Reality bites, and chews

TELLY VISION

Television ate my family." With this observation, Lance Loud, one of the first reality TV stars, delivered his verdict on reality television.

He made this scathing remark years after 10 million viewers in the US, for the first time, witnessed the highs and lows, the drama and the complications that unfolded in a middle-class American family. An American Family was a fascinating documentary series, produced by Craig Gilbert for Public Broadcast Service in 1973. Of the nearly 300 hours of footage, only 12 hours managed to make it to TV screens.

For seven months, audiences were treated to slices of reality episodes, topped generously with the day-to-day trials of the Loud family "" the most notable instances being a marital feud leading to the divorce of a middle-aged couple, and the candid admission of their son Lance, who announced he was gay.

And even if audiences were "tch-tch"-ing in their living rooms, or curled up comfortably in their quilts, An American Family was the ultimate voyeurism fest of the seventies.

And if most of us shake our heads in disdain, grumbling at the Loud family members' desperation for cheap publicity (remember, there was no money involved here), there's no disputing that they went on to create history and kickstarted a movement that the world calls reality television.

While cameras were installed in the Louds' home, the real story lies in the manner in which the family dealt with the series after it was aired. Pat, for instance, found it difficult to deal with the divorce and somewhere regretted her decision of sharing seven critical months of her life with the public at large.

She thought she had been subtly influenced by the crew and hated the series forever. The two daughters in the family learnt gradually not to care but the two younger sons seemed distraught, especially after the series was rebroadcast in the early nineties.

Lance, the eldest son and television's first out-of-closet gay, always had mixed feelings about the series that had granted fame to his family.

But what made An American Family click? In Lance's own words (he mentioned this in one of his interviews to a human psychology-centric magazine), "Filming a family like ours could never happen again because everyone is too media-savvy now. We were the last gasp of human innocence."

Lance was 20 years old when he appeared on the series and admittedly never bothered about what people at large thought of him.

"Two years later when I was singled out as the 'evil flower' according to newspapers, it horrified me."

Lance may have breathed his last in 2001 and the entire Loud family may have dissipated over the last three decades, but An American Family is still a crystal that tells us the real story of people, much after a reality show gets over.

How will our home-grown Bigg Boss inmates react to what the Loud family went through for the rest of their lives post-Bigg Boss?

Maybe they could take refuge as virtual avataars on www.secondlife.com; or they could ponder, regret, laugh and cry over their decision to be a part of reality television. Whatever they do, that will be the "real" story behind the reality show that we are seeing today.

aojha@business-standard.com