![]() I think you’d be hard put to think up a more extreme cultural mash up.Īs Denise remarked: what an amazing world we live in.Īnyway, it got me thinking (again) about the similarities between doing a PhD and taking part in a reality TV show. I have an unhealthy obsession with reality TV, which I have accepted as part of the brain damage I suffered while doing my PhD. While I’m selective about which ones I watch, I find the whole genre endlessly fascinating for the way it portrays learning as a process of self discovery and transformation. ![]() Bear with me here, I think I’m onto something and want to throw these ideas past you in the form of an academic mash up of my own before I go all academic and write a paper on it. Some years ago I picked up a book at the local library called “Makeover Television: realities remodelled” which contained a bunch of essays on reality TV shows that – well – do make overs on the participants (what fun those cultural theorists have). These are shows like “What not to Wear” where the fashionable Trinny and Susannah ambush unsuspecting women, convince them they have horrible taste in clothes and take them shopping. In the process of undergoing a wardrobe transformation, the women seem to be transformed too from shy retiring dowdies to confident, take charge women.Īt least that’s how the show portrays it. In Australia, the reality cooking show ‘Masterchef’ is something of a national obsession (at least for some of us). Our version of the show, as distinct from the version in the UK, has a group of 24 amateur chefs who live in a house together and compete for the grand prize, week by week, through a series of challenges. The challenges are designed to test their cheffy abilities, usually under some kind of insane time pressure. If the contestant fails the challenge they must go into an elimination round in this way two people leave the show each week until the final two have to battle it out for the title of Masterchef. I love it because, as an amateur cook myself, it’s kind of like watching sports I get involved in the contestants failures and successes. What’s interesting for me is that the participants on the show talk endlessly about learning. The learning shown to the viewer seems to be full of failure. The price of failure is high, potentially being sent home in disgrace and having your foibles taken apart by the news media for the entertainment of the whole nation for the next week or so.
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