DGK in de media

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Reality check
MIKE WADE

IT IS the dead of night and inside a luxury mansion in the heart of the Netherlands the sleazy side of human nature is slithering into view. Through hidden cameras, viewers are watching as a man in a bath is pleasured by a prostitute. At the back of the building a couple of relative strangers are having noisy sex behind a screen.

This may seem like a night of debauchery in a brothel somewhere in Amsterdam's red light district, but it is not. This is mainstream television Dutch-style, broadcast daily into almost a million homes as well as being shown 24 hours a day, seven days a week, over the internet.

Welcome to the world of De Gouden Kooi - The Golden Cage - the programme that gave birth to reality TV and which has finally brought the genre to crisis point.

Just as Channel 4 executives in Britain stall over the future of their own sickly child, Big Brother, so The Golden Cage has brought a reckoning for its creators in Holland.

The Golden Cage was the show that began it all, the concept emerging from a 1997 brainstorming session arranged by the billionaire Dutchman John de Mol, the architect of reality TV and creator of Big Brother.

It was the working title for Big Brother when the show was first screened in the Netherlands, but now that the programme has finally aired in its original concept form, its daily diet of excess could prove fatal to the genre.

Prompted by talks of advertising bans and protests from across the political spectrum, the commercial channel RTL has decreed that it will end the programme on December 31, unless it can prove its popularity by achieving an audience viewing figure of 1.5 million a day. That is unlikely to happen. But the time lag will give De Mol a window of opportunity in which to sell the format overseas if he can.

De Mol is not desperate yet. His Taupa TV production company has already done a deal for this 'reality soap' in Denmark, but he could legitimately hope to achieve his most important sale in Britain.

One senior figure at Taupa confirmed there has been interest from "several parties from the UK" and hopes remains high for a lucrative deal. After all, it was Channel 4 who most enthusiastically bought into Big Brother in 2000 and catapulted it to global success.

But with reality TV now in retreat on this side of the North Sea, will British executives be prepared to take another risk? Or does the fate of De Mol's latest creation signal the end of an ignominious era in TV history?

The Golden Cage finally opened last September, when 10 contestants signed up for at least a year to life in an enclosed luxury compound, competing for a prize estimated at £3 million.

The winner will be the last man or woman standing as contestants vote out their rivals or otherwise force them to leave. Predictably, a parade of exhibitionism has followed which has put all other reality shows in the shade and scandalised even the liberal Dutch.

Sexual acts, real and simulated, are its stock-in-trade, and a series of loveless liaisons between contestants has sparked bitter feuding. The grotesque consumption which inevitably comes with the 'millionaire' lifestyles of the contestants adds a new dimension, with a system of points allowing those who wish for it the chance to buy in personal services from outside the compound.

Factor in limitless opportunities to gorge on drink and food and the atmosphere of decadence is complete. Hardly surprising then that there have been frequent doses of violence - sometimes playful, sometimes otherwise.

"It's not enough to call it a freak show. That just doesn't describe it," says Vittorio Busato, a psychologist and critic for the Volksrant newspaper. "The Golden Cage demonstrates how strange people can become if they are brought into a situation like this. It becomes the survival of the fittest. The whole situation promotes their greed."

Even before it was first broadcast last September, the show faced a wall of criticism. Some were appalled by the individual contestants such as Natasia Blank, a 33-year-old mother of two who had agreed to enter the building and arranged for her boyfriend to look after her kids. When he appealed for her to return she refused, saying she needed the prize money for a boob job.

Others opposed the project as a whole and one even compared it to the 'Zimbardo experiment', a psychological project carried out at Stamford University in 1971 with unexpectedly horrifying results.

Undergraduate volunteers were cast in the roles of wardens and prisoners, and relationships very quickly broke down as a third of the student guards exhibited sadistic tendencies, leaving many of their 'captives' traumatised. Participants in The Golden Cage have shown a similar willingness to surrender to their darker instincts, adopting all manner of vindictive strategies to win the huge cash prize.

Encouraged by the show's producers, a series of alliances have formed, resulting in groups ganging up on individuals.

Five contestants have been unanimously voted out by their fellows, never to be replaced. Another five have walked out in disgust - one amid allegations of homophobic bullying - and two contestants were sacked for violence.

The 'millionaires' have adopted ever more desperate means of overcoming their rivals. In July what looked to many critics like a sexual assault was attempted by a group on one woman contestant, leaving her clutching at a robe which had been ripped from her body. During the incident, Jaap Amesz, a 24-year-old student, was shown restraining the one housemate who was attempting to defend the woman.

Footage of this scene - which remains posted on the internet - was enough to prompt an online petition calling for the show to be banned. On the day of its launch it attracted 1,000 signatures an hour.

Amesz had already devised another novel strategy to break the will of his fellow contestants. He retched in public, on camera, covering himself and some of his housemates in vomit.

"That scene is the worst thing I have ever seen on Dutch television. It was a complete disgrace," said Busato. "It's not really normal behaviour. The psychologists involved with the show should protect that man from himself."

Of course, critics such as Busato who air their views in the newspapers are grist to the mill for the producers of reality TV which positively thrives on controversy. More worrying for its promoters are the growing signs of apathy among the viewing public, a trend as evident in Britain as it is in the Netherlands.

The truth of falling viewing figures for reality TV is being absorbed by Channel 4 and at the offices of Endemol UK, the company behind Big Brother. After sizzling along for seven summers, the eighth series of the show fizzled out long before its result was revealed in July. It was not simply that the audience had fallen by up to 20% over the series, though that was bad enough.

To make matters worse, as it ended its run Big Brother was losing out in the ratings to the twee detective series, Midsomer Murders, its scheduling rival on ITV1. More worryingly for its backers, the programme has simply failed to connect with the popular consciousness. Nearly a month since this year's Big Brother finished, the name and face of the winner is largely unknown among the general public. It simply wasn't like that in the days of Cameron Stout, the Orcadian fish trader who won the show in 2003 and soon became a pantomime favourite.

An atmosphere of retreat prevails. Celebrity Big Brother has been cancelled this year, following the racism row in which 45,000 people complained about the treatment of the show's eventual winner, Shilpa Shetty, pictured below. You Are What You Eat, Brat Camp and It's Me or the Dog have all been abandoned by Channel 4 in favour of new drama, documentaries and current affairs output.

At the BBC, the showpiece reality show, Castaway, was switched from a peak slot to the graveyard shift where it ended in May without a whimper. On ITV1, Celebrity Love Island was an embarrassing failure which almost certainly will not be commissioned again. The glaring truth is that a format which felt genuinely fresh when it was pioneered eight years has become tiresomely predictable.

"The first Big Brother wasn't manipulated at all. I think it was fantastic television. The people in the house didn't know they were becoming famous in the outside and they acted naturally," says Busato. "Now people go in with an agenda. They want to be famous or a TV star. They no longer care about their privacy or their private lives.

"There's a kind of exhibitionism which is strange. I thought the need for privacy was universal, but programmes like Big Brother and The Golden Cage show it is not a universal need."

Taupa TV insiders still talk up the chances of survival for The Golden Cage. Sensationalism over recent months has helped boost ratings. Its highest single audience was 1.2 million, and growth has been particularly marked among 20 to 34-year-olds, a notoriously difficult market for television to penetrate.

"The audience reaction is amazingly intense," said Marc van Hal, the company's head of communications. "I have never experienced anything like it. Soaps are successful because people are interested in the character - and the same kinds of loyalties build up for people in The Golden Cage.

"We wanted to become the talk of the town and we have succeeded. In this case, all publicity is good publicity. It has made the programme what it is."

John de Mol was not available for comment, but van Hal claimed the future of the programme was still not decided, in the wake of the more recent and positive audience figures. But he promised that, whatever happened, the final show would be memorable.

"It is like John de Mol has always said - it will be surprising. The whole show is based on the notion of last man standing.

"There will be one last special game to get a result."

All this after sexual assaults, mindless violence and public vomiting. The mind boggles. "It is horrible," said Busato. "When this programme stops, the world will be a more beautiful place."

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Op zondag 16 september 2007 16:33 schreef schatje het volgende:

[..]

bron

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Op donderdag 25 oktober 2007 20:21 schreef avonne het volgende:
Er staat een stuk in de Party vandaag dat de AVRO niet eerlijk is met het tellen van de stemmen voor de nominaties.
Volgens 2 anonieme bronnen had Huub tussen de 2000 en 3000 stemmen (Fok, Vol en Nowlive worden genoemd) van de 20.000 stemmen.
Ook zou Gordon erg veel stemmen hebben gehad.
Beide zijn niet genomineerd.

De reactie van de avro was dat er in totaal 60.000 stemmen waren en dat Huub bij lange na niet genoeg stemmen had.
Beide personen (Huub en Gordon) zouden zowiezo niet in aanmerking komen omdat, zo zegt de avro, alleen een presentator in aanmerking komt, die bovendien het programma alleen presenteert, en dus niet samen met een duo presentator.

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Op maandag 12 november 2007 16:58 schreef ikhebdegrootste het volgende:
DGK in de Media(markt):

http://www.ikhebdegrootste.nl/specs.php?id=1042

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Gouden Kooi gaat door!
AMSTERDAM - De Gouden Kooi blijft open. John de Mol heeft nieuws gehad van RTL 5.
De Gouden Kooi gaat door. RTL 5 is blij met de kijkcijfers van de soap/reality. Op het nieuwe kanaal kan het omstreden programma rekenen op een half miljoen vaste kijkers. John de Mol vindt de ontwikkeling amusant. "Het is wel vaker gebeurd met mijn ideeen. Eerst werden ze verguisd, daarna omarmd."

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Op donderdag 20 december 2007 09:36 schreef My_ het volgende:Jaap is genomineerd als 'Spraakmakende Nederlander' bij de MSN.nl-Sp!ts award!

Via deze [url=http://battle.nl.msn.com/StarsBattles.aspx?cateId=264
[]link[/url] krijg je elke keer twee BN-ers die een 'battle' aangaan qua spraakmakenheid.
Het is de zaak om:
1. Alle battles waar Jaap in voorkomt te laten beslissen in het voordeel van Jaap
2. BN-ers boven Jaap (vooralsnog Foppe de Haan en Fatima Moreiro de Melo) te laten verliezen in de battles!

Jaap op #1!

Nog een keer de link: http://battle.nl.msn.com/StarsBattles.aspx?cateId=264