What would you be prepared to do in order to appear on television and maybe win thousands of dollars? You might be willing to bone up on useless facts for Jeopardy!. You might even consider humiliating yourself on The Dating Game. But would you videotape any of the following events on your home camcorder: (a) Your child trapped inside a suitcase? (b) Your pet cat wandering about with its tail on fire? (c) Your spouse hitting your child in the face with a shovel? If you can say “yes” to any or all of the above, there is probably a place for you on the nation’s highest-rated TV show–America’s Funniest Home Videos.
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The tube has been democratized; the airwaves are open for your family’s video snapshots–all of which, without exception, look as boring to my eyes as they ever did. Actually, ABC knows this too. So they spice things up with vulgar sound effects and add a “cute” narration by host Bob Sagat. It all reminds me of a British TV show I watched as a child called Animal Magic, in which host Johnny Morris dubbed in the “thoughts” of various animals as they engaged in pratfalls, stunts, etc.
But if the analogy is correct–and in the prime-time zoo of AFHV, members of the public are rarely more than chimps playing around at someone’s tea party–the participants don’t seem to care. For a show that only debuted in January, AFHV has been fabulously successful. Its audience is huge. It’s receiving about 1,000 tapes a day from wannabe TV stars who seek a little fame and the $10,000 weekly prize, plus a chance to win the end-of-season bonanza of $100,000. Local TV stations across the nation are planning their own versions of the show. A tourist with a keen eye for bloopers or news can now make that family vacation self-financing.
TV Guide is much more ambitious than this in its analysis of the program: “Because people are people, this kind of television . . . is universally, timelessly popular.” (Don’t tell me I’m introducing politics into something trivial.) Here TV Guide is telling us that AFHV sustains a (bourgeois) theory of human nature. Quite a load for a show that gets its biggest laughs by showing someone’s face plastered with birthday cake.
Nobody can use a camcorder now without hearing wisecracks about AFHV. And there is no such thing as an innocent bystander anymore–television is everywhere. You can’t find yourself in a weird real-life situation without wondering if there’s a Candid Camera crew lurking somewhere. Even a “real” camera crew might turn out to be a setup asking phony questions. Don’t lie–they’ll catch you out and put you in Totally Hidden Video. Don’t get yourself busted, or you’ll be on Cops. Don’t escape, or they’ll put you on America’s Most Wanted. And don’t, whatever you do, die in a grisly accident; some tourist will make $50 selling your image to the local TV station.
