If you've just arrived on a tropical island hoping to fall in love, there's one thing you don't want to hear. / TVNZ
A million years ago, just after I'd started on Newstalk ZB, I was asked if I would appear in the first episode of Celebrity Treasure Island.
The answer was a flat out no.
Twenty-five years ago, reality TV shows were still in their infancy but I knew enough about myself to know that being put on a tropical island, in a pair of togs, being deprived of food and sleep, and forced to spend time with a group of people I couldn't get away from would not bring out the best in me.
And I knew enough about the producers of the show to know that me bawling out a gorgeous young thing in a teeny tiny bikini who had seriously got on my tits was exactly the sort of televisual mana from heaven they were hoping for if I signed up for the gig. So I said no.
And I kept saying no, year after year. And this was, as I say, before reality shows were a thing.
The young adults on TV2's new show, Heartbreak Island, have grown up with car-crash television. Dancing with the Stars when it was on TVNZ; the aforementioned Treasure Island; Popstars for heaven's sake, a concept that was sold around the world that saw the creation of True Bliss and spawned Britain's Got Talent – any 20-something man or woman knows what reality TV is all about.
So all this handwringing and outrage and prophecies of the end of civilisation as we know it over Heartbreak Island are nothing new.
For those who don't know, Heartbreak Island is a dating show where beautiful young people compete with one another to win $100,000, by forming an alliance or a series of alliances that see them through to the end of the show and by winning silly Top Town-style challenges. Presumably heterosexual alliances, although the wholesome hosts haven't stipulated that in the rules.
The catalyst for the furore over this particular show seems to have been when Ella and Tavita were told they were the least popular contestants as voted by the other young people and judged solely on the three photos and the short bio each person had submitted. Humiliating, people bellowed. Cruel and heartless, said others. How can people judge on looks, asked the willfully blind. No doubt about it, it was an awful moment.
Heartbreak Island's Tavita and Ella.
To be told people don't find you attractive is tough. And most of us know that. When I saw Ella bravely fight back tears, I was right back there at the Sacred Heart and St Johns sixth form ball, being one of the last to be asked to dance. Everybody saw and everybody knew. And no, it wasn't on television but it might as well have been. Because everybody who mattered was in that hall.
We've always been judged on our looks – men and women. And it sucks when people don't see the beautiful soul that lies beneath. But that's life. And that's reality television.
Can we please stop infantalising the contestants on Heartbreak Island? They are not victims. As far I'm aware, none of them claim to be. They're just winners and losers in a televised game they signed up for, in the full and certain knowledge that reality television is not a benign environment.
At first glance they seem well-adjusted young people who are willing to trade their gorgeousness and dignity in the one-in-eight chance of winning a heap of dosh.
Presumably they received advice from the people who loved them that this was a very silly idea. And presumably they ignored that advice. Let them at it! The joy of being autonomous is that you can do exactly as you wish. The downside, of course, being that sometimes you make poor choices.
Personally, I'd far rather live with freedom of choice than being managed by people who want the best for me.
This moralising is a depressing throwback to an era I thought I'd left behind.
The shocked and outraged comments writers on news websites and Facebook pages are simply the Patrica Bartletts of yesteryear. People who love to be outraged have been getting on with being appalled since radio announcers first dared to speak with a New Zealand accent and not their best faux British rounded vowels through to Angela D'Audney baring (an admittedly splendid) boob back in the eighties through to young ones today putting themselves through Heartbreak Island.
If people want to hook up on TV for cash with other like-minded souls, let them at it. If you don't want to watch it, don't. The power is literally in your hands in the form of the remote.
