No really, it's not really reality. Just really bad.

A few years ago, when there was an unhinged fervour inside the CBC to round up ideas for the next big reality TV show, a producer asked about the possibility of a reality show involving kids in school.

They were quite serious. They believed there was big potential for a show that could somehow use teachers, students and learning or not learning in a regular classroom setting. Hey, let’s vote Susie off the playground!
Even the thought of such a show was so horrifying, using kids’ education as a prop for entertainment, that the query went unanswered.

At that point it seemed the so-called reality TV craze had reached the bottom of the barrel and producers were madly scouring the last dregs from a sordid keg.

Not so.

Since then, programmers have scraped through the bottom of the barrel. They are now burrowing deep into that rich vein of muck and dung, unearthing yet more and more radiant concepts to enrich our modern culture.

Welcome, Jersey Shore.

This is the MTV show where a repellent, self-absorbed group in their early 20s (both in years and IQs) is stuck in a beach house where they swear, get drunk, puke and generally behave like the teenagers in American Pie, minus the humour or charm. At least two advertisers have already pulled out of the series.

There was a time when it seemed that the reality tide that tossed onto the beach such gems as Temptation Island and Who’s Your Daddy? would eventually recede, leaving nothing but relief in its wake.

But no. Cheap and easy to make, reality shows have invaded more and more hours on TV and crept beyond their digital borders, infecting real reality.

We had the caper of Balloon Boy, where the reality-obsessed family lied about their son being carried across Colorado in a giant Jiffy pop bag; all designed to get the dad a reality TV show. Then there were the rubes that snuck into the first state dinner hosted by President Barack Obama, again to get to the front of the line for reality TV contestants.

Even the adventures of Tiger Woods last month played out like some perverse reality game show where contestant after contestant declared themselves bedmates of the King of Clubs. It was so unreal as to be reality TV. There was little, if any, concern that this involved genuine people, like a wife and two small children.

Indeed, the authentic people were probably intentionally forgotten because in the basic reality genre there are no real people, just caricatures. In Tiger’s tale, we had the diva golfer, the porn stars, the Vegas socialite, the cocktail waitress, the model and, naturally, a former reality TV star. As with any good group of contestants, there were the mouthy and the sullen and the quiet, money, fame and enough silicone to insulate a large office building.

People could vote online for their favourites or place bets on how long Woods’s marriage would last. The only thing missing was Tiger showing up on Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew to cure his sex addiction. Stay tuned.
When Survivor debuted in 2000, the mainstream media would issue stories every week on who was voted off the show and detailing the dynamics of each instalment as if it was a real event. Now they cover real events as if they are episodes of reality TV.

After the reality show Jon & Kate Plus 8 was shelved because of the couple’s marriage implosion, Kate Gosselin cried that her kids were devastated – because there weren’t any camera crews around anymore.
As Cabaret might be updated for our modern world:

Life is no longer a cabaret, old chum.
Come blow your horn,
start celebrating.
Right this way,
your TV’s waiting.

Crazy Kids and Their Wild Music
Correction: Washington Post, Dec. 3, 2009:
A Nov. 26 article in the District edition of Local Living incorrectly said a Public Enemy song declared 9/11 a joke. The song refers to 911, the emergency phone number.

In December, MTV News Canada, Tweeted with the revelation that rapper
T.I. was releasing “Halfway House in January. Can’t wait to hear it.”

It followed up with the correction: “T.I. being released TO a halfway house.”

2 Good 2 B Tru
According to a survey in Britain, children who blog, text or use social networking sites have stronger literary skills than their techno-challenged classmates.

“Our research results are conclusive - the more forms of communications children use the stronger their core literary skills," Jonathan Douglas, director of the National Literacy Trust, told BBC News.

The survey covered 3,000 children age 9 to 16. It found 24 per cent had their own blogs and 82 per cent texted at least once a month.

On The Other Hand, Writing Has Improved
An MTV-Associated Press poll has found that one in 10 teens and young adults have sent out naked pictures of themselves on a cell phone or online.

And it discovered that 17 per cent of kids who received such a picture passed it along to someone else.

The survey, of 1,450 people aged 14 to 24, reported that a quarter said they’d been involved in texting sexual messages, known as sexting.

Tweet this job or shove it
In another study, the seventh annual Junior Achievement/Deloitte Teen Ethics Survey, almost 60 per cent of teens said they would consider their ability to access social networks at work when considering a job offer from a potential employer.

The poll found that almost 90 per cent of those surveyed use social networks every day, with 70 per cent spending an hour or more a day online.

Cinephiles, every one of them
University of Montreal researcher was forced to drastically alter a pornography study because he couldn’t find any younger, adult men who had never viewed erotic material.

Professor Simon Louis Lajeunesse told the British newspaper, The Sun: “The objective of my work is to observe the impact of pornography on the sexuality of men, and hot it shapes their perception of ment and women. We started our research seeking men in the twenties who had never consumed pornography, but we couldn’t find any.”

Olfactory officers on trail of malodorous students
A Florida eighth-grader was suspended from riding the school bus for three days last month after being accused of passing gas.

The bus driver wrote on a misbehavior form that a 15-year-old teen passing gas on the bus Monday to make the other children laugh, creating a stench so bad that it was difficult to breathe.

The Lakeland Florida Ledger said the student might have gotten off easy. A 13-year-old student at another Florida school was arrested after authorities said he broke wind in class. He was charged with disruption of a school function.