This is part one in a series of comical but always interesting rants from Bradley Chagdes. If you are a kid, prude, or someone who doesn’t like the occasional swear word, please skip this article.
“Reality TV” started with MTV’s Real World in 1992 and it was captivating in the way “Professional” wrestling was in the early to mid 80’s. You watched Hulk Hogan or Randy Savage strut down into the ring not being able to take your eyes off this awkward masterpiece. You knew deep down that if these guys wanted to kill one another, they would not sit and wait for the next episode of the show to grapple with one another. In fact they would have hunted down the other guy in the locker room somewhere and never made it to the ring for a televised match. If you really think about it we convinced ourselves that wrestling was real more than the wrestlers actually did. Yet you still watch and watch hoping to see some sign that this event is staged. You look for any hint, miscue, or some sort of definitive sign that watching wrestling was just as real as watching Different Strokes (which may actually be a bad example). After a few episodes you no longer cared all that much about what is staged and what isn’t; and you get caught up with “what will happen next”. We all know now that wrestling is in fact “fake”; but what about “Reality TV”?
As much as I tried to avoid it, the “Reality TV” boom kept growing and growing to the point where I was excited when Nickelodeon started playing reruns of Family Matters; and for the record I hate that fucking show. The sad part about all of this is after all these years I’m starting to actually get sucked into “Reality TV” shows, and I am enjoying them.
The first show that really got me interested in “Reality TV” was Hell’s Kitchen. The basis of this show is Gordon Ramsay, one of the world’s most prominent chefs and owner of several successful restaurants, takes a variety of different people with food experience and runs them through a gambit of tests while treating them like shit. Ramsay almost tries too hard to be mean to these people, but as you watch you can see that he’s not doing it for ratings in the way Simon Cowell (American Idol Judge) does; he actually has a point. Ramsay uses his passion for cooking as his fuel to shape these people into the best possible chef they can be; much like the U.S. Army would (only for soldiers, unless they work the mess hall, but now we’re just being picky). He strips away your confidence and punishes you for any disrespect towards the thing that has blessed him all these years; and he re-programs these people the way they need to be programmed to be a head chef at one of his restaurants. This is fitting because it just so happens that is the prize for the winning contestant. Ramsay also has a spin-off show called Kitchen Nightmares on the Fox network as well as several shows on BBC America that I also enjoy.
Sadly, after an understandable re-entrance into the “Reality TV” world (Hell’s Kitchen, I was seduced by the worst form of reality TV), I’m talking about the kind of TV that makes you fear for the future of our planet. It’s the kind of TV where all you can think is “this is somebody’s daughter”. I can no longer think I am better than the average American because I watch Rock of Love with Bret Michaels. In my own defense, the first cassette tape I ever owned happened to be “Look What the Cat Dragged In” by Poison. Let me remind you that I did not crawl out from behind a rock before now; while I avoided “Reality TV” like it was a Bible Salesman; I still have basic knowledge of people who are “famous” from these shows and the types of behavior they portrayed. While watching the first episode of “Rock of Love” there were an enormous amount of sarcastic things that could have been said right off the bat. There were topics ranging from the abundance of Botox, Silicone, and fake hair, to the deficiency of intelligent speech and/or basic education. However, I was just disappointed that one of my heroes as a kid, the guy who was responsible for my interest in singing, the guy who played sold out arenas all over the world, and the guy who I could NEVER in my wildest dreams be as cool as, couldn’t get hotter girls than I can. I will talk about my feelings on certain “types” of girls and their outward appearance in another form someday; but for now just understand that even WITH all the enhancements these girls were surely no prize. It turned out that the season one winner was a bartender from one of our local bars that we never once gave a second look to. Oh Bret, you horny diabetic little bastard, you have let me down.
While these two shows have got me primed to actually give various other shows a chance I keep asking myself, WHEN THE FUCK DOES ANY OF THIS SHIT HAPPEN IN REALITY???
Can someone tell me where other than The Real World is being flamboyantly gay interesting? Can someone give me an example of somewhere other than an island on the show Survivor there are incredibly curvy girls in bikinis jumping around and nobody is having sex or hiding in a bush to at the least rub one out? Can someone tell me where on the planet girls are at one another’s throats, screaming and yelling at one another, just to get a chance to sleep with a rock star that put out his first record around the year they were born? Where is this awesome reality world and when can I catch the next rocket going there?
When it comes down to it, there is only one place in the world where you can make sense of “Reality TV”. 18 Miles east of Savannah, there is a little place called Tybee Island, Georgia. Years back I was traveling with my own band as well as our “brother band” that was also on the very same tour. We were in need of a place to park and sleep until it got light enough to find a hotel in which we could spend the whole day and night as opposed to finding a hotel right then and spending money in the middle of the night only to have to check out a few hours later. Our main criteria for a destination were somewhere with a parking lot, and somewhere near a beach. Along the way we picked up a brochure that told us Savannah, Georgia had all the hot women and cold beer we could ever want; so our destination was to be Savannah, Georgia. When we got to Savannah the town was completely dead and void of any parking. Feeling let down by the tri-folded lie we found the next closest place on the map that had a beach; unfortunately for us this place was Tybee Island. We parked and headed to “Main Street” which consisted of a Super 8 Motel, a couple run-down buildings, and a bar. We went into the bar and immediately bought a few pitchers of the finest cheap beer in Tybee. We sat down and started to chat and during this period I was looking around at the locals taking notice that they were eerily similar to the pictures I had in my head of Tybee Island bar patrons. The two other guys in my band were dying to get out of the bar because they were under age so we sent them to get us our HI-8 video camera that we had used to document our first tour down south. To their dismay, they came back with the device minutes later. Let me tell you the second that little red light was seen by the locals the bar that seemed mostly normal turned into the most interesting fucking place I had ever been. A young man who was inebriated while on leave from the Army sat down and began spewing nonsensical sentences left and right as if he were auditioning for a pilot. Keep in mind we’re a bunch of dirty smelly rock n’ roll kids who obviously don’t belong in Georgia, having some drinks and holding a $300.00 video camera. We appropriately named this gentleman “Timmy Tanks” due to something he had said about tanks at some time during his one-man-show. We had our fun with Timmy every minute we could until last call happened, which as I remember seemed more like the bartender getting tired and less like a state law. We were sad that this event had seemingly ended; however we discovered that everyone spilled out to the front of the bar, fully loaded with glasses of whatever their last drink of the night was, and finished the party there. It dawned on us that Tybee Island was void of any form of police; and seeing as there was one road on and off the island there wouldn’t be any coming anytime soon. I kept thinking of this place as “The Land That Time Forgot”. We kept the camera rolling and the other locals instantly saw Timmy Tanks putting on a show in front of our camera. Quicker than you can say “holy stereotype” we had all of the other locals on Tybee pushing in for a chance to do something stupid. Our piece of shit camera spawned several auditions to a non-existent show that these people DESPERATELY wanted to be on. We had a lovely little inebriated blonde girl telling us about how the “African Americans” (ßnot her exact words) come out on various weekends and this makes Tybee a bad place to be. She explained that it was an incredible place all the other days. We named her “Danni the Racist” after she spelled her name for us several times. Shortly after her one-woman clan meeting she was escorted up the stairs to a hotel room by two other local gentlemen that were likely going to do the exact things to her that make me hope I never have a daughter. Several other things happened that night that are amusing even without an explanation.
1. Ernest Hemmingway told a really bad joke.
2. We missed Timmy Tanks falling off a bicycle due to Hemmingway’s bad joke.
3. Kris Kristofferson was so drunk he could barely speak.
4. Earl “The Pearl”
Well, Earl “The Pearl” needs to be explained because he was an overly flamboyant gay man that looked much like an even gayer version of Carlos Mercia. He kept running into our shots randomly saying typical “gay guy” things like “heeeeeyyyyyyy” and “you know whachoo want?” Each time he would do this our reaction would be something like “Earl, get out of the way Timmy Tanks is about to (insert crazy thing here)”.
The night ended when, in our own drunken hazes, we taped two of the locals fighting for our camera and one of our own got punched during the brawl. It’s all fun and games until the person behind the camera gets hit in the face by a drunken old man who was your friend 5 minutes ago.
This long winded, yet summed up, version of our Tybee Island trip is proof enough for me that reality TV IS and ISN’T real. The messed up part is that it’s not real because it’s real, it’s real because when you put a camera in front of ANYONE they are going to act a certain way, and that in itself is real. If having a camera in front of you makes most anyone a little different than they are without a camera in front of them it’s not necessarily acting; it’s that person being the “most entertaining” person they can be (or at least trying to). So, as much as I want to knock the people of the Real World, or Rock of Love, or Survivor for being fake, they’re only being fake in the same way any idiot on Tybee Island would when some dumb kids from Chicago hold a HI-8 video camera in their face.
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