Strong Recommend: The Contestant

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Welcome to Strong Message Here, Strong Recommend, our cultural recommendations and a look at their impact on language.

I'm Helen Lewis.

And I'm Amanda Nucci.

And what have you brought?

You carried aloft on the story of the world.

I have brought, well, basically, my iPad, because on it is my iPlayer, from Storyville, the documentary strand, I think they used to to call these things on BBC with amazing documentaries from all around the world.

And one is called The Contestant.

It is fundamentally about a Japanese game show.

1998, there was a comedian who was one of the contestants on it called Tomoaki Hamatsu.

He won and what he won, which he didn't know, was he was going to be locked up in a room with nothing.

no clothes, nothing.

And he had to then apply for competitions, take part in magazine competitions and start getting winnings, start earning his winnings.

And once he acquired a certain value of prizes, he was told he would then be let go.

And it went on for months and it was televised and people were watching him.

He was called, his nickname was Natsubi, which is Japanese for eggplant.

So named because the channel would put an eggplant symbol over his regions because he was naked.

Do you know I've been learning Japanese?

Do you want to know what the Japanese for banana is?

Go on.

Banana.

Oh, great.

And you've learned that.

Yeah, I just, it's amazing how I'm bilingual, really.

There's a lot of Japan has got a very free approach to just going, well, we just said it in a Japanese accent.

So like ice cream is i sucrimu.

And you go, yeah, fine, that'll do.

That's our style.

Okay, I'll take that approach whenever I'm in Japan.

Okay.

And he was going madder and madder and madder.

At one point, he felt he had one.

So he was taken out of his lair by the producer, the show's producer, and taken somewhere else, and then was told he was going to have to do it again.

Did he not go, you can't make me?

I think he was broken by then.

I mean, it all, I wouldn't say it all ends happily, but he ends up in a happier place at the end of it.

But the fact that this happened, the fact that we weren't talking about it at the time, but that a whole country was watching this.

I mean, it is beyond the Truman show.

And the producer of it is happily doing his interview in the film, explaining what a great idea.

He's just going into solitary confinement yeah it's extraordinary thing and it did make me

you know the whole business of reality television i still i have a problem with because i kind of think isn't this using other people for our sport isn't this an exploitation i read an interesting piece recently by matt alt who writes a substack about the fact that japan has recently turned away from those very

hardcore torture-based reality tv issues to things that are much more cuddly and i thought yeah

not it's kind of not overdue guys you know they had some pretty pretty endurance kind of stuff

and remember when Big Brother started it was always sold as a psychological experiment and there was going to be a professional psychologist standing by monitoring and giving his or her interpretation of what this meant that was gone the moment somebody had sex in the big brother that was gone it was just all about us watching other people i think in the first series they let people have books and then they took them away because they just wanted people not to be sitting on their own right yeah i think that's one of the things that became more obvious with it, is that they tried to drive people mad through boredom.

But that's one of the reasons they had so many problems.

I don't know if you remember Kinger on one of the series of Big Brother, which she got very drunk and inserted a bottle into herself in quite a moment.

But they essentially realised that there was this kind of duty of care to people.

If they're people bored, they will just drink.

Yes.

And then they will get into fights.

And then,

like, it's in a very unnatural state to be able to do it.

And then the increasing element of introducing, we're going to shake it all up, you know, unexpectedly.

New rules get started to make it even worse for them.

um mr beast does something similar you know he has a stunt i mean he does lots of different stunts but one of them is

the popular youtuber mr beast all right okay yes um he uh lock tube youtube yes on the tube of you uh he locked a guy into a like a it was a big american supermarket and he had to just like he had to kind of live on eat his way out

he was he was like there with it like he making himself a tent out of the kind of camping thing and he was cooking himself some bees we just run out of stories today and they just but the thing was that you were exactly right which was the problem was that it became, and he won money sort of escalatingly for every day he stayed in, but it became obvious that he was too good at it and therefore they had to make it meaner and harder.

And then they switched off the lights, you know, and sort of stuff like that.

I mean, it's quite an ethical minefield because you're watching this guy for whom this is a life-changing amount of money, but he's miserable as sin.

He's obviously missing his family incredibly.

And it's just like, but if I hang on a bit more, then I can put the kids through college.

And you're like, oh, I'm not, I'm not sure I'm loving this.

Yeah, or you could, you know, get a job elsewhere.

But in this case, I guess, not for your poor Japanese comedian, but for this guy, this was more money realistically than he could earn.

Yeah, it's not.

Yeah, absolutely.

But that's why I'm fascinated by the fact that the Japanese guy would stay in, even though the

prize was just merely release.

Yeah.

But he could have had that prize.

And I suppose fame, but he wasn't aware of that at the time because he wasn't aware of how extensively it was being filmed.

Or indeed of the huge audiences following him.

Which is one of the interesting things about that first series of Big Brother is it is a bit more naive and innocent that they have no idea if anyone's watching or not.

Because of course the internet, I remember, I remember it was like it was little boxes at the top of your screen on your laptop or your PC, wasn't it?

The whole idea of there being a live feed into the Big Brother house was like revolutionary.

Yes, you'd be watching normal channel four, and then there'd just be some people sort of sleeping in the corner.

Okay, find a book.

And the other thing, and this is where I do feel really old, and whether I am now just part of another species of human and will just never understand

what I'm about to talk about, which is

structured reality, this bizarre category of so the only way is ethics and

all those.

I don't get it.

I don't know what's happening.

As in, are they really having a row?

Are they genuinely having, or have they been told to have a row?

Or is it some hybrid of the two where people think they will probably will have a row?

So, that being the case, we might as well tell them what they should say when they do have a row.

I don't know.

I don't know why I'm being asked to watch this because i don't know what they're doing

i think the best commentary on all of that is have you ever watched the mitchel and web sketch about the apprentice right i think so yes and they do they say well basically let's give it a very small amount of money that you win but basically make it only so that only idiots will apply but they don't know that they're idiots

and they're like what's the kind of an amount of money that an idiot would think was a good amount and then everybody who watches it will think that they're the only one who's noticed that everyone on screen is an idiot and they say and how will that count in the ratings they go just the same.

But that's how I feel about all of those structured reality things.

I think the whole premise of this is it's real.

And if it's not real,

well, then we are, yeah, then I've sucked you into the no, but it kind of comes back to all the controversies about

memoirs.

You know, the fact that we always come over this summer, we've had this discussion about the salt path.

Yeah.

There's something different if something is sold as being real.

It touches you in a different way than if something is constructed.

I mean, my theory about the structured reality is it's just networks strapped for cash can't afford drama because drama is expensive.

Yeah.

Because it needs to be written and acted.

So they just round up some people and tell them what to say, but say it's real.

So you're not having to pay any writer's fees or costume and makeup.

Do you have any that you like there?

Because I remember reading an interview with

Henry Montana.

She said she loved Selling Sunset, which is about estate agents, which made it worse.

My daughter and I sat down and watched the first episode of Selling Sunset, and it was so unpleasant.

We looked at each other, went, No, we don't.

There's a lot of people sort of tossing their hair over their shoulder.

The other thing that always people say in reality TV shows against me is like, I say it to their face.

You know, the thing about me is I say it to their face.

I say it to their face.

That's just rude.

You're a monster.

You're just a monster.

Don't.

We all observe these rules.

Do you say it to their face, or do you wait till the camera team has set itself up so they can record your face and their face so they can see you saying it to their face?

I think that's what happens.

Yeah.

In my time, I've dabbled with a fair amount of reality TV, but I found that the innocence and the joy of it is gone.

And watching people people who know this is their shot at fame desperately kind of clawing at it.

I always recommend, so I recommend the contestant on BBC's Storywell.

I always recommend Goggle Box because A, it's very good.

They're great.

All the people in it are great.

They're very funny.

But that's where we get our little sampler of these types of shows.

And the little two-minute extracts I see of Maiden Chelsea and the rest of it to me feel just enough.

This is all your fault because in my house, when we watch Goggle Box, we say this is a Zeitgeist tape.

It's our Zeitgeist tape.

It's just like, well, I haven't got time to watch this late TV, ITV murder drama, but now I've given a prize.

If I'm ever asked any questions about it, I'm going to be fine.

Do you know what back in the day, I used to be an absolute fiend for America's Next Top Model?

I don't know what you're talking about.

It was Tyra Banks and a series of women who, because this was the 2000s, were just told to lose weight, basically.

And she'd always give them a makeover, which always involved her taking women with long hair and cutting off all their hair, which made them cry.

Right.

I mean, it was sort of like

Tyra Banks' sort of you know, punishment nunnery.

There's a show where you don't know if it's a cake or not.

I mean, that's where we've that's where we've ended up.

I mean, listen, at least the cake, I mean, the cake is harmed, actually, because I always cut the cake, but at least no humans are harmed in cake.

Icings,

yeah.

Well, there we go.

Okay, that is the contestant.

It is available on BBC iPlayer now.

And that's all for this week.

It'll be my recommendation next week.

Make sure you're subscribed on BBC Sounds.

Goodbye.

Goodbye.

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