to discuss modern t.v. i'm joined by stephen reese and columbus he's the executive director of the world society of motivation scientists and professionals in glasgow we go to brian mcknight our he's a professor of journalism and communication at the university of strathclyde and we go to london to study molly she's a lecturer of media and communications a bernal university and another member of our cross talk team yell on the hunger all right folks cross talk rules in effect but first i'd like to make a few comments about some of the research i did making this program because i am i do not actually watch reality t.v. programs quote this is what i found some of my research reality t.v. makes us feel dirty and cheap and if we didn't we probably wouldn't bother turning turn tuning into it never have so many watch t.v. with so little good to say about it and also critics call it gutter t.v. and humiliation t.v. reflects a culture that worships vanity and wealth rather than virtue and humility so if i

go to you brian why do people watch reality t.v. programs. i think that reality t.v. gives people an unsafe and to us as banal as ordinary and put it doesn't shed a light on the ordinary and it makes the ordinary so more extraordinary we all live ordinary waifs. we really get an opportunity on mainstream t.v. to watch interpersonal dynamics personalities developing all of it done in a relatively spontaneous manner and i think it's genuinely fascinating you know we are human beings we're interested in other human beings this kind of form of t.v. always has access to one dimension of human experience that we rarely actually experience it was of our own families of course and it was of our own friendships so this isn't a place of value but it is of lawyers and i think it's quite healthy and reflects human nature ok stephen you think it's healthy being

a voyeur. i don't know how much boyer. is involved in reality t.v. i have a little bit of a different take on it go right ahead in the research that ok in the research that we did the number one reason the most important motive for watching reality t.v. is that it reflected the values of a person concerned with status and another words it was about fame and fortune and so i think the audience can see ordinary people getting attention attention is a primal indicator of respect and importance and they can imagine themselves doing that and they sort of having their lives and the things that they see in their life being validated as important and the values the of the audience are the values of wealth and fame or what i call

a high status person they're not the values of intellectuals and not the values of people who want to learn about anything they have the values of people who want to be rich and famous yeah but stephen vanstone with you is be humiliating yourself in front of millions of people is that a value. is that something that we should think is a social positive good well i don't know if they. get to do is two different things here there's the audience and then there's the people who are going on t.v. i'm not sure that the people who are actually on t.v. . think of themselves as being humiliated they getting famous they getting attention and even negative attention is better than being ignored it it's a very primal thing you pay attention to things or people who are important you ignore everybody else most of the audience is ignored there are people on a television program they're getting attention they getting fame and they're being

paid they know probably don't see it is you really is ok city how about you or is it all of these programs truly reflect the values of society because i guess maybe i am a snob i would like to think the society has higher values than a lot of these programs not all of them but some of these programs that have come out that are still very very very popular. they are very popular i think it's very easy to make these kind of sweeping generalization about reality t.v. being representing some kind of moral decline and the audience is sort of mindlessly kind of consuming what's put out by reality television and i think actually the story's a lot more complex than that of course there is a sort of sort of huge plot of reality television today and audiences clearly find a lot of pleasure in it there's this whole idea of the pleasure principle of audiences actually forgetting the pain in life the difficulties of the every day and actually enjoying watching reality television for the pleasures that it brings

in as different motivations for people being fascinated with reality television but there's also something else which kind of accounts for the popularity of reality television and that's a financial factor which doesn't mean mentioned here and that's obviously institutional issue which is about why actually reality television is so successful today and that's to do with the market the media markets single formats being able to be cloned globally and you know production companies be able to actually really get some sort of high revenue low cost material which the public seems to be very much in favor of and go back to you brian i mean. if we program to repeat the question. do they reflect the value of society or a large proportion of society they are fabulously popular. yes and i we do

they are popular because they clearly appeal. to human interest you know they're often it's often dismissed as it's just human interest media it's just human interest journalism but actually of course human beings are interested in themselves and in their societies and in their and their groups and as i said before reality t.v. at least as it started off with big brother and so on ten years ago was an opportunity presented an opportunity for people to kind of be flies on the wall of groups of individuals or relationships watching them develop in change i don't think it was a wilson theme to be honest nearly in the early days of of big brother and other reality formats that me that may have may have developed i mean as all successful formats on t.v. do it becomes becomes more complicated more contrived more game show focused that happens certainly to big brother and leave britain and other countries are you saying the us are you saying that these are very expensive you know are you saying

you know you could go ahead you know if there's been an evolution here and i'd like to touch upon that go ahead steven. finish your point i just want to see it and it's basically just point about expensive it's true that it's true that it can be cheap t.v. and that's why it's popular with with with production companies that doesn't explain its popularity with audiences though and it's also the case that programs like big brother are actually quite expensive to make the not as cheap sometimes is regarded as thought that said that there are plenty of cheap imitations much much cheaper versions of some of these big shoes but the idea that all reality t.v. is just cheap t.v. that is produced mass marketed across the world is slightly i think. too simplistic is it can be very expensive i think and very very same place to me to make her jump in go ahead if i if i can just build on my point really which is that it's obviously reality t.v. has been. the whole of the way in which global formats have kind of thrived and

flourished and certainly i wouldn't say that reality television is cheap t.v. if anything actually i'm kind of quite adverse to speaking about reality television if it's one thing we know that actually encompasses many different kinds of programming you know from talking to talent shows to surveillance shows such as big brother to talk shows so it's not one thing we shouldn't talk about it in blanket terms at all. and i think there is an important connection there between the public society and reality television as is shown or and that goes way back sort of before big brother many decades before when you know we had to tell even television could've been said to start with sort of candid camera back in the forty's there's always been this kind of connection there between the social and. self in fact the early kind of notions of reality television were very much about the production of social knowledge and if we think about social documentaries the fifty's and sixty's

and i think there's still that kind of connection today so i certainly wouldn't be the first person to say that actually you know it's cheap or lazy programming and i'm. generally very supportive of reality television even though i do think it does throw up a set of critical concerns which i think i think we're all aware of maybe we can talk a bit more about ok stephen if i go to you i mean we've all to we've all touched upon one issue here in coming in the evolution here we've seen an evolution of this type of programming because it makes me question i mean how much of it really is reality t.v. now because it's more and more scripted more and more controlled more and more outrageous for some people's tastes i mean we went from something that. made a connection to people and now it's charged to really go find. the you know the consciousness or whatever i mean are you concerned about how that's been changing over the next five five years. well i mean the whole culture keeps changing and it's hard to keep up with it sometimes you know

things that were considered maybe inappropriate thirty forty years ago you know they just keep pushing the limits and pushing no limits in terms of culture. i think that comment a little bit about the money part of it i don't really know them much about the business about the business but the fact that it may be inexpensive simming it is isn't going to attract anyone to watching it no one wants to watch a show cares about what what this show actually cause and what we study and we've studied probably forty fifty thousand people now including a fair number in europe and clothing russians we study values and the values we know how values go together so for example what i call

a high status person the values that go under that are attention wanting to get attention ok stephen i'm going to jump in here real quick here after a short break we'll continue our discussion on reality t.v. shows stay with r.t. . and. this is not a good morning. everybody you sure this is a pretty trees have no idea about the hardships that face. like wanted this is. all too new to. the army life. is the most pressure. i think you know we're. decisive and i really like

the understand. you have to live a. life stories from world war. two nineteen forty five going to dot com. welcome back to peter lavelle to mind you were talking about what stands behind the popularity of reality t.v. programs. but before let's see what russians think about them says reality shows first appeared on t.v. screens they have sparked a lot of debate and the issue of censorship is high on the agenda the russian

public opinion research center conducted a survey then ask citizens what should be censored on the t.v. that the seven percent said it was necessary to ban sex scenes fifteen percent wanted censorship of reality t.v. programs and the same percentage of people called for a filter on the use of bad language and the five percent say they want to see the coverage of tragedies and terrorist attacks censored however eight percent believe there should be no censorship at all on the russian t.v. back to peta ok stephen i'd like to go back to you because i want to talk more about values and that's what you were talking about again another comment i'd like to read about what i came across and in in preparing for this program a car a community of more materialistic morons who don't think blink twice about running around naked while swallowing live cockroaches if it means being cool and winning a million dollars to do. so again i like to kind of go back to values because i've

always believed and i liked how documentaries educated people made people aware of things about how people live and maybe i'm old fashioned in that respect but stephen you were talking about values i mean is it a value to do that kind of thing just for money is that a reflection of our society today. well it's a reflection of the values of some people in this society you're also expressing different values you're you're basically expressing a negative view towards those values by saying you know why isn't society have a higher values notice also use you said you don't watch reality t.v. so it's perfectly consistent and you're an example of what i'm saying that the people watching have the other values the the one thing about values they make two quick points they come in opposites so there are some people who value wealth and fame and there are some people who don't and people who are on the two ends of the

pole motivated to trash each other you can't understand someone who has an opposite value to you so if you're someone who likes the shows because they project wealth and fame and you're someone who and someone else doesn't value wealth and fame they're going to tranship the person who doesn't value wealth and fame are going to say that's low values what's wrong with you for wanting to do that that's true not only in regard to reality t.v. in the values and i'll explaining why people are criticizing it you're basically saying intellectual values a better than status values and that's for you that's how that works out for you but i can assure you there are millions of people who are the other way around oh i can say this i really value wealth in a time i value wealth and fame but you know i don't go on reality t.v. shows i do it took over some shows you know you know i come in there. you make. so you just said there are many different kinds of reality t.v.

show and the one nine hundred ninety s. we had to join a new one as doc you saw in this country in britain. tommy done a lot of research on the motivations of those who participated in those programs and they often say things like i want to share my experience of you know difficulty or tragedy with others. i want to develop myself personally and so forth and many of those programs were very educational and intentionally hard what's really to call their social knowledge function so we learn about people who worked on cruise ships or in airlines or we learned about driving instructors and how they function then a bit brighter and you know he's on the point very clearly a quick question i mean where we were when strangers never was. told was money the agenda and i guess you just answered it was money at the center and on it because a great deal of it today is go ahead it wasn't it wasn't that and in many of the current programs i would say it's no at the center but you're right to say that. john has evolved to the farmer has evolved in the last decade the very success of

big brother and other formats in attracting media coverage from from the tabloid press in particular has meant it that emerges as a vehicle if you want to be famous very quickly and you don't have much talent then one way to do is to go onto reality t.v. that is true and that has happened. and as a result of some of those four months i think have lost the educational function and how become of zero wealth and theme and what people are prepared to do in order to achieve it and it becomes a game show and the audiences enjoy as a game show it's like pop idol x factor reality reality sure how t.v. has morphed into a. kind of game sure type of sorts of liberty culture in which ordinary people are you know and celebrities are a way to participate and possibly become celebrities well once famous for a fairly million she's ready to write go ahead record jump right in there go ahead

. i think it's really interesting what brian saying and i think one of the things that is academic we're trying to do is read try and sort of historic reality t.v. look at the ways it's changed in the last decade and there's definitely been tonal shifts one might argue that actually now sort of post in the u.k. the celebrity big brother race around there's been a shift in some of the sort of manifestations and some of the talent shows and some of the kind of cruelty has actually changed and we've seen a kind of more gentle approach towards the public so the ways in which reality television itself is changing the nuances is really the way we should be approaching it rather than talking about a decline in valleys per se and i would also want to say that it's an area that i'm interesting researching is actually some of the social good that potentially has come out of reality television and i'm thinking specifically about the way in which reality television more than any other shown on television has actually platform

the range of social types and in many ways can be seen as being responsible for. showing a kind of more modern conception of the world that we see different people in terms of ethnicity in terms of sexuality ability intellect you know social background and actually i would say that we out in television is doing a lot more in that sense than some of the other sean or even those there are claim to kind of work in the public interest so that if i get your ideas it it's breaking down certain stereotypes you might have about. gender or ethnicity about sexual orientation and things like that i mean if you mean example what you mean by that we're in example where these reality programs can actually help what i would use this is a progressive agenda. yes i mean i think you know if you look at the big brother in the u.k. which has just just been launched launched last week you know you've got such a huge range of people in there and there's very little space elsewhere on

television where you get that diversity so i think there are there are sort of really important developments in the air that's not to say that reality t.v. has the power to eliminate all stereotypes because because of course in many ways it's quite a conservative schoener in many ways it does hold certain definitions of what citizens are and those who belong and those who do not but i think what's important to look at just not what we are t.v. kind of doing to society but also how society is reflected in reality television and so i think it's a two way process and there is a dialogue going on stephen what do you think about that is it a two way street there a dialogue going on between the two. i. am kind of skeptical about that. i think everybody has the same values every you know the same the same things we care about but we care about them differently we prioritize the same things

differently so everybody is going to say oh i like wealth and fame or i would like to be richer or almost everybody will but we in our work we asked people stream questions searchers wealth is the most important thing to me so we can we can differentiate how motivated you are by money how motivated you are and you yourself may not know the answer to that these things don't change very much what would people who like attention and what people who like money do they select the programs that agree with with their values now intellectuals do not watch reality t.v. the people watching reality t.v. like it. and that's why these shows are going to get more and more extreme because if you look at something you paying attention to it after a while you get bored with it so they have to get more extreme or outrageous to

attract you ok so i'm skeptical about people learning think a bright ality if i go to brian it sounds like stephen is saying that we're just going to go down the line of really spreading sort of circuses ok more and more extreme. i'm afraid i think stephen is all over simplifying was a very complex set of t.v. genres. sure that our people who are interested in wilton theme and that is the motivation to go on but there are also people who wish to test themselves who wish to push the boundaries a little but who wish to educate pretty sure the great american of the great russian public you know there are many motivations good motivations for appearing on reality t.v. and audiences i think it's i think it's wrong to say that they're not intellectual i think it's slightly dangerous. i mean i would regard myself i'm not snobbish at all as an intellectual but i mean i've enjoyed reality t.v. through across the last decade i've learnt

a lot from i believe enjoyed watching real people and kind of slightly yes it's not it's not it's not unmediated reality by any means but it's a form of spontaneous social observation made possible by the internet made possible by digital technologies and cameras that we simply didn't have access to back in the ninety's or the teaser even before ok when we were almost running out of you was running out so we don't like to give you the last word where are we going with reality t.v. in about forty seconds well well i think now we can just talk about reality television let's talk about reality culture if you look at you chibi is reality without the t.v. . and people are voluntarily are asking to be watched through to twitter through you know through facebook or other social networking sites so really we're talking about a new kind of public a much producer and that's something to be a plan with it in terms of access. ok well thank you guy i want to i could say ed

you know what i mean and seconds go ahead their heads now you say we look at every motor every one curiosity has no correlation with watching reality t.v. none whatsoever just as many people intellectuals watch as you know. it's not watch all right people values dad is overwhelmingly white ok i want to thank my guests today in london is glasgow and columbus and thanks to you our viewers for watching us here at r.t. see you next time and remember cross talk rules. and if you. still. want.

relentless fires claimed dozens of lives here in russia as

a record breaking heat wave shows no signs of letting up. and join me either ben it's in the moscow region where firefighters are managing to control the blaze the smoke is still choking the atmosphere and spreading to the city. russian president last summer residence to hold an emergency meeting in firefighting ancram. and in other news today tightening the grip on turned on the washington imposes new sanctions severing ties with the radio groups thought to be aiding terrorists. also coming up in the business update as the severe drought in russia devastates wheat production we're looking at the impact it's been having across the world join us in about twenty minutes time.

hello this is r.t. it's just after eight pm now here in moscow this wednesday night the fourth of august i'm kevin in with the top stories at least forty eight people have died russia sweltering in the worst heat wave in decades the air here in moscow is thick with smoke from wildfires more blazes keep springing up our correspondent over bennett's just outside the capital with more tonight. all morning in the early hours of this afternoon just in the woods behind me there was a fire raging and the firefighters were struggling to control it but in the last couple of hours they have managed to put it out for the time being because the conditions here simply just so dry the fires are spreading it very very quickly and unpredictably earlier we had a look at the fire it didn't seem too troublesome from where we saw it at the flames were just coming up to about knee height but suddenly out of nowhere they flared up to well over two meters and that's the sort of challenge these firefighters the facing as they put out one part then another part springs up very very quickly we did actually have to move the position we were broadcasting from

because we were very close to the woods and the fire we're off the road as you can see the small here and the smoke is very very thick the air is very very heavy and you can taste the smoke here if you're outside for more than just a few minutes it is quite know was anything in fact that taste of smoke and there's a gray blanket over the sky you can't really see the sun and moscow region is one of twelve regions worst hit in the whole of russia and this morning satellite imagery suggested there are around eight hundred fires across the country four hundred of which have sprung up just in the last twenty four hours so the situation is still very very critical the conversation has actually already started to filter through to those who lost their belongings at the last affected around three and a half of the thousand people across the country two thousand homes approximately have been wiped out and this is a report by my colleague jim of fake on the effect this is had on those suffering when darkness falls hours ahead of schedule. although what's already been five days

since fires incinerated this village clones are still so thick they block.