Sluffy wrote: Breadman wrote:If anyone thinks LLT, Pawn Stars, Storage Wars and, in fact, pretty much anything on Discovery nowadays is real, I have some magic beans they can have cheap..........
Storage Wars is sort of real.
I first discovered the programme when on holiday in California a few years back and soon got hooked on it. I reasoned that it must be 'set up' in some way because you couldn't possibly 'win' on the lock ups every time but then one of the contestants got sacked and claimed the lock ups were 'rigged' with good stuff BUT the TV compamy fought the claim - on the basis of freedon of speach - and up to now is winning the legal battle!
I'm not quite sure of the subtlety of the defence but I think it goes along the lines of - as no one is losing out financially, it is not a game show, so they can present the show in whatever way the makers want to!
So it is both real - 'reality' TV - and fake - loads of bins are filmed most having nothing in them but the few that do, forms the programmes - at the same time!
I think Lick Lizzard sort of falls under the same sort of real / fake heading too.
I know what you're saying, Sluff, but it still doesn't sit well with me.
When I first got Sky on cable in the early 90's, it was chock full of great programmes which were "proper" documentaries, ie a production team pitch up with some cameras and film what's happening in any given situation, without trying to influence what's going on.
Nowadays, we've got all this "scripted reality" stuff being rammed down our throats and most of it's not worth watching.
For the record, I think Dave Hester's right about Storage Wars.
He got fed up with all the staging and scripting and said he'd had enough and was going to expose the show's producers as fakes who were misleading the public.
They then panicked and fired him on the spot.
The fine he incurred was as a result of the production company successfully arguing that he wasn't wrongfully dismissed, rather than his claims about the show being fake being wrong.
That bit's never been contested in court (yet) Hester still plans to actively pursue it.
I would have less of a problem with this type of format, if the programmes carried some sort of disclaimer along the lines of "We've set up these situations and what you're about to watch is scripted because it's cheaper to make than a programme where we have to film hundreds of genuine situations, in the hope that something interesting happens in enough of them to get an hour's worth of usable footage."
Look at that awful "Airplane Repo" programme, where supposedly a team of crack repo men rock up and recover planes from people who owe money on them.
Everything's filmed from multiple angles, no flight plans are ever filed and it's obviously faker than Nat's boobs.
But on the face of it, it's all genuine.
TV's dumbing down at an alarming rate (No likey, no lighty!) and it won't be long before the top rated show on Saturday night will be "Celebrity Farts", wherein a panel of ex-reality TV stars will have to guess which fart belongs to which contestant, by asking a series of dietary based questions and having a good sniff.....
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