Latest news with #CandidCamera
ABC News
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Creepy Guy Meets Recording Device: The True Origins of Reality TV
If you thought reality TV began in the '90s or early 2000s with MTV's The Real World or Big Brother, think again… According to Pulitzer-Prize winning critic and New Yorker staff writer Emily Nussbaum, the genre actually pre-dates television altogether, beginning with audience participation shows on radio in the 1940's. But she tells host Marc Fennell (Stuff The British Stole, Mastermind) that it's really thanks to a guy named Allen Funt that we have shows like Survivor, The Kardashians, and MasterChef today. His weird obsession with making secret recordings of people and spying on them eventually turned into a hit TV show called Candid Camera and laid the foundations for a phenomenon that would not only change television, but would affect us as a society, to the point where a reality TV star now sits in the Oval Office (yes, Donald Trump). Binge all the episodes of No One Saw It Coming now on the ABC listen app (Australia) or wherever you get your podcasts. And check out Emily's book on the history of reality TV: Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV. Candid Camera (CBS) theme created by Bob Crane. Get in touch: Got a story for us? We'd love to hear from you! Email us at noonesawitcoming@
Sydney Morning Herald
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
What to stream this week: The strangest show on TV, plus five more for your list
This week's picks include the latest instalment of Nathan Fielder's The Rehearsal, an 'over-qualified' crime drama directed by Guy Ritchie and a promising animated comedy co-created by Ramy Youssef. The Rehearsal (season 2) ★★★★½ Nathan Fielder has done it again, even if it's difficult to fully explain what 'it' actually is. The second season of the conceptual comic's mix of absurdist humour and documentary simulation remains jaw-dropping but difficult to quantify; perhaps it is a mix of absurdist simulation and documentary humour? Fielder, whose voice is so monotone that it suggests hints of menace, once more tries to game out scenarios in search of fail-safe solutions, only for it to escalate in audacious and unforeseen ways. There should be less shock value the second time around, but the Canadian provocateur has tweaked his goals. In the first season of The Rehearsal, Fielder acted on his God complex, helping applicants prepare for difficult situations by creating elaborate practice spaces for them, complete with sets and actors. In the new season he's searching for answers, although the questions are sometimes murky. This is not car-crash television, it's air-crash television. Literally. Fielder is obsessed with the lack of communication between pilots in air disasters. Once again, the scale is staggering and the methods alternately droll and alarming: Fielder builds a replica of a terminal at the Houston airport in a Los Angeles studio, then runs scenarios with real-life pilots and actors to provide quantifiable data. 'Pull up! Pull up!' a simulator warns, but Fielder wants to reach terminal velocity. Lurking in the background, his laptop strapped to his chest, Fielder is the Hannibal Collector of this experiment. A mad genius flummoxed by human emotions. There are still moments of melancholy, but less obvious mawkishness. Still, the series has four credited writers, including Fielder, and it liberally drops hints about its yen for misdirection. 'I've always felt that sincerity is overrated,' Fielder muses at one point, only to be drily sincere throughout the six episodes. You can view everything that happens here as a metaphor for understanding relationships – when couples can't communicate, their love crashes. If you told me this was Fielder's way of processing a break-up, I would believe you. Loading The theoretical leaps and sudden diversions are numerous, but difficult to detail without spoiling. Without context some are otherworldly: was it necessary to ship San Jose air to Los Angeles for a nature versus nurture experiment on a cloned dog? It's Stanley Kubrick's Candid Camera. Let me put it another way: watching the third episode I made noises so loud and inexplicable that my children came to check on me. No one else is making television like this – that actually might be for the best. MobLand ★★★ (Paramount+) After a handful of episodes, this over-qualified London crime drama, which stars Tom Hardy, Helen Mirren and Pierce Brosnan, and was created by Ronan Bennett (The Day of the Jackal), with filmmaker Guy Ritchie as the lead director, is at a comfortably familiar pitch. Snarling crime lords, bruising bursts of violence and inventive invective are all in rotation, as a gang war looms. It is a satisfying genre work, but I keep waiting for a jolting twist. Hardy plays Harry Da Souza, the capable fixer for Irish underworld rulers the Harrigan family. He cleans up problems for patriarch Conrad (Brosnan) and matriarch Maeve (Mirren). He cajoles, bribes, blackmails and beats, and Hardy wisely dials down his performance to a menacing quiet. The only time Harry's taken aback is when his cuppa comes with oat milk. It's life and death stuff, but his wife, Jan (Joanne Froggatt), has grown tired of his absences. Everything is in the moment, because the plot is reactive to an initial crisis centred on a cavalier Harrigan grandson, Eddie (Anson Boon). Harry and numerous Harrigans are trying to keep ahead of the chaos, which provides enough momentum to mask the lack of organised crime plausibility. MobLand feels like a throwback: the Harrigans' adversaries are Cockneys, not Albanians. When your needle drops are 30-year-old Prodigy tracks, nostalgia is at play. #1 Happy Family USA ★★★½(Amazon Prime Video) Created by Ramy Youssef (Ramy) and Pam Brady (South Park), this promising animated comedy is about family foibles on the cruel cusp of history. An Egyptian-American boy living in New Jersey with his immigrant family, Rumi Hussein (Youssef), just wants to fit in with his school friends, but the debut episode is set on September 10, 2001. There are subsequent trials for the family's adolescents – Alia Shawkat as Rumi's older sister, Mona, is already hiding her sexuality – and adults, and the humour spans the bittersweet to the sadly absurd Ransom Canyon ★★½ (Netflix) Wednesday writer April Blair ticks quite a few required genre boxes in this Texan romantic drama, which plays like a cross between Yellowstone, Friday Night Lights and Virgin River. There is a trio of ranching families competing to control the titular spread, a widowed lead seeking retribution who nonetheless looks good in denim (Josh Duhamel), his childhood friend just returned from New York (Minka Kelly) and multiple generations caught up in attractions that can't be denied even as others insist they must. There's a real taste for melodrama here, but the dust never feels authentic. Memoir of a Snail ★★★★ (Stan*) The phrase 'national treasure' gets thrown around willy-nilly, but you can at least make the case for Adam Elliot. The Melbourne filmmaker has produced a small but unique body of work with his artisanal stop-motion animations. Nominated for best animated feature at the Academy Awards in March, Memoir of a Snail has the same idiosyncratic appeal and sombre laughs as Elliot's previous works, Harvie Krumpet and Mary and Max. Succession 's Sarah Snook voices Grace Pudel, whose tragicomic life story forms the backbone of a film that is grim and subversively uplifting. Bad Influence: The Dark Side of Kidfluencing ★★★ (Netflix) Genuine question: is there a bright side to kidfluencing? Based on this three-part documentary series about a child ruthlessly promoted online by her mother, you would think not. Piper Rockelle's journey from child beauty pageants to lucrative adolescent YouTube channel was controlled by her mother, Tiffany Smith, who framed her daughter's image in deeply questionable ways and had an inappropriate level of control over the other children in her troupe. It's bleak, thorough, and sadly none of it is surprising. Smith is the show's villain, but what about the system that rewarded her? *Stan is owned by Nine, the owner of this masthead.
The Guardian
21-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Prank shows are normally done by thick people or jocks': Dom Joly on the return of Trigger Happy TV
The first episode of Trigger Happy TV aired 25 years ago. Its very first sequence was of a man screaming into an oversize phone, startling the unwitting diners at a fancy restaurant. 'The following Monday I was on a train, and that ringtone went off,' recalls the show's co-creator and star Dom Joly. 'Three people in the carriage stood up and went: 'Hello! I'm on a train!' And I sat there thinking: 'Holy shit, something extraordinary has happened.'' Joly isn't often drawn into conversation about Trigger Happy TV. In the 20-plus years since the show ended in 2003, he has busied himself with plenty of other projects – books, columns, TV shows, podcasts – but nevertheless has found it hard to shake off his breakout hit. 'Every time I do anything, even if I'm walking across Lebanon for 27 days for one of my books, someone will go: 'Did you take the big mobile with you?'' he laughs from his home in Gloucestershire. 'Of course I fucking didn't take the big mobile with me. Why would I take the big mobile with me?' But the show's silver anniversary has encouraged him to re-examine his work. In October he's taking Trigger Happy on tour, showing old clips and reintroducing characters. As such, he's in a warm, expansive mood, especially when I try to put the show in some sort of context. After all, 2000 was a big year for prank shows. The form had existed in one way or another since 1948, when Allen Flunt's Candid Camera first experimented with tricking the public (and in one instance former US president Harry Truman) with hidden cameras. But by the late 20th century, thanks to Noel Edmonds and Jeremy Beadle, the form had taken on a slightly insipid chumminess. 'I remember watching those shows,' remembers Joly, 'and thinking: 'I fucking hate this.'' As such, Trigger Happy TV felt like a violent shake-up. Lower-budget and more prone to surreal flights of fancy, it was also much faster than anything people were used to. Set-ups that Beadle would have laboured over for an entire episode were done within a matter of seconds. It felt like the prank show as guerrilla attack. 'I don't like calling Trigger Happy a prank show because I'm a ponce,' frowns Joly when I mention this. 'It's hidden camera. Prank shows are the lowest rung in comedy. It's normally done by thick people or jocks.' Instead, much of Trigger Happy bordered on performance art. As well as the big phone – which Joly never thought was particularly indicative of the broader show – there were dog walkers performing CPR on taxidermied alsatians, people in rabbit costumes loudly rutting in London's Prince Charles Cinema, chefs chasing man-sized rats out of their kitchens. People leaving public toilets would be shocked to find Joly and a brass band standing outside, loudly celebrating them as the millionth person to have relieved themselves there. Opera singers would scream atonally at strangers then demand payment. Unlike previous hidden camera shows, Trigger Happy went without a studio audience. There were no laugh tracks to their stunts, with that role being filled by music; in the case of Trigger Happy, it often provided a sombre counterpoint to the silliness on screen. Joly credits Trigger Happy's ability to disrupt the form to his upbringing. He was born in Beirut, and grew up reading French comic books such as Astérix and Lucky Luke, before discovering notorious phone pranksters the Jerky Boys. 'There was also a Belgian guy called Noël Godin, who was a very stoned, drunk Belgian anarchist,' he says. 'He came up with a manifesto that there's no better way of judging someone's character than by how they react when they're hit in the face with a custard pie. And so he'd go and custard pie people they thought had got above themselves in public life. What I loved about it was they did it for the beauty. They didn't film it. They were just doing it because they felt it needed to be done.' This bled into the show. 'When we were making Trigger Happy, we had the things we were doing for the show,' he says. 'But the things that really made us laugh were actually things we didn't film. They were stuff we did for the beauty.' Like what? 'I'll give you a great example,' he replies, grinning. 'Our office was just around the corner from a radio station, and every day at 10 o'clock Tony Blackburn would walk past our office. One day we just thought it'd be funny to pose as fans and get his autograph. And he was like: 'Oh, yah guys,' and signed something for us. From then on, we decided we were going to do it every day.' He pauses. 'We got 262 autographs off him, and never once in those 262 days did he say: 'Have I not seen you guys before?'' Not that Blackburn was the only celebrity he encountered. Although most of Trigger Happy TV involved members of the public, who all had to sign consent forms – 'If people wouldn't sign, it was usually because we'd filmed them with someone they shouldn't be with. The amount of people wandering around having affairs is quite astonishing' – with public figures he could skirt the issue by asking if they'd mind being filmed 'for Channel 4', subtly implying that they would end up on that evening's news. Sign up to What's On Get the best TV reviews, news and features in your inbox every Monday after newsletter promotion Many remained none the wiser. The most recent volume of Michael Palin's diaries includes an entry that reads: 'Terry G [Gilliam] has come from an aborted street interview, in which an annoying busker had his guitar smashed by the interviewer who chased him off into Wardour Street and never returned.' Needless to say, unbeknown to all involved, the interviewer was Joly, and this scene played out at the end of the show's first episode, with Gilliam blurting out a bewildered 'Fuck' as Joly chased the busker into the distance. 'We did actually contact him about that,' Joly admits now. 'He came back saying it was perfect gonzo comedy. I loved that.' If 2000 really was year zero for the modern-day hidden camera show, Joly is quick to credit it to a technological breakthrough. 'A year before Trigger Happy happened, if I'd wanted to make that show I would have had to hire a proper cameraman, a proper soundman; it would have cost a fortune, they would have been grumpy, we'd have had to have a lunch break. But a camera had come out called the VX1000 and it was just good enough quality to be shown on TV. It meant that we could film and film, and we didn't have to worry about any of that stuff. In a sense, that was the birth of YouTube.' In that regard, Joly is now master of all he surveys. 'Hidden camera is by far the biggest comedy format in the world,' he asserts. 'Almost all the stuff you see online, on YouTube and TikTok, is hidden camera. The ultimate endgame from Trigger Happy is MrBeast. MrBeast online is astonishing. I mean, it's a bit crass, but it's so much more interesting than what you see on telly.' 'I'm longing to make a show called International Prank Stars,' he continues, 'because we've all seen these videos that get like 200m hits, but you've no idea who made them. It's a very anonymous format.' That said, the modern hidden camera scene is still full of tropes that grind his purist gears. 'I hate that a lot of them are faked,' he says. 'I can smell a fake a mile off, and that's the thing that really irritates me.' If nothing else, Joly is finally comfortable embracing the Trigger Happy TV legacy. 'Of all the things I've done, Trigger Happy is the thing I'm most proud of,' he says. 'It was a work of absolute love and total control. Sam [Cadman, the show's co-creator] and I did everything, from coming up with the ideas to filming everything all day to editing. Every element of it was just us.' Now that he's more comfortable with his legacy, Joly has been meeting with the old Trigger Happy TV team. 'Not so long ago we had a For the Beauty night back at the pub off Charing Cross Road where we used to come up with all our ideas,' he says. 'I met everyone we made it with. And that was so annoying. All my runners are now, like, Bafta award-winning directors and stuff.' What's charming is that his notion of 'For the Beauty' – just doing something for the hell of it, not to make content – still seems to be his defining mantra. 'If I ever write a proper autobiography, I think it'll be called For the Beauty,' he explains, before grumbling. 'Obviously someone would want it to be called Pranks for the Memories.' The Trigger Happy TV: Live! 25th Anniversary Tour starts 7 October.
