Reality TV’s carnies are conning us

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 29/01/2011 (5685 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There was a time when a visit to the Red River Exhibition brought a once-yearly glimpse at the weird and discomforting world of the sideshow — an exotic, not quite forbidden, but stomach-tweaking attraction to which fair-goers were invited to “Step right up” to view the likes of the bearded lady, the tattooed lady, the world’s fattest man, the dog-faced boy and the human pincushion, along with contortionists, sword-swallowers and fire-eating oddities.

It was, in the parlance of the day, a freak show. And for a modest price, anyone could step inside for a long, lingering gawk.

But that was then. This is politically correct now. It’s no longer socially acceptable for the carny class to exploit the unusuals among us for public amusement and personal profit.

The seedier side of showbiz — you know, carnivals, professional wrasslin’ and the like — has come to accept that this sort of thing isn’t done any more.

But that doesn’t mean those human oddities are no longer on display, or that there doesn’t exist a class of showbiz hucksters willing to exploit them for fun and profit.

They are, and there does. In a place called cable television.

Take a flip around the specialty-channel dial these days, and you’ll discover a host of reality-TV shows dedicated to exploring — or exploiting — the lives and tribulations of people whose anatomies and behavioural abnormalities place them outside of society’s mainstream.

Tattooed ladies? You got ’em. Morbidly obese people? Certainly. Anorexics, giants, little people and unfortunate sorts whose addictions range from hard drugs to extra-soft toilet paper? Check, check, check and check.

The “freak” show endures; these days, it’s just packaged as programming whose intent is to educate and enlighten. But from this couchbound perspective, it still carries more than a faint whiff of carny-style exploitation.

The major clearing houses for these types of programs are TLC and A&E, networks that long ago abandoned the lofty agendas that their acronyms once represented (Arts & Entertainment, The Learning Channel) in favour of voyeuristic unscripted programming that never fails to attract a curiousity-seeking audience.

TLC’s lineup is big on little people, with Little People, Big World having been so successful that it was followed by the addition of The Little Couple and Little Chocolatiers. It’s also home to L.A. Ink and Miami Ink, which celebrate tattooed lifestyle, the self-explanatory Hoarding: Buried Alive; I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant; and Toddlers and Tiaras, and has recently added My Strange Addiction, which so far has profiled people whose obsessions include eating toilet paper, dressing up in furry suits, eating household cleanser, sleeping with a hair dryer, and eating couch-cushion foam.

TLC also carries Sarah Palin’s Alaska, but that’s an oddity for another day.

Over at A&E, tattoo aficionados, obese people, addicts, obsessives and assorted misfit-celebrity-family dysfunctions are the primary fare, with titles like Intervention, Obsessed, Heavy, Hoarders and The Hasselhoffs dominating the prime-time schedule.

The programmers at networks, delivering TV’s 21st-century sideshow, would be quick to tell you that there’s a societal benefit that comes from helping the viewing public understand the issues that these shows explore.

I’m not buying it. There’s no more altruism in these programming decisions than there was truth to the carnies’ claim that they were just providing employment to people who couldn’t find jobs elsewhere. It is now what it was then — the realization by certain showbiz types that there’s money to be made by making the out-of-the-ordinary accessible to the gawkers.

The only difference is that instead of stepping right up, all you have to do these days is sit right down.

brad.oswald@freepress.mb.ca