Class Observations: "Intimate" Technologies and the Poetics of Reality TV

For some of us, one of the biggest surprises of the 2006 Big Brother show was not the winner, Pete Bennett, but, according to The Guardian newspaper, the fact that “[a]fter seven years, the BB brand is stronger than ever” (Lawson 2006:3). The fact that cultural critics are wishing the show away at the point at which it has reached its popular cultural zenith of mass appeal is significant in that it is indicative of a widely held position, which readily equates (mass) media culture with bad or low culture, frightening, out of bounds, vulgar and excessive (Skeggs 2005a). At the same time however, Reality TV appears to have developed a major role in what could be deemed a public class re-education project through body politics. This paper re-evaluates the relationship between Reality TV and our lived experiences and discusses how this relationship re-engenders class(ed) relationships in contemporary culture. At the center of this discussion are what can be termed the body-politics of Reality TV and questions of agency and selfhood. Under examination is its tendency to mimic privacy and shift the dynamic interplay between media strategies and (consumer/audience) tactics (De Certeau 1988; Silverstone 1989). Through this process, existing power structures are masked. Secondly, it will be argued that the (physical) body is central to a public class reeducation project in that it not only offers a blank canvas for make-over projects, but is increasingly reinvested as a signifier of class difference and transformation. Rather than focusing on a particular Lifestyle TV show, this paper traces the classed body-politics across a range of Reality TV genres and shows and questions the power dynamics and cultural values generated.