Reality TV did exist in the 70s

In my admittedly unreliable and predictably rose (or perhaps beige) tinted memory of the 1970s, there was only one TV programme that purported to be ‘reality TV’ and this was ‘The Family’.  The premise was no more complicated than a fly-on-the-wall documentary about a family from Reading.  Later, I lived in Reading as a student and coincidentally we also had numerous flies on our walls (and once I even had some Walls on my flies - that was when I dropped an ice-cream onto my lap.).  There was no angle to this programme.  This was years before Channel 4 existed and the family in question were not fat or gypsies or fat gypsies; they weren’t first dateable or undateable; they weren’t filthy rich and fucking stupid, nor were they piss poor and fucking stupid; and they weren’t all doing an everyday job that involved dealing with members of the public that other members of the public find entertaining to watch.  Channel 4 wouldn’t have touched them.

On reflection, when you’re a kid in the 70s then EVERYTHING is ‘reality TV’, because everything on TV was REAL.  Take Rainbow. That’s your nuclear family unit, that is. A mixed-species homosexual couple who’d fostered two one-armed children with learning difficulties. (Channel 4 would certainly have touched THAT family).  Wrestling on World of Sport.  Every male in the 70s stripped down to their y-fronts for a wrestle with another male on an almost daily basis, that’s what you do when you don’t have computer games.  (I still do it now if my phone battery runs down).  And  most realistic of all was the documentary about life in a department store, Are you Being Served? Anyone going into a John Lewis or C&A or somewhere similar would have noted the superfluous over-staffing (5 shop assistants for one customer every half hour); and John Inman was a real gay man playing a gay man. Arguably he was only implicitly homosexual, but up until then films and TV had been full of gay men playing straight men and straight men playing gay men - and Millenials think that THEY invented the concept of being sexually non-binary. No more so than they invented ‘gender fluid’ (as we know, that was Les Dawson and Roy Barraclough.)

There is an argument against all this, though.  In contrast to the above, programmes that claimed to have some kind of gritty authenticity actually proved to be far from realistic. Grange Hill started before I went to secondary school, so I was duped into believing that I was on the verge of experiencing similar escapades to those of Tucker, Benny, Trisha and co.  Two years later I’m in secondary school and wondering why the pupils in Grange Hill didn’t use tits and willies and poo as the fulcrum around which ALL their humour was centred.  And The Sweeney showed coppers beating up criminals, using politically incorrect terminology, drinking scotch for breakfast and  tellling women to put their knickers on and make the tea - but my Dad was a copper in the 70s and he had Frosties for breakfast, so that’s at least one thing that wasn’t quite authentic.

But on the whole, 70s TV was far more authentic than reality TV these days, which presents to us people who are not representative of the population, but instead come from the narrower demographic of vain exhibitionists desperate for attention (or, in fewer cases, vulnerable people who find it hard to fit in). These unremarkable but irritating non-entities who saturate our screens are worthy not of  TV celebrity status, but instead a Sweeney-style whack.