Wendy M. Grossman

There is clearly something wrong with me: I am not now nor have I ever been hooked on Big Brother. For one thing, it's a stupid name. The fact that a bunch of exhibitionists are happy to live in a house for a relatively brief period of time so they can compete for fame and riches really has nothing to do with Big Brother, the frightening spectre of total surveillance proposed by George Orwell in 1948 in 1984.

Martha Soukup, who watched the raw feed via the Web during the 2000 US version, documented in the Web magazine Salon the way the interactions between the housemates on display during the many hours of raw watching were far more interesting than the (rather different) stories imposed by the series editors. The most recent UK edition apparently managed to mangle the layers of "reality" even better, by showing an edited version in prime time and then a "raw" feed all night. This "raw" feed was time-delayed by 15 minutes so they could slice out anything the ITC would disapprove of or that might get the TV company sued.

In the US in 2000, Soukup wrote, one of the Big Brother housemates nearly succeeded in leading a complete walkout of all the remaining house members, an event that was completely censored by TV network CBS. The real-time Web cast, featuring feeds from four live cameras scattered around the house, revealed exactly what kinds of decisions the network personnel were making. Soukup's article made clear how far Orwell actually does apply to these shows: "If the producers want to," she wrote, "anything the residents do can be made to look like something other than it was - or be as obliterated from history as the archival news stories Winston Smith rewrote for the original Big Brother. Especially, it seems, if it might make Big Brother look bad."

I suppose that was predictable, though as a good, practising skeptic it's nice to see documentation. What has amazed me slightly is the enthusiasm with which people have leapt on the idea that these "reality" shows are something new. Wouldn't you think someone would have dimly remembered the dance marathons so popular in the 1930s by now? These were affairs just about as gruesome as Big Brother or Survivor. Essentially, couples would enter these contests in hopes of picking up the winners' payout, and they would dance before a live audience until there was one couple left standing. Some allowed brief rest periods; in some you were disqualified if you fell asleep on the dance floor (although others allowed you to sleep as long as your partner held you up and kept moving). These events were memorialised in the 1969 movie They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, directed by Sydney Pollack and starring Jane Fonda in one of her first serious roles. It's still a terrific movie, and available on DVD, if you'd rather watch the barbarism of a previous era, when TV kept such events small-scale and before the marathons were outlawed in many localities.

I'm thinking about propounding the new economic theory of the Desperation Index: how much humiliation people will put themselves through for a chance at some big money and limited celebrity status. I mean, the pattern-recognising portion of my human brain wants to see a connection between these rather similar contests.

It's kind of intriguing to line these media phenomena up against CNBC, where daily a parade of analysts and announcers spend their time trying to convince themselves and their guests and viewers that economic recovery has really begun. This is fascinating viewing for anyone intrigued by the mechanisms of irrational belief. There are the technical analysts, who produce complex charts showing pricing "floors" in what are actually random dots. The human eye, you see, is perfect for spotting visual patterns where none exist. There are the snippets of Congressional hearings, intended to reassure everyone that corporate fraud is being Cracked Down Upon with all the force of Shrub and the law. Always good to be able to say solemnly "It will never happen again" into a TV camera. There are the mutual fund managers, the CEOs, and the announcers themselves, all of whom need to sell us on the recovery because, let's face it, if you own stocks and they're really crashing will you watch?

In many ways, the stock market is irrelevant to whether the economy is recovering. The real question is: do people have jobs? Do they behave as though we are in continuing economic trouble? Well, there of course it depends where you look. A friend attending the Comonwealth Games recently noted that the stadium held 38,000 eager attendees - about 10,000 fewer people than Motorola fired last year. People without jobs are struggling to find work; people with jobs are worrying about losing them. On the other hand, some of my friends have been predicting an imminent massive depression every year since 1972. They are self-employed, a state of being in which periodic panic is normal.

So, basically, we can't tell. You see why people hate skeptics? All we have to offer is uncertainty.