Too Real TV?

[00:00:00] The Why Curve, with Phil Dobbie and Roger Hearing. Is reality TV a bit too real? Is the trend to entertain us by putting real people in challenging situations actually damaging them and us? After the allegations about married at first sight, is it time to ask if television's gone down a very dark hole? Vulnerable people push to reveal their weaknesses before an audience of millions. It's obviously popular.

[00:00:26] And a gift to media firms desperate to grab a shrinking TV audience. But is it the right way to find amusement? Are we turning entertainment into a blood sport? The Why Curve Well, I guess, you know, if we're talking about blood sports, we used to have beheadings, didn't we? Well, we did. They've kind of gone out of fashion a bit, apart from in Saudi Arabia. So, I mean, it just feels, you know, we're looking at people suffering.

[00:00:54] They're choosing to do it, of course. That's the point. But should we choose to encourage them? Should we choose to watch it? Yeah. Married at first sight, Saudi Arabia. That would be interesting, wouldn't it? With their beheading at the end. I mean, we're joking about it. Actually, it's not really a laughing matter, is it? It isn't. Because I feel like the most vulnerable people in society, even though they appear as, you know, enormously confident, they're not really, are they? I feel like a lot of them are either covering stuff up or they are in it for ulterior motives.

[00:01:24] But they're not aware of just how much they're putting themselves through by going through this, irrespective of what the TV show is. Yeah. Yeah. Because it's one of those situations where people, you know, it may be money. Obviously, they get paid to do it, I guess. They want to, you know, get famous, become influencers or whatever it is. But a lot of them are, I mean, they're going to be persuaded by the TV companies. I mean, it's almost like a kind of con, isn't it? Yeah, it is. So how far does it go?

[00:01:51] And do we just, it feels like, I mean, we had several people who committed suicide from Love Island and Love Island still on TV, as far as I'm aware. And Married at First Sight just seems to go from bad to worse. I have to confess, I have watched it and found it quite entertaining in the same way, in the same way that, you know, probably I would have been watching gladiators fighting each other in a row. All public hangings come to that. Well, I don't know, I would have gone that far, to be quite honest.

[00:02:16] But I mean, maybe I'm a little bit immoral by admitting to that, you know? Is it the question of morals? Anyway, I mean, let's look into all of this because it's an interesting topic. Okay, well, we've got a real expert on this. It's Helen Wood. She's Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at Aston University. And she's led research into the effect of reality TV on participants, crew and audiences. And she joins us now. So, Helen, I mean, first of all, an obvious question.

[00:02:41] The people who go into these reality TV shows, I know some of them are doing it because they've got this aspiration that they're going to make money out of being content creators in their own right. But, I mean, really, what is their motive? Is that their only motivation? Or do you think people going into Married at First Sight actually are looking for love? So, from our data, there's a mixture of those kinds of things. I mean, it's fair to say that fairly few people actually go on to make a lot of money having come through reality TV.

[00:03:10] It's a fair minority. So, it's not going to be an easy route to brand endorsements, etc., etc., which is kind of how it gets presented as a kind of content creator factory. Some do, but there's a very narrow and fairly sort of narrowly defined sector of the society that can do that. So, certain kind of white women tend to do well and others tend not to. So, I'm just sorry to interrupt so early on.

[00:03:38] But does that mean right from the very beginning they're being sold a lie? Well, I don't think that broadcasters necessarily sell it as this is the way that you're going to make money. But, of course, that is the attraction. And so, some shows, fairly few shows, but some shows do draw people from their already extensive profile. So, if you've got a big Instagram following, you may be called upon by a producer. They may look at you, may look at your following. I think you'd be great for the show. Some recruitment happens like that.

[00:04:08] Not all recruitment happens like that. And I think of the people that we spoke to from Married at First Sight, there was definitely a mix of people who did go in there for love and those who perhaps went in there to get something out of it at the end. And I think it would be fair to say that from our data, those who went in for love are those that are more likely to be harmed by the experience, I would say.

[00:04:35] Because they're sort of less resilient in some ways. Yeah. And I suppose there is this thing that people know what reality shows are generally. They're very aware of reality TV right across the piece. There's lots and lots of different shows doing it in different ways. Yeah. And is it almost now a thing? Fine, you know, yes, I'll go on reality TV. It's not a big leap to bare your soul in public in a way that, well, perhaps it should be. I think it's probably not as big a leap now as it was 10 years ago.

[00:05:04] I think the advent of social media, where people have grown up in an economy of performing themselves for other people, I think has changed the nature of what they think of as extreme. So there are sometimes, you know, people say to me, well, you know, they're going on there for fame. Why do you care? And I think, well, because we've created an environment in which self-performance is normal and very much part of our current economy.

[00:05:32] So I think there is a difference between how that felt. It felt shocking 10, 15 years ago, maybe, but it really isn't now. So people don't see it as such a big leap. I think the thing they're not prepared for mostly is that they're not in control of that image at all. They're not in control of the way they're curated and put together. And I think that is the piece that's shocking for most participants, that they're really not ready for that.

[00:06:00] However much they've watched a show, that's the thing they're really not ready for. So I have to confess, I've already confessed actually today, that I have watched Married at First Sight Australia, which I think is the worst, actually, example out of all of them from what I can tell. And there's so much bitchiness between the women on these shows. And yes, I am hearing more and more that a lot of those battles between the women on it

[00:06:24] have really been created by the, not just in the edit, but actually sort of like, you know, feeding lines to people. It's almost like in the schoolyard, you know, where people trying to make enemies of each other saying, oh, you know, you should hear what Nancy's been saying about you. You know, but it's been taken from the schoolyard and applied on international TV. So is that what's going on? Yeah, I think we thought we'd moved away from that kind of show.

[00:06:53] I think when we had the kind of parliamentary inquiry in the UK in 2019, I think we thought, and the Jeremy Carl show closed down, I think we thought we'd moved away from that kind of baiting kind of show towards getting people to act up for conflict. I think we thought we'd seen the end of that. And I think we thought that Ofcom's new guidelines created a different culture and a different environment.

[00:07:20] But I think we've seen it come back in the last few years or so. Married at First Sight changed its format to make it much more conflict-driven to how it was in the beginning when it was much more like a matching experiment. And of course, it got more popular when it became more conflict-driven. So we have got stories in our data about conceits where producers have pulled people aside

[00:07:47] and sort of figured out ways to get them to come over and said, oh, your mic's not working, and then fed them some story about, well, they said that to you over there behind your back, or are you sick of sitting on the fence, things like this. So I think there's definitely a lot of that producing. I think fans call it the producers producing, you know, they're actually making the drama out of the people. But with real people. But with real people, yeah.

[00:08:17] And that's what you'd expect as well, isn't it? Because in the end, Helen, you've got people want to watch conflict. It's not exciting if everyone's happy and sitting around and chatting amiably. And also the participants, maybe they get excited by that too. I think there's one thing to think about conflict, but there's another thing to give the audience sovereignty and say that it's okay if the audience want to watch conflict. We should give it to them if it harms people.

[00:08:44] I mean, the principle of the Ofcom code is that you shouldn't really do harm, that you should minimize harm. And so I think, you know, when you start to treat people like, you know, like warm bodies and props on a stage in the same way as you would for drama, then you've got to really think about what you're doing. Remember, if they were actors, they'd be protected. They'd have pay. They'd have sick pay. They'd have an agent arguing for them. These are not actors.

[00:09:14] They're not protected in any way for any kind of work they're doing. If they were, you know, in a boxing ring or something, there's nothing covering them in that sense. And yet they are going in. I think it says a lot about us, doesn't it? The fact that we accept it, because it's almost like Romans, you know, with the gladiators. It's that theatrical event that we're happy to watch and we want to see blood. And you could say, well, just like the gladiators, these people are going into this of their own free will.

[00:09:43] But I guess, you know, your comment earlier, they don't know what they're getting themselves into. Some of them are quite brittle and they're looking for stuff that they're not going to realize and they are being manipulated. Yeah. And I think we get that a lot when I talk about the projects, we get that a lot, you know, well, you know, that's up to them. They've got their own free will. They should be allowed to do what they want. But one of the principles in the changes to the Ofcom code is that they need to give informed consent. So they have to understand the risks of going into the show

[00:10:12] and that the production should spell that out to them. And for those of whom had the worst time in our data, and I have to say some people had a good time as well. Some people did enjoy different kinds of experience. This is not universal across the industry. But for those who had a bad time, they said nothing could have prepared me for what that was like. Nothing. And I think partly that's because a lot of the ideas

[00:10:38] about preparing people have been about preparing them for fame or preparing them for what's going to come out afterwards or preparing them for the kind of social media backlash. That's been very much part of the story. But I don't think, I think what's harder to prepare people for is what it might be like in a high-risk show to be taken away from your family, to have no contact with the outside world,

[00:11:05] to have your actions controlled and manipulated. And then to be edited and put together in a particular way in which you don't necessarily recognize yourself. And I wonder if you're actually quite a level-headed person who really does understand yourself and you get involved in a show like this. I wonder whether you'd be less attractive. I wonder whether you get knocked back. They're going, well, you're not brittle enough for the show. We actually want people who are going to go to pieces because that's good for TV.

[00:11:35] If you go in there and you balance and you understand yourself and you're bringing calmness to it all, maybe that's less interesting and you fail the audition. Well, those initial tests are really supposed to be about testing whether people are resilient enough for the show. So they have an initial psych test. One of the things I find that's interesting through doing the research is that the word psych is used as a verb. People get psyched all the time, which is sort of testing. Are they up to it? Are they up to the metal?

[00:12:04] It's like a mental health testing ground, I feel. Well, and so one of the things that happens is that they get tested and they feel, and you're supposed to only put people through who aren't showing such vulnerabilities that would create them problems down the line. But could they gain that? That sounds like the sort of thing you could gain because if they desperately want to do it and you ask the question, do you feel like you're mentally balanced? You're going to go, yes. However you ask that question,

[00:12:34] that's the question they're amounting to, isn't it? And you would just try and cheat the system to get through. And that's some of the problems that the productions have is that people will tell them what they need because they're desperate to get on. I think that's the other thing, you know, that you have a group of very willing people who really want to get into the game. So... And Helen, is there a gender element to this? Because, I mean, I haven't seen very much. I haven't watched it as much as Phil, certainly. But there seems to be an element that often the victims,

[00:13:04] and I mean, literally in some cases, of course, in what you're taught, you have been discovering at the moment, potentially, allegedly, are women. And that there are men perhaps are better able to deal with it or women tend to be more exploited in these circumstances? Is there a gender difference? I think it kind of depends on the show. I mean, some people will say that women are edited worse and they get a worse edit out of things. And that's...

[00:13:32] People have often said that about reality TV. Particularly black women tend to get shifted into the kind of black angry woman stereotype and that there's a kind of racist element to it too. And I think people have argued that through the history of reality TV, actually, that there's a kind of embedded white producer kind of bias in a lot of what's going on. I think also the thing is that women feel less protected,

[00:13:59] but it's not true that only women come out of it feeling damaged and harmed. We have that in our data too. Men who've been through a process where there were certain expectations of them that they weren't expecting. So it isn't an entirely female problem, but there's a kind of... I guess when men are whipped up, they're whipped up to get aggressive quite often in some of those shows.

[00:14:28] And whereas women are kind of whipped up emotionally and their emotions are played with a bit more and the kind of drama is seen to be a kind of feminized melodrama that has a kind of long history in soap. And so you can see those things being worked out and played out in a kind of very melodramatic style. Yeah, and this is true right across the piece. And we've talked about, obviously, Married at First Sight, but I mean, things like Love Island, of course, and various offshoots of that

[00:14:57] and lots of other reality shows you think might be the same. I mean, it might be as bad in various ways. Is it true right across the piece? I think there's a difference in what gets called high-risk shows to kind of other shows that might be about, you know, cooking, baking, or have a kind of particular task element involved. People get a bit humiliated when the pie doesn't work or the cake falls or that sort of stuff. It's not the same, is it? Yeah, and there's often a kind of disappointment in the talent in those shows

[00:15:25] and kind of how they're treated differently and things like that. But there's a difference between when you're put in a situation where you're kind of hothoused to react and where the drama is created out of that kind of reaction and the interrelationships between each other. That's where the difference happens. And so we hear things like we've heard today about, you know, the kinds of things producers will do to make things happen.

[00:15:55] And we heard in our data that the use of alcohol was very much back. And that, you know, I thought that had gone really after 2019, 2020, that it was very heavily controlled. It's bizarre though, isn't it, that we have a TV show where people get married having never met each other. They're encouraged to kiss fairly early on, you know, passionately. And then they're stuck in a room where they get into bed, presumably naked with each other.

[00:16:25] Normally at that stage in a relationship, I'd feel like sex was going to happen. But this is just such an unnatural environment. So understandably, these women are going, well, I didn't want to have sex. But I'm not saying this is my view, but you can understand the view of people saying, well, hang on a second, you put yourself in a position where that was bound to happen. But the thing is, the position that has been created by an unnatural environment orchestrated by the show. And I think it's fair to say that you have to take some responsibility

[00:16:54] for creating that environment where there are certain kinds of expectations. So anyone knows, you know, that does research on consent, you know, consent where there's any kind of power imbalance is difficult. It's difficult to have full consent when there's a power imbalance that's so heavy. If you wrap that power imbalance around the balance of production, lots of people around you, pressure to perform a narrative, consent becomes really complicated in that situation. And I think those shows

[00:17:23] needed to really work that out and really shake that down and it doesn't seem like they have. I mean, they can ask for separate rooms, but that's not an easy ask always. It's not necessarily available. And you can see that being turned into part of the narrative as well, you know, at this point. It becomes part of the narrative, yeah. Like they didn't want to sleep with you. Why didn't they? Why did they want a separate room? But Helen, we've talked very negatively about a lot of this and for good reason. But there are certain,

[00:17:53] apart from this particular show, which perhaps we should widen our focus a bit, there are things where certainly the pitch is helpful. So, you know, things like Virgin Islands or somehow these people who've never had a relationship or sex, you know, helped, advised, guided, things like the undatables, I think is another one. There are some where it's trying to encourage people. Do you want to lose your virginity on international television? Oh, no. Not an option in my case, I might add. It feels like it's the sort of thing

[00:18:23] that is, yes, too late, but it feels like it's the sort of thing that is being, a rationale is being created to justify the fundamental idea, which is, you know, let's just, you know, here's a show about sex and let's do it about people who've never had sex before. And you'd have to assume that, you know, humility is an important part of the criteria for the audience there. It's like, well, let's see, you know, who these weird people are who've got to a certain age without having had sex before. And I think this gets by Married at First Sight

[00:18:53] is the same as well. And I'm completely guilty of this. And I've talked to other people as well. You watch these shows because you feel better than they are. And I think that is part of the problem. We did some audience research back in 2012 that we published called Reacting to Reality Television. And that was very much about schadenfreude. That's the kind of, the kinds of things that people get is that they can compare it to their own lives, put themselves in a position where they feel better and gain some kind of sense of their own value.

[00:19:22] That's how it was working. We called it a tournament of value and that the audience were very much part of that. And I think that to a certain extent is true. But I also, you know, I've always been interested in this because I've been interested in ordinary people getting access to space on television. And there was a lot of arguments, particularly around the 2000s about reality television opening up the representational space. So when the Jeremy Carl show shut down, for instance,

[00:19:52] the fans were outraged because they couldn't see themselves on TV anywhere else because that demographic doesn't get space. So there is, you know, and there was an argument from the broadcasters as well in our data about, you know, vulnerable people shouldn't be, you know, blocked out from entering TV because they have certain kinds of vulnerabilities. We should open up this space to everyone. So that's where the argument, the kind of pushback,

[00:20:21] the pushback kind of comes. And what's your view on that, Helen? Do you think that's a valid point in this case? I don't feel as though when you're taking those vulnerable people, TV is ever on their side. They are just really playing at that weakness, aren't they? I think that's the point. I think representing vulnerable people is fine when you're on their side. And you can hear that if you hear to certain kinds of news producers, documentary makers, you know, if it has a kind of ethical, moral point, I think that's fine. I think it's hard,

[00:20:50] and this is where the lines get blurred, when you apply that to a very conflict-driven show where the kind of optics are different. And, you know, we could see what went wrong in Jeremy Kyle. And you can see some of that kind of creeping back. So the point is, you know, do you want to, do you have a kind of moral ethical framework in which you understand that the point of the show

[00:21:19] should not exceed and should not come at the expense of somebody's, another human being's harm, that no entertainment has that kind of type of value? And I think in the TV bubble, and lots of people talk about it as a TV bubble, that kind of, you know, the kind of ethical framework where people probably wouldn't do things like this in daily life are so wrapped up in the TV bubble that the dial starts to turn on what they're prepared to do.

[00:21:49] Crew talked to us about feeling very kind of morally compromised. Yeah, because I know that's part of your study. These people, you know, have to film this stuff, have to arrange it. I mean, does it make them feel really awkward? Yeah, I mean, one of the things I felt was that during the inquiries we didn't speak enough to crew and we didn't speak enough to participants and yet these are the people doing the care and experiencing the care on the ground. And so crew do talk about, well, they feel about,

[00:22:18] they feel really compromised about being, you know, encouraging someone to stay when really they know it's better for them to go because crew are asked to sort of be their friends. They feel really compromised about tricking them about how much alcohol they're drinking or telling them fibs about a mic working or not working so that the producer can say something to them. There are tricks and conceits that they're encouraged to do and they really feel uncomfortable about that. But the other thing is...

[00:22:48] I imagine a lot of the younger producers as well or assistant producers or people who are working on it who are young people who are just trying to pay their rent, trying to get a crew in TV and they don't feel as though they can make too much noise about this. So there's lots of work by people like the film and TV charity whose looking glass survey is open now for crew who talk about, you know, regular bullying, regular, you know, long hours, you know, really bad treatment from people higher up. that's kind of like

[00:23:17] the universal experience of working in TV for a lot of people. So dropping care into that environment in a kind of regulatory framework, it's difficult to do. So is it all getting worse as well? It seems like, you know, we just go from one extreme to another and, you know, the next thing could be even worse than this and it all seems like... I mean, I look at the early days of reality TV and you probably won't remember this. I'm sure you're far too young to remember Cilla Black doing Blind Date. Oh, I remember that.

[00:23:47] A blind date. A blind date felt a bit, you know, just very calm compared to all of this. I mean, I can't imagine anyone getting much, you know, I mean, some people might seem as though they're a little bit overconfident or... But I mean, certainly it wasn't playing on people's emotions too much, was it? It wasn't portraying them, I don't think, as what they, as, you know, anything other than they were. Well, and then you enter into things like Big Brother, which it always seems to me was the first real leap into... Yeah, where you were absolutely filming people the whole time in every circumstance,

[00:24:18] couldn't get away from the cameras. I mean, again, you know, as Phil's wrote, it's step changes, isn't it really, Helen, that we get used to? I think we thought... I mean, when I first started this project, there were people who said to me, oh, it's all sorted now, the culture's changed, this kind of thing won't happen again. There was a real feeling that we've... You know, the audience's tastes have shifted, that they don't want to see that mean, nasty television now anymore. They want to see The Bake Off and Sewing Bee

[00:24:46] and those kind of shows. The piano. The piano, yeah. So these kind of surprise successes that have done really well with, you know, which you can sort of see it's about valuing people and valuing humanity. Yeah, celebrating humans. Yeah. Yeah. Which is the complete opposite and can rate. So why do we need it? Well, the weird thing is that the viewing figures are really good at a time in which the TV industry is struggling, you know, particularly

[00:25:16] the public service broadcasters when they're competing with the streamers. So, I mean, I can't say that's exactly why, but it does seem like the industry's downturn may have contributed to the need to find the next big hit and the need to keep the viewing figures up and particularly the need to find the younger demographic who are all now on YouTube and social media and so these shows still attract a younger demographic.

[00:25:45] And it doesn't work going down the route which I thought they were at one point with things like I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, The Jungle, where you had people who are known, people who are in the public eye anyway, slightly being tortured in public in some cases almost literally. People feeling almost, oh, we're getting our own back on these people, let's make life harder for them. Or even, I suppose, in things like Strictly, where again, people can be quite humiliated in public but because they're famous

[00:26:15] people anyway, people felt fair enough and actually quite enjoy that. And it's kind of interesting that those shows have had their problems too. So, you know, and I think the recent I Am A Celebrity has been people with agents, with protection, getting angry about the way in which they've been edited because they were used to having more control than that. And so, that debate is being brought out now because these are people who have many more resources with which to protect their image

[00:26:45] and to think about what's happening to them. I think for me, one of the big issues is that most people going into reality TV don't have anywhere to go when things go wrong. You know, there's nowhere to complain. They're not yet, you know, workers. They've got no right. In fact, you know, some of the contracts, they almost sign away all their rights to go in. So, there's a kind of, some of the things going on and I'm a

[00:27:14] celebrity and us laughing at people at least they've got a really big paycheck and they've got an agent that will have negotiated the terms of their contract and what they're prepared to do and not to do. Possibly coinciding with a new book that comes out immediately after the series. Possibly, yeah. It will be carefully thought about and carefully curated and some of the people who go on to those shows without any protection, without anyone to read the contract, which is really hard to understand,

[00:27:45] possibly do it on a whim, are often really encouraged by young workers in the TV industry who act like their friends and their mates who say it's going to be a great experience for them. And I kind of coerce into it at a moment where they could be vulnerable, they're perhaps thinking about can they break into the industry. So, you know, most of the unions talk about, you know, when you're trying to break in or trying to get a job or, you know, that's when you're most vulnerable to kind of exploitation.

[00:28:14] So, I think they're a different constituency that we haven't really ever thought about or got our hands on thinking about in terms of how best to look after them. So, is this now a race to the bottom then, Helen? Is essentially, you know, we're going to see something even more extreme come down the line, something even more, making people even more vulnerable because in the end it makes money. Roger's not looking for former ideas, by the way, that you can go and sell. I mean, I don't know. I mean, I can't look into the future, but, you know, there have been some

[00:28:43] crazy ideas that, you know, we've heard commissioners say things like, that was the line. Somebody came to me with this idea and it was absolutely wild and we can't do it. But, you know, there is a show where people are chained together for 24 hours, isn't there? There was a spinoff called Honeymoon Island where people jumped off the edge of a cliff and went and stayed on a honeymoon having just met. You know, there is sometimes a kind of, you take a format that kind of works and you think

[00:29:13] about how can we ramp it up again? I think that tends to have gone two ways. I mean, some shows have tried to take a format and then perhaps make it, you know, use the regulatory framework and try and make their own version of it in a more safe way with a kind of particular mission. And you could argue that Virgin Island tried to do that potentially. But I always worried over whether a tighter compliance

[00:29:43] framework and a kind of risk matrix, which people have to use now, whether that would mean you could actually amplify risk. Because you've got all the measures around it. You're going to psych test somebody 10 times a day. You're going to do whatever it is. You're going to give them all of this after care without thinking, if this is what it takes to make this safe, is it ever really safe? And I think that's probably the conversation we've got to have. It's like a compliance step, isn't it? You're just saying, well, okay, if we tick

[00:30:13] the boxes, we can do whatever we want. Take your point, that could be a really big problem. So I think Divorce Island, where you take couples who have been married for 30 years, you stick them on an island together for a couple of weeks, and the winners are still married at the end of it, all of the winners. That format is available, and Phil will be advisor for reasons we can't possibly mention on this podcast, just to put that out there. But I

[00:30:42] suppose in all this then, so this style of TV you don't think is going away anytime soon. This is just the way that, as you said, connects with younger viewers, it also helps people who are unrepresented get onto TV. And it will just always be there. Because we are to blame, because just as Romans used to watch The Gladiators, we are going to watch that piece of theatre on our TV so long as people are prepared to put themselves up for it. The problem is it's still commercially very valuable.

[00:31:12] I think there's a difference, though, between how you think about, so there's been a massive rise in shows that put people together around partnering, coupling, relationships, threesomes, all of this kind of thing. There's just been a huge exponential rise in that. And one of the things people perhaps argue is that in a kind of dating culture that mostly happens via apps and biometrics and all of those kinds of things, that this

[00:31:42] has become appealing to us, this kind of idea that we're looking for love. I think those shows need to be thought about and whether they can be done safely. And I think they have to have the tightest kind of regulation. I think if you couple that with the way in which you might drive for conflict, it starts to become really dangerous. You've got to make shows

[00:32:11] where the participants that enter into them really trust the welfare teams and the people who are making them and feel that they have their best interests at heart. So they call... handing over control of your life for a period in time. And that's why they call themselves experts, the experts that are overseeing the experiment, which is how they describe Married at First Sight, isn't it? I would imagine that they hardly see those experts in

[00:32:41] real life. They're not the people running the show, doing the producing. They're also props staged for particular moments, I would suggest. Well, how do they live with themselves? That's a question. Because it is an experiment to try and create love for people. So the numbers I've got here for the report earlier this year into the Australian series, which I think is more popular than the UK one because it's more extreme. 119 couples have been matched across 12 seasons. Only nine have managed to stay together.

[00:33:11] So that's a success rate of 7.5%. So if I was one of these experts that was counselling people in love, I had a success rate of 7.5%. I wouldn't feel very happy about myself. Well, I don't know how the matching works much more

[00:33:41] care. Do you actually expect that to happen? Because as we said, the drivers are so strong out there in terms of audience and money. But the risk is so high. I mean, I think nobody wants and the broadcasters will say nobody wants someone to have another death by suicide on their hands. And there are people in our data who have actually talked about that as a result of the show. So nobody wants that. So in any kind of, you know, organisation that makes a lot of money,

[00:34:11] they're worried about risk management and manage that risk because their brand could be hugely, massively damaged. So I'm not particularly happy with a corporate response that is only about ticking boxes. I think what they've got to do is think about a response that is meaningful on the ground and have conversations about where the ethical boundaries are so that people feel looked after. And I know that sounds very woolly

[00:34:40] and a lot of people think I have a, you know, I'm a bit of an idealist, you know, that, you know, these, the creative industries are uber competitive, individualistic, everybody's out to make a buck and to climb up the ladder and these are not industries that lend themselves very much to care. But creativity, people, human endeavour, all of that should all be about a caring environment and I think it can be done well and shows can be made where that's

[00:35:10] possible. And I think in the UK we're quite good at that when we do it well. Well, maybe that will be the direction but I have to say I'm not confident. Well, I just feel as though, I mean, we actually say that we've been through this before, haven't we, where we thought we'd reached a peak but maybe we're getting there again, maybe we'll go through so many cycles of things getting so extreme and we start to look at the shows that are popular as well, which are all about human endeavour and human pursuit, shows like The Piano. But then I noticed with,

[00:35:40] we need to wrap up, but I noticed on shows like Britain's Got Talent in the early days on all of those shows they used to delight, taking great delight in the people who were really bad and they're doing less of that now perhaps because they realise just how there's not entertainment value, there's better entertainment value actually in the people who overwhelm you with their talents. Yeah, that's part of a culture, that's part of the culture shift we thought had kind of happened I think especially after the X Factor

[00:36:10] etc. Indeed, well Helen, thank you so much for taking us through that, really appreciate your time and your expertise, it's fascinating if not particularly I'd say optimistic. And I'm not going to be watching it anymore, I feel guilty. He will, he will, we all know he will. Anyway, Helen, thanks for being with us. Thanks Helen. Thank you, cheers. It's interesting stuff isn't it? Anyway, next week what are we going to talk about? Yes, well there's a very interesting case here in Britain of course at the moment about some lads who

[00:36:39] raped some girls and there's great shock because they weren't sent to prison. They were very young, these guys, and people, it's been referred to the Court of Appeal because there's a sense that this was not justice, not justice for the girls, put the wrong message out there. But the judge's argument was he didn't want to criminalise them did he? Yeah, and that, you know, what is the whole thing about youth custody, which is what it would be, what does it do to young people who go in at that sort of age? I mean, do we reform them? Do we have the

[00:37:08] resources to change the way in which they're heading in directional terms? Or do we begin a life that will be almost inevitably criminal for them? Maybe back in prison before too long? That was such an extreme case though, wasn't it? I mean, they couldn't. And then I've heard a lot of people saying as well that, you know, just kids are getting more violent now. So we can't just let them not go to prison because the situation is getting worse. But if we send them to prison, are we simply building up problems for the future from them? Criminalising

[00:37:38] them for life? Well, and maybe you do because you can't let them get away with what they've done. But what you've got to ask is, why did they do it? Why on earth did they do that in the first place? Well, what sort of society is it? But then how do you treat them once they do? People, I mean, kids have been doing this forever. It's a question really of how you treat them. And although it may be seem justice to put them behind bars, and maybe it is, what is the actual outcome? Have we learnt anything about how we do youth justice?

[00:38:08] Have we learnt anything from things like, you know, that adolescence series on television? A lot of people thinking about that as well. And obviously you think about the victims, but what about those who end up behind bars, youth custody, and some perpetrators? Does it actually do any good to the rest of society, or even to them, or even to the victims? I don't think you can give them a get-out clause, but what you can do is ask the general question about why would they be becoming more violent? What is it in society? And how do you treat them once they do? That's the point. What do you do with these kids? We know they're violent sometimes and do

[00:38:38] these terrible things, but how do you change them? Because that in the end is what society needs. Anyway, that's what we're going to have a look at next week. Yeah, a lot to explore there next week on The Why Curve. Join us for that. We'll see you then. The Why Curve.