. Funt's use of surveillance for entertainment addressed the public's concerns about threats to privacy in a time of rampant paranoia. And though Funt's entertainments quietly probed 1950s Americans for their “good citizenship” qualities, creating a comic inversion of the HUAC hearings, his critics inevitably questioned what sort of citizen these shows’ creator was as well.

The Apprenticeship of Citizen Funt

Funt was born in Brooklyn in 1914 to immigrant German-Jewish parents. He graduated from high school at age fifteen and went on to study fine arts at the Pratt Institute and Cornell University. No introverted artist, he was feisty and streetwise. To gain respect in his Brooklyn neighborhood, during his childhood he began boxing, and he continued as a member of the Cornell Boxing Club; his scrappy appearance and manner later aided him when he asked outrageous favors and questions of people on camera. After graduating from Cornell in 1934 with a degree in fine arts, and recognizing that he was “no Matisse,” Funt landed an entry-level job in advertising in Manhattan and soon found a niche as an “idea man” for radio shows.

Drafted during World War II, Funt continued his show business apprenticeship in the U.S. Army Signal Corps, where he produced radio shows and fund-raising events for war bonds. In Behind the Dog Tag: The Show That Makes GI Wishes Come True, Funt would field GIs’ bizarre wishes, for example, “to go swimming in beer,” and find a way to grant them. He also created a radio show that fielded GI complaints called The Gripe Booth. According to Funt, GIs tended to become tongue-tied when the red light flashed on for recording, so he began to record them earlier, in secret, while casually bantering, to get better and more candid communication from his subjects. This was a breakthrough for him. According to his 1994 memoir, “As soon as I was discharged from the army and returned to New York, I tried to create a radio show using hidden microphones…. I wanted to create a program that would simply record the beauty of everyday conversation … pure eavesdropping” (Funt with Reed 26).

The results, made with a wire recorder in diners and other public venues, frequently consisted of weak banter and background noise that tended to be unfit for his radio show Candid Microphone. Occasionally the hidden microphone would pick up gems, such as when two handicapped veterans in a veteran's hospital talked about how difficult it was to deal with the public's inquiries about their disabilities. Too often, though, there was not enough drama in these secret recordings. Funt claims that he finally hit on the proper formula while hiding a microphone in a dentist's office. A customer interrupted him, and in a fit of inspiration, Funt began to examine her mouth, then told her that she didn't have any wisdom teeth at all, which led to a heated exchange on tape. With this improvisation, Funt left behind the role of silent eavesdropper and took on the role of dramatic provocateur.

His further exploration of his gimmick gained for Candid Microphone popular acclaim and a following that included numerous New York intellectuals. The sociologist David Riesman, for example, in The Lonely Crowd (1950) cited a Candid Microphone sequence as evidence that consumerism had led to the emergence of an “other-directed” personality anxious to smile and please (121). In addition to being reviewed in the New York dailies, Funt and his innovative shows were the subject of articles in Life, the New Yorker, and the Saturday Evening Post; he also became the model for the roguish television producer Golk, who revels in shouting, “You're on camera!” to his media con-game dupes in Richard Stern's energetic novel Golk (1960).

Braced by this early appreciation, Funt continued his experiments, pranks, and improvisations and helped define himself as a new sort of “auteur.” A publicity photo from the late 1940s shows Funt in his office, tie loose, arms crossed, and one leg up on a chair as he gazes bleary-eyed past three workers with earphones who are splicing wire recordings. Like a jazz album photograph showing musicians and producers in a relaxed studio, this portrait suggested a certain insouciance and world-weariness in Funt and his young staff. His wised-up, technically capable portrayal announced a new sort of artist at work: a practical joker, sociologist, and confidence man. Like the swindler Rinehart in Ralph Ellison's 1952 novel Invisible Man, who prowls the streets of Harlem impersonating a preacher and a pimp, Funt—who also published his first memoir in 1952—could “be” anybody—dentist, grocer, butcher, hotdog vendor, driving instructor, wrestler, annoying presence on a street corner, even HUAC investigator. And he was able to evoke melodic inspirations from his “instrument”—the anonymous people he referred to, alternately, as “subjects” and “victims.” He was no Matisse, but a new kind of artist primed for the age of radio and television.

A year after his radio debut, Funt took his format to television. The show pleased audiences even though it did not fit preexisting genres or broadcasters’ notions of television's strengths as a medium. In 1948, when Candid Camera first aired, television was in its infancy; many believed that the small screen with its poor image quality was best for live events, which offered a feeling of immediacy and connection. Hollywood-made telefilms such as detective series were suspect. One critic argued that such artificial shows “break the link between human and human. The viewer loses his sense of being a partner and instead becomes a spectator” (Boddy 81). Much of the early television programming was live, whether talk shows, quiz shows, variety shows, or live dramas and staged spectaculars that drew from the New York City theater talent pool.

Funt blended curiously into this mix of live programming. He began on a local ABC broadcast with Ken Roberts as his cohost, Philip Morris as the show's sponsor, and plenty of shots of Roberts and Funt puffing on their sponsor's cigarettes. To meet television's demands for immediacy, Funt gave off-the-cuff introductions to his films and ongoing commentary or banter with his cohost during the live broadcast. In so doing he solved the problem of maintaining immediacy and a sense of intimacy with live audiences. In the 1960s, when Candid Camera became a national success on CBS, Funt relied on the same format, working with a string of urbane partners that included the acidic, witty talk show host Arthur Godfrey, and later the more self-effacing Durward Kirby and Bess Myerson, a former Miss America.

Selling his show to local networks, while also working on industrial films and producing phonograph recordings of his radio material, Funt soon became a wealthy man. In 1951 he purchased a large estate on the Hudson River that he and his wife Evelyn dubbed White Gates. There they took to living in high style with their three children, as the original ten-acre purchase spread out into a hundred acres. Funt struck a jaunty style, commuting to work in a phone-equipped white Thunderbird, relying on a tape recorder to capture his inspirations, pleased to get comments on his show from a toll collector every Monday morning.

Candid Methods

When Funt gained prominence in the 1950s and 1960s, he offered interviewers a standard account of Candid Camera's five basic categories: (1) pure observation of the ordinary; (2) wish fulfillment; (3) human frailties; (4) the small crisis; (5) the expose of tricks of the trade (Martin 93-94). Funt insisted that he could spend hours admiring the different ways in which people smoked, ate spaghetti, or descended staircases. The “pure observation” that he had attempted in early Candid Microphone segments by recording in diners and veterans’ hospitals had by the 1960s become compendiums of simple events set to music, whether a montage of numerous bowlers bowling, babies’ crying set to opera music, or stylish traffic cops at work directing the flow of traffic in time with a jazz score.

The category of “wish fulfillment” involved the viewer's identifying with Funt, the provocateur, as he played out a transgressive or risque fantasy, attempting, for example, to pick up girls in Central Park, or to order a set lunch special at a diner and repeatedly ask the irritated waiter to make substitutions (“Vegetable soup, I don't like vegetable soup. Can I change the soup for some fruit salad?”). In another wish fulfillment fantasy he would nonchalantly hand a cab driver a fifty- or hundred-dollar bill and wait for the cabbie to complain he couldn't change it.

“Human frailties,” in his formula, meant exposing an individual's vanity, greed, or weakness in the face of social pressure. His camera would catch people primping in front of a mirror, for example, or getting increasingly aggravated as he asked for favor after favor. He would use difficult words in an improper context and prompt absurd responses from subjects who didn't know the word's meaning but wouldn't admit it, as when he asked, “Did you know that elevator is retroactive?” or, “Who do you think is the most superfluous actress acting today?”

His exposés of tricks of the trade, which aligned his shows with crusading journalism, included candid tapes he made of trickery in the loan industry and on used car sales lots. In one such sequence he talked with a professional wrestler about how he could fix a fight and was assured that 99 percent of all fights were fixed, and those that weren't were “no good” because they bored audiences. Such exposés could also benefit businesses, as when he created sales training films that highlighted bad salesmanship.

The heart of his show, however, was in the small crisis. His creation of these small crises anticipated the work that the social psychologist Leon Festinger in the late 1950s termed cognitive dissonance. Much of this research could be traced to postwar funding related to understanding shifts in public opinion and concerns about conformity and totalitarianism. Such communications research examined how subjects handled the unexpected—if what is going on is baffling, or contradicts a person's received wisdom, ethics, or common sense, how does she or he resolve the situation? How do people manage to reduce the dissonance and related anxiety? The majority of Funt's sequences fit this category, which in his hands involved people handling the minicrisis of the practical joke. How do people in telephone booths respond, for example, when an elephant comes and blocks their exit?

For this category of research, Funt, like a silent comedy director, often highlighted people's reactions to machines that went haywire. In linking comedy and automation, Funt was following a long tradition. Writing in an era of increased industrial regimentation, the early twentieth-century French philosopher Henri Bergson argued that “the attitudes, gestures and movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion as that body reminds us of a mere machine” (75). Bergson called laughter the corrective for such rigidity. Funt produced his work in a new era of social regimentation, and his audience's laughter “corrected” revealed behavior patterns.

In one Candid Camera sequence, we see an office worker at first amused, and then fluttering around in dismay as a mimeograph machine begins to fling out sheet after sheet of paper. In a more elaborate setup, a new cook in a bakery is positioned at a conveyor belt to put whipped cream on cakes. The cakes come at much too fast a pace. The worker is a morose little fellow who responds in much the same way as a Harry Langdon or Charlie Chaplin might. He finally can only scoop the cakes up and place them higher up the conveyor line, knowing they soon will return. Further exploring the grammar of slapstick, Funt hired Buster Keaton to imitate an accident...