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Now that’s entertainment

Posted in Media, Mel Varley, Latest reporters' blogs April 16th, 2008 by Melinda Varley

The line between what is real and what is indeed fiction is somewhat blurred when it comes to television – but isn’t it all just entertainment?

I refer to the documentary series Bear Grylls – Born Survivor. He has been the victim of some bad press lately after ‘faking’ his documentary style show by misleading viewers that he was actually sleeping in the wild when infact he was sleeping in motels.

So what! The point of the show isn’t to get some cheesy adventurer to sleep the night in the desert or the Siberian wilderness – it’s a show about how to survive – should you be in that situation, not infact how to put yourself in this situation.

I caught the show on Sunday night and didn’t find that he mislead us at all. With lines such as ‘if you were to sleep out here’ or ‘should you be in this situation’. Not once did he say ‘I am sleeping the night here.’

However, Bear Grylls has publically apologised for misleading viewers of the Channel 4 show.

This show is as much about entertainment as it is about how to survive in the worlds most baron landscapes. Have viewers become so cynical and so pedantic that they must question everything they watch and the motives of those shows as well as their credibility?

I think back to the reasons I bought a TV and installed Sky – I want to be entertained and we all know that what we see on TV isn’t exactly real, even if it is in colour. We should stop question and whining all the time and just sit back and enjoy the box, that’s after all, TV’s main purpose.