Reality TV is designed to bring out the worst in people. On October 20, the top-rating Australian Idol â a glorified talent quest â really delivered the goods when "judge" and music industry heavy Ian "Dicko" Dickenson counselled beautiful and talented contestant Paulini Curuenavuli to "lose a few pounds or choose another outfit" following her sizzling, gold-lam-clad rendition of Destiny's Child's modern feminist anthem "Survivor".
Channel 10 has been inundated with complaints, health experts have issued damning press releases and the newspaper letters pages have seethed with furious, pro-Paulini sentiments.
Paulini has recovered slowly. Sadly, she changed out of her sparkly, figure-hugging dress and into a modest, black pantsuit when she returned to the stage at the end of the show, but she has come out fighting in subsequent days, shyly joining in the public vilification of Dicko.
In his defence, Dicko said that his sexist comments reflect "commercial reality". The music industry, he admitted frankly, tortures women for money.
No doubt the "controversy" is largely a fiction, stirred up to publicise the program and increase ratings for the incessant fast-food commercials that punctuate it, which remind us of another "commercial reality": nothing turns a profit like the addictive combination of sugar, fat, starch and salt.
"Commercial reality" is not nice.
It is "commercial reality" that it is not worth producing drugs to treat the HIV epidemic in Africa, because the dying millions there can't pay for them. It is "commercial reality" that public transport, public health and public education don't make any sense to capitalist governments because they don't make a profit.
It is "commercial reality" that a work of art is worth what it brings at auction and a song is worth nothing if it can't be packaged and sold â but there is nothing, in "commercial reality", that can't be packaged and sold. Even feminist outrage can turn a buck, if it's handled right.
Reality TV would have us believe that "commercial reality" is the only reality. In that world of camera angles and fake lounge rooms, contestants never turn against Big Brother, never collude to rise up, to share the prize money â its against the rules! It's a competition! It's "commercial reality".
But there is another reality that is generally un-televised. It is impossible to package in a 30-minute timeslot and its "rules" are constantly being tested and broken.
In that other, fragile, tantalising reality, a woman's song is priceless because neither she, nor her song, are for sale. In that reality, food is for nourishment, art is for human expression, health care creates health, education brings understanding and our bodies are daily miracles â not sources of private profit.
While we are currently force-fed "commercial reality", in the act of collective resistance to it, we can glimpse that other, more authentic, possibility. If we break the rules, refuse to compete and collude with one another to share the prize with all humanity then we can't lose.
BY KAREN FLETCHER
From Green Left Weekly, October 29, 2003.
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