9
Television You Can’t See
Taste and decency today
When Big Brother was still a key programme in Channel 4’s summer schedule, there were occasional controversies about the sexual content in its episodes. In a Big Brother highlights programme on Channel 4, beginning after prime time at 10 p.m. in early August 2006, the contestant Kinga Karolczak engaged in various sexual acts that were highly publicised and attracted negative publicity and complaints to Channel 4 and Ofcom. The producers edited the sequence so that some of the details could only be gauged by the horrified expressions on her housemates’ faces. Ratings for this episode were 5.4 million, a 38 per cent audience share of the audience watching television that evening. Kinga arrived in the house in June with two further contestants but was evicted after three days. On 31 July she was brought back, and on 2 August she had simulated sex with an inflatable dog and initiated a game of truth or dare in the jacuzzi that led to her kissing two of her male housemates, baring her breasts and asking the other female contestant whether she fancied her. After bursting into tears briefly, she then put a wine bottle up her skirt and appeared to be masturbating in front of her housemates, before going into the garden where she lay with the bottle between her legs. She denied doing anything sexual, claiming that neither her housemates nor the cameras could really see what she was doing. But during the next day’s episode she apologised while talking to Big Brother producers in the diary room.
In the same episode, another contestant, Makosi, told Big Brother in the diary room that she could only speak with her eyes closed but could not say why because ‘It’s not safe’, and fellow housemate Craig burst into tears and shouted, referring to the other housemates, that ‘They’re evil! They all are!’ It may be that the success of former housemates such as Jade Goody (whose prominence derived in part from her nudity on Big Brother when she lost a game of strip poker), encouraged housemates to aim for a celebrity media career on the basis of extreme or outrageous behaviour in the reality TV series. The campaign group Mediawatch made critical remarks in comments to newspapers, and Channel 4 received phone complaints from viewers. A spokesperson for the channel explained that ‘Kinga’s antics on Monday night went out post-watershed and as always with Big Brother there was a voice-over before the programme alerting viewers to the nature of some scenes’ (Kirkham 2006). Ofcom received about 80 complaints about the episode but as a post-transmission regulator it is not empowered to ban programmes in advance.
Ofcom judges programmes case-by-case, on the basis of the way they are advertised and viewers’ expectations are set up, so that audiences watching Big Brother were assumed to be prepared for bad language and sexual content. This assumption applies not only to live programmes (where producer control over events can be incomplete), but also to recorded programmes like the Big Brother highlights programme discussed here. In July 2001, for instance, the current affairs comedy spoof Brass Eye on BBC2 screened a programme satirising hysteria over paedophiles that was much criticised in the press. Government ministers including Tessa Jowell (Head of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport) criticised the programme but refused to view it. The regulator at the time, the Independent Television Commission, ruled that Channel 4 gave inadequate warnings to viewers but was not in breach of regulatory codes governing programme content.