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.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
