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Oh brother. Not again!

Some networks never learn, do they?

One of the television networks here has revived that tired old chestnut, Big Brother, and I am finding myself asking why? I remember the first season and even watched a couple of the episodes, but got tired of it pretty quickly because I couldn’t really see the entertainment in watching a houseful of people lolling around doing not very much. Season Two was more of the same…and then it started to sink.

What I think continued to attract people to sign up for it though, was the sudden shot at instant fame, after a couple of the contestants from the first two seasons ended up falling into lucrative media careers or slots on the popular soap operas. In rushed the hopeful wannabes and it all went downhill from there. I think it was Season Three or Four were where the narcissists started to appear, along with the sleazy types, and before we could say, oh no, not another season of this tripe, it was wiped.

Viewers were tuning out, rating were seriously dropping and the networks that had aired it sensibly decided not to air it again. Good for them! And the insta-fame wannabes moved on to such drivel as Married at First Sight, The Bachelor and it’s trashy spin-offs, and anything else that go their names and faces out there. You’ve probably guessed by now that reality television is not a favourite of mine.

But anyway, one of the networks has decided to revive Big Brother once again, but seriously, I think they’re flogging a dead horse. After the sleaziest of seasons (I forget which one) where viewers actually complained about the overtly trashy sexual behaviour of some of the contestants, it was cleaned up. The next one though was so sanitised that even the most diehard fans of the show stopped watching because they were bored! So what does that tell you? There doesn’t appear to be a middle ground with this show; it’s either too explicitly trashy or it’s too bland, with no in between. People don’t want to see smut, but on the other hand they do?

And that’s the problem with Big Brother. Put a couple of dozen people of mixed sexes, who don’t know each other from a bar of soap, in a house with a large share bathroom, in dormitory style sleeping quarters where strangers will share  beds and then give them little else to do, they will soon find their own ways to amuse themselves, and more often than not they will do so at the expense of each other. There will be pettiness, there will be jealousy, there will be bitchiness and eventually there will be downright nastiness.

Okay. so that is sort of the name of the game. Break down all the normal social structures they are used to and air the fallout nationally and this is supposed to be entertaining? Some may still think so, but the number of viewers tuning out of the last couple of seasons should have been the red flag for the makers of this season and the network that opted to show it this time around. Perhaps shouldn’t have because I think it’s going to flop.

But guaranteed every one of those housemates signed themselves up with an agent, to manage their new online social media “careers” as soon as they heard they were Big Brother bound, because that’s what they all do now. Reality TV has become a launchpad for fame-hungry unknowns hoping to become a name and a face off the back of their (often embarrassing) “big break” in reality TV. It has absolutely nothing to do with talent and they won’t automatically become household names (well okay, maybe briefly) no matter how badly they behave in front of the cameras.  But they will try.

I won’t bother watching this latest effort to revive Big Brother, despite the promo promising something different this time around (it won’t be) because I’m not into utterly self-focused people behaving badly. I have a feeling not many others will be either. It had its fifteen minutes years ago.

It’s over.

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Safer Schools now, we hope!

Remember when troublesome kids in a classroom were given a warning or two, and then sent outside when the warnings were ignored? Being sent outside was a biggie because it often meant a trip to the Principal’s office when the class was over and depending on how bad the behaviour was, a possible letter sent home or even worse, a telephone call made on the spot. Generally, the child’s parents would side with the school and deal with the little miscreant when they got home. It worked.

Everything changed, however, once children were handed more rights than they knew what to do with and every school got a counsellor to ensure that every child knew what those rights were. Problem children were no longer punished for bad behaviour because they had a talk with the counsellor instead who had a tendency to exonerate them from blame and the situation escalated when the parental trend to not control their child’s behaviour became the norm. Schools could suspend a student but expulsion became more difficult as various agencies stepped in support the child, leaving schools powerless to act. At home, as the child aged and the bad behaviour was no longer cute, parents who’d opted out of any type of discipline could fall back on such labels as Attention Deficient Disorder and Attention Deficient Hyperactive Disorder to get them off the hook. Lazy parents loved the ADD and ADHD labels because they could blame the “disorder”, not themselves and pop the little monster on behaviour surpassing drugs. Problem solved.

Not quite.  Not every problem kiddy is medicated. A lot of them have parents who flatly refuse to accept their child is at fault. It’s the school’s fault, teacher’s fault, another child’s fault and in some cases, even the victims of their child’s bullying or violence is at fault! I’m not sure how they can arrive at that one, but they do. Then the whole thing goes beyond them and they “need help” and want “the government” to fix it.

Well possibly that may be on the cards now, with new laws being introduced into state parliament which will force students who pose a significant risk to others to enrol in distance education were they will be monitored and study online from home while the danger they pose to teachers and other students is assessed. This is a very good thing, even if it is at least a decade or so late. It means that students who commit crimes outside of school hours, especially when that behaviour can cause issues in the school as well, can be stopped from returning to school. Under the proposed Education Amendment (School Safety) Bill 2017, school principals will regain control and it will bring the 30-year-old Education Act up to date with the kind of threats posed by radicalised students and those who pose a genuine threat via anti-social or violent behaviour.

And so it should! And it will put the onus back onto parents to curb their children’s bad behaviour; something many of them haven’t been doing for a couple of generations now, leaving it up to others to do the “parenting” because they didn’t want the inconvenience of having to do it themselves, “inconvenience” being the key word here. But these new laws should change that (so long as they really are put into practice and child agencies/counsellors butt out and let it happen) because the thing with lazy parents is this; they tend to ignore their child’s behavioural issues, no matter how bad, when it doesn’t directly impact on them. Banning the little monsters from the classroom though, and forcing them to enrol in distance education means they will be at home which puts them back under parental control and when suddenly lumbered with their problem offspring, they will no doubt act. A school principal once said to me “The best way to get some parents to actually do something about their kids’ bad behaviour is to make it inconvenient for them. Once they can’t unload the problem onto someone else, they soon step up to the mark.” Something they should have been doing from day one.

Anyway, on paper it looks good and if the bleeding hearts are kept out of it, schools should be able to return to being safe places again and the flow-on will apparently see teachers having more powers to deal with those uncooperative, troublemakers and classrooms should go back to being the more peaceful learning spaces they used to be. The physically and/or violent schoolyard/social media bullies could be in for a shock too from the flow-on effect because I think the laws apply to them as well. Either way, many of the social/behavioural problems that have been allowed to infiltrate schools for too long will now be addressed.

See? The government is fixing it, after all!