It seems content creators are running out of ideas to make cheap TV. It’s amazing what you can come up with when you lose your ethics! Here’s a few quick pitches:
How about a show about chubby rich women trying to drop weight by living in Ethiopia with a malnourished family for six weeks?
No?
Okay, everyone is interested in exercise and dieting – they don’t want to look big and bulky anymore. Seal jackets are so slimming. How about we do a photo shoot in a seal colony? Fat shame some seals and then club them for fashion?
Or what about Buying Byron – a show that gives viewers a glimpse into the most exclusive ‘A List’ properties in the country? A show that features spectacular beaches, and seaside glamour. ‘Beachside deals, tussles for premier property listings, feuds over negotiations as agents work to secure a piece of paradise for their prestige clients.’
Buying Byron is the new series coming to the Channel Nine network in 2022.
Oh my God. Have we become that shallow? It’s like wealth porn. Not even Marx could have predicted this capitalist low.
Offensive? Yes. Very. We are facing record homelessness. And somehow production companies feel this is legitimate and ethical programming. They call it the ‘sexiest real estate on Earth’. Because as we all know, there’s nothing sexier than homelessness.
To glamorise privilege when so many are suffering is immoral. To perpetuate the fairy tale of entitlement and wealth, while mums live with their kids in cars, when older women set up tents in the bushes – this makes me sick to my core. It makes the people who actually live here angry. This is not who we are.
Our narrative is being colonised by lazy content producers.
They come to Byron Bay to quarry for content. To fabricate a reality that drives the dollar, that pornographises privilege while at the same time entrenching poverty and housing stress. These narratives aren’t just vacuous, they are dangerous. Real people live here. A connected community needs its diversity. That amazing place they mythologise in these crap shows exists – because of the artists and musicians and cleaners and teachers and tarot readers and drummers and retail assistants and nurses. All people who cannot now afford to live here. People are being driven out because of the industry penchant for ‘Luxe’ Estate. It’s a community killer: Snuff Realty.
It’s a ‘docu-reality’. Basically when it comes to filming protocols, if you whack the word ‘documentary’ in, it falls under low impact. But the truth is – there is no such thing as low impact filming in our community right now.
We are happy to accommodate production as a location, but what happens when we are the subject? When we are inaccurately and insensitively represented? This isn’t fiction. It’s in the title: docu-reality. How do we account for the effects of opportunism, and its long-term harm? How do we undo the lie?
We have a housing crisis. We have a production industry with an ethics crisis.
Buying Byron is grotesque. It will probably rate well. And morality is no match for big money.
We urgently need new filming protocols that redefine what ‘impact’ means.
We need housing. We need truthful stories.
We need the bullshit to stop.
Bullshit is correct. As a retired editor & publisher I’d like a ‘spreadsheet of community killings’ placed
near my doorstep. The entire spread would be no larger than a postage stamp. Crap-wrap is the best
they’ve got… via steroids. I’m waiting on Helen Caldicott’s reaction to place & planet. I guarantee
the impression won’t be fit for any form of human consumption let alone the animals.
Yep. Completely agree. It’s beyond immoral. Exploitation in any form usually ends up in tears. TV production can be the most sleazy, scheming and dubious of enterprises.
It’s ironic that we long term residents moved up here because land and property was cheap. We chose a way of life that didn’t chase the dollar. Some of us became hobby farmers and supported the community by volunteering. We still do that. Money wasn’t important, it was the quality of life we enjoyed.
Real Estate agents are rubbing their hands with glee now over the obscene amounts of money they can get for properties. We shake our heads in disbelief that we now live in millionaires row. They say that money talks – not to us, it doesn’t.
Yeah…Kinda funny ,byron in a lockdown now because a person from im an intelligent celebrity get me out of here.
What happens when Covid comes with the TV film crew? No need to wonder anymore, it has happened. Once again Hazardous Brad at the service of KingCovid.
There are many forms of wealth. Fiscal wealth is but one. Integrity, selflessness, altruism, generosity of spirit, sensitivity, humanity, empathy, compassion and morality are but some of the others. Fiscal wealth alone is thus a form of abject poverty and cause for sadness.
This is what Byron shire has portrayed, reap what you sow BBay . My heart said goodbye years ago to Byron of old 😢
40.000 homelessness teens living rough
at anyone time in Australia.
Defense Veterans also in the thousands
can’t recall any retired Politicians
Homeless. !! and certainly no real estate agents in Byron ..
‘Sick to the core’ is how I feel. Thank you Mandy for raising your always eloquent voice to represent the actual ‘reality’ of the situation.
How sad that the indigenous heritage not regarded in the development of Boring Bay..the women’s birthing pool at Suffolk Park for instance..I heard it was drained for development in the 80s.
Thank you Mandy Nolan for your intelligence