Contribution to the panel ‘Doing ‘being ordinary’ in reality television discourse’

 

 ‘Being fake’ as (a deviation from) ‘being ordinary’ in a Big Brother house 

Valeria Sinkeviciute

The University of Queensland 

 

         Reality television discourse has been predominantly analysed in terms of the entertainment public space where the emphasis on the participants’ performance and their constructed on-screen personas is of primary importance. Nevertheless, it should be pointed out that even though being part of a televised event, the participants in reality television are aware of what constitutes ‘ordinary’ behaviours and, most importantly, of the value that is placed on being seen and treated as ‘ordinary’ in different contexts (Sacks 1970; Bignell 2005; Sinkeviciute 2017). This paper examines the notion of ‘being ordinary’ in the 2016 Australian and British Big Brother houses. It is argued here that the housemates, through their discursive practices, conceptualise ‘ordinariness’ as a usual un-noticeable activity, but do it in two different ways. First, similar to the common assumption that ‘being ordinary’ in reality television is transformed or extended to the performance space of ‘being a celebrity’, the notion can be treated as a situated phenomenon. On the other hand, it has been observed among the housemates that they also tend to promote their off-screen understanding of the notion and condemn any deviation therefrom on-screen. The case in point, which is the focus of this talk, is the behaviour labelled as ‘being fake’ in the house. Consider a short example:

 

Luke A is talking to Ashleigh about Becky:

                             you know she’s fake [...] she hated Conor and

now she is best mates with him

 

         The preliminary results indicate that ‘being fake’, as a situated Big Brother identity that the participants (e.g. Becky) claim to themselves in their interactional practices in order to become potentially popular among the viewers and help win the gameshow, is primarily seen as a way of doing ‘being ordinary’ in the Big Brother performative context. This ‘fake’ identity, however, is negatively evaluated by other housemates (e.g. Luke A) who discursively portray those being ‘fake’ as deviating from ‘being ordinary’, ‘real’ or ‘genuine’, which is also understood as being positively valued by the viewers at home. This represents a juxtaposition between the two seemingly opposing identities in Big Brother – ‘fake as on-screen ordinary’ and ‘ordinary as off-screen ordinary’ – both of which, in different situations, the participants see as beneficial to them in the process of the gameshow. Nevertheless, despite the fact that the idea of ‘being ordinary’ shifts in the reality television discourse and its conceptualisation can include ‘being fake’, it is claimed here that the housemates in the analysed data also seem to apply their off-screen understanding of appropriate ‘ordinary’ behaviours when (morally) judging the on-screen identities of their fellow housemates.

 

 

References:

 

Bignell, Jonathan. 2005. Big Brother: Reality TV in the Twenty-first Century. Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Sacks, Harvey. 1970[2006]. Lecture 1. Doing ‘being ordinary’. In Gail Jefferson (ed.), Lectures on conversation. Volume II, 215-221. Oxford & Cambridge (USA): Blackwell.

Sinkeviciute, Valeria. 2017. “Everything he says to me it’s like he stabs me in the face”: Frontstage and backstage reactions to teasing”. In Nancy Bell (ed.), Multiple Perspectives on Language Play. Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 169-198.