2022-05-17
53 分钟Sirin Kale and Pandora Sykes slip into the moneyed world of the Californian 0.01% with the help of a Real Housewife and a Selling Sunset realtor, to examine property porn, toxic wealth, and why audiences want schadenfreude. Featuring interviews with Real Housewife's Taylor Armstrong, Selling Sunset's Mary Fitzgerald, plus the show creators and more. Producer: Hannah Hufford Executive Producer: Pandora Sykes Executive Editor: James Cook Content Producer: Hannah Robins Technical Producer: Giles Aspen Archive credits: The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, Evolution Media Dallas, Lorimar Productions Desperate Housewives, Cherry Productions Selling Sunset, Done and Done Productions ABC News, ABC
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Genre in entertainment or the one that tells us the most about ourselves since its conception, reality TV has divided its viewers, but we think it's possible to enjoy it whilst also questioning the ethical foundations upon which it was built.
I'm journalist and broadcaster Pandora Sykes.
And I'm investigative journalist Shirin Kahler and a large part of our friendship has been spent discussing Reality Team.
We've both been fans since we first watched Big Brother as preteens, and we spent a fair amount of time defending reality TV when people are snobby about it or dismiss its importance in our wider culture.
But we've also been troubled by the exploitation, the lack of aftercare, the impacts of sudden fame.
In this 10 part audio documentary for BBC Radio 4, we'll be bringing an analytical eye to a genre that influences almost every walk of life celebrity, music, fashion, beauty, dating and even politics.
Over the last six months, we've rewatched hundreds of hours of reality TV and spoken to over 60 show creators, producers and iconic reality stars in order to chart reality TV's evolution and explore the ways in which the format needs to change.
This is Unreal A Critical History of.
Reality tv Please note there will be strong language throughout the series.
Let's take a trip to a place where the sun is always shining and ageing is optional.
Where women live in mansions with swans swimming in moats around the perimeter, where estate agents dress like they're headed for an Ibizan super club and sell homes where the bathrooms are the size of a three bedroom flat, where husbands gift their wives Cheryl paintings and Lamborghinis on their birthdays instead of flowers.
And nobody except for the help flies coach.
I guess the responsible amount of money.
For a birthday party is somewhere in.
Between a Range Rover and a Rolls Royce.
Los Angeles City of dreams and the backdrop for two hit reality TV shows, Bravo's the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, the show we just heard in that clip, and Netflix's selling Sunset.
Both are shows about extreme, over the top displays of wealth, about how the 0.01% inhabit a world so removed from our own that sometimes watching them on tv, you have the feeling that you're Charles Darwin in the Galapagos Islands, observing an exotic alien species through a pair of eyeglasses.
Since the genre began, reality TV has always been fascinated by the lives of the super rich.
But although it may not seem like it, these shows are about us in our homes that have neither swans nor moats.