Media scholar Jon Dovey notes that the intimate revelation, individual pleasures and desires have become a key part of the public performance of identity (4-12). Dovey argues that the yearning for subjectivity, the personal, the intimate is the “only remaining response to a chaotic senseless, out of control world in which the kind of objectivity demanded by grand narratives is no longer possible” (26). In Dovey’s words, in a world in which objectivity no longer reigns supreme, we’re left with the “politics of the self to keep us ideologically warm” (26). 

However, the contemporary pop-cultural voyeurism and exhibitionism is not a phenomenon specific to the nineties or the end result of the explosion in visual technologies. In this paper I will discuss Candid Camera and An American Family as precursors of media voyeurism that hit the airwaves long before The Real World, Survivor and Big Brother. In light of the social and cultural changes of the sixties,1 we can better understand the cultural environment that developed and nurtured the fascination with the private and the ordinary. It was in such a climate that Candid Camera reached the peak of its popularity and An American Family televised the Loud family’s inner struggles.

Reality TV shows, as examples of media voyeurism or mediated observation, share some qualities with Candid Camera, which first aired on national television in 1948. Candid Camera is also considered to be the early forerunner of ‘reality slapstick’ shows such as America’s Funniest Home Videos, which eventually led audiences to become familiar with the exhibition of domestic video recordings in the mass media TV context (Dovey 58). In addition to such familiarization with private images on public screens, Candid Camera heightened awareness about recording and transmitting of everyday human actions. Perhaps Candid Camera was the first television show to incorporate self-scrutiny or self-surveillance into the stage-like everyday life. . 

Candid Camera’s creator and original host Allen Funt devised the show from the idea “to catch unsuspecting people in the act of being themselves” (Saxon B 9). Funt implemented this idea for the first time on a radio show on ABC Radio Network, the Candid Microphone where he used hidden microphones. Upon its popularity the show moved to television in 1948 and was renamed Candid Camera. The show achieved top ratings in network runs and syndication. It was a hit from 1960 to 1966 on CBS. During the 1960-61 season, it was the No. 7-rated show in the nation. It was followed by New Candid Camera, which ran for five years in the 1970’s, as well as adult versions shown on cable television. Today, Peter Funt, Allen’s son is hosting a revitalized show on CBS and reruns of the original show are also broadcast on cable. 

In a time when popular entertainment forms such as dramas and sitcoms reconstructed reality through writers, directors and performers, Funt focused his energy on what he argued didn’t need a rewrite: human nature itself. However, to catch people in their most natural roles would be a challenge if he let them knew he was taping. Perhaps this is why Funt used the hidden camera coupled with a practical joke. Funt, who studied psychology at Cornell, was probably aware of the tendency of people to focus on ‘performances’ and ‘impressions’ they gave off. As Erving Goffman argues, the sense of the self as performer under observation of others is extremely prominent. Goffman argues that people act with their ‘audience’ in mind and are aware of the possibility of being checked on the consonance of their behaviors and roles. Such ‘performance’ is not a staging only by the individual. Rather it is an interaction shaped by the environment and the audience, constructed to provide others with ‘impressions’ (17). 

Funt’s original intention with Candid Camera was to show comparisons between human behavior in real life and in drama. He tried “to rewrite the script of everyday living to test people’s responses” (11) and give the audience some food for thought about the ‘real me’: “The self-image that people have is generally two-dimensional, consisting of what they feel about themselves on the inside and what they see of themselves on the outside” (21). 22

For the broadcast industry, Candid Camera signaled the “spirit of experimentation” with a new pattern: realistic dramatic shows. Mike Dann, the then Vice President of CBS network programming, said there was a “tremendous impetus to combine The Real World and the entertainment world” (CBS 21). Almost three decades later, reality TV hit the airwaves with The Real World and its spin-offs, based on not contrived voyeurism with humorous gags as in Candid Camera, but on verite voyeurism. However, the first reality TV show to feature ‘real’ people and their everyday ‘reality’ unfolding was not on MTV. In January 1973, PBS aired An American Family, centering around the Loud family of Santa Barbara, California. It documented the lives of the family and their members for one year--unscripted, unrehearsed. What resulted was one the most controversial PBS features, having powerful implications for almost every aspect of society. The unprecedented documentary observation of the everyday family life recorded William and Pat Loud getting a divorce, their son Lance coming out of the closet, his parents reluctance to acknowledge it and the eventual family break up. 
 

Conclusion

 Recently, reality-based shows have become sites where the media and the non-media (ordinary) worlds -- to use media scholar Nick Couldry’s terms-collide. In an image-saturated world, we are in continual search for the ‘nostalgic’ and the real. The so-called interactivity it provides between the media and non-media world, hopes to satisfy the search for an “underlying level of social life that is still real…free of representation” (28). Ironically, we are searching for the real in the very medium that exploits it to the full, saturates it with images and gives back to us. Hungry for the real as ever, we hopelessly end up in our stage-like world. 

 1 The zeitgeist of the fifties dominated by Cold War anxieties, and the Red Scare fueled government surveillance. The 1960s and 1970s saw the courts legitimize the invasion of privacy and the government and the Congress passing laws to protect privacy. The sixties also saw the rise of the personal and the private that prevails to this day. In The Culture of Narcissism, Christopher Lasch (1978) attributes this shift to Americans’ retreat to purely personal occupations, particularly after the political turmoils of the sixties (4). The combination of a lack of hope of improving their lives, a retreat from politics and a repudiation of the recent past made Americans see the society without any future and live for the moment, argues Lasch. Conventions of previous decades were now regarded as constricting, artificial and deadening to emotional spontaneity. Past boundaries between the self and the rest of the world collapsed in the ‘therapeutic’ climate of the sixties. People came to believe that public actions revealed their inner personality, which came to be seen as the unique expression of individual traits. Meanwhile, television brought a whole new world to the living room, and erased the lines between the private and public. Movies increasingly created ‘celebrity culture’. Home videos reflected Americans’ self-consciousness of performance, making the video technology a medium for entertainment and a springboard for their share of ‘fifteen minutes of fame.’ 

2 Echoing Funt’s venture to test responses, Mark Burnett, the executive producer of the CBS series Survivor insists that the show is “a glimpse of raw human reality,” which sets out to “see who would mate, who would fight” (Sella, p.53). Producers of like shows argue that their shows are human experiments. The original Dutch Big Brother claims that “less educated people see the soap opera [in the show]…people with more education see the social experiment, which is interesting even if nothing happens” (p.102). Testing the outer limits of what people can do in front of cameras, UPN’s Blind Date for example, follows young couples through their awkward blind date, whereas ABC’s Making the Band and WB11’s Pop Stars tag along with a group of young men and women competing and training to be part of a boy and a girl band, respectively. 

Boorstin, Daniel. J. The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America. New York: Athaneum, 1987.

Calvert, Clay. Voyeur Nation: Media, Privacy and Peering in Modern Culture. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2000.

 “CBS-TV sees year ahead patterns emerging,” Variety, September 6, 1961: 21

Couldry, Nick. The Place of Media Power: Pilgrims and Witnesses of the Media Age. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.

Dovey, Jon. Freakshow: First Person Media and Factual Television. Sterling, Virginia: Pluto Press, 2000. 

Funt, Allen and Philip Reed. Candidly, Allen Funt: A Million Smiles Later. New York: Barricade Books, 1994. 

Gabler, Neal. Life, the Movie: How Entertainment Conqured Reality. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. 

Galloway, Doug. “Allen Funt,” Variety. September 20-26, 1999: 100. 

Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Woodstock, New York: Overlook Press, 1973. 

Hamburger, Philip. “Peeping Funt,” Friends Talking in the Night: Sixty Years of Writing for the New Yorker, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999, pp. 299-301

Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978. 

Leach, William. Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.

Rieff, Philip. The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud. New York: Harper Touchbooks, 1966.

Saxon, Wolfgang. “Allen Funt, Creator of ‘Candid Camera’ is Dead at 84,” The New York Times. September 7, 1999, p. B 9. 

Sella, Marshall. “The Electronic Fishbowl,” The New York Times Magazine. May 21, 2000, pp. 50-57, 68, 102.

Sennett, Richard. The Fall of Public Man. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977.