Thanks to the loosening up of pesky regulations, British holidaymakers will be able to watch some UK TV abroad. No more missed episodes of Corrie, no need to record your football team’s failures for consumption at a later date. As liberating as that is, it also means there is no need for a half-hearted attempt at watching the local TV – and that is a shame. When you look hard enough, you can find some bland but revealing fare.
Renters is the best show about the travails of New Zealand property management companies you will ever see. All right, it is dull. Very dull. “One in three New Zealanders lives in rented accommodation,” is how a boring voiceover pitches the intro to every episode. The more lively plot arcs concern illegal soundproof panelling. It is so hypnotically, defiantly ordinary that if they showed it in Norway it would be Slow TV.
Of course, that is only when Renters is considered as reality TV. As a travelogue, it is amazing. How do you really come to know a country? Via the haka and abseiling down fern-filled ravines? No, you do it by watching tenant managers kick defaulters out of Dunedin bungalows, put in claims to the Christchurch Earthquake Commission and pick drug spoons off abandoned hobs in Hamilton.
Waved into this inner sanctum of New Zealand, we glimpse a culture where everything is civil, small society, olde worlde and humane. In one episode, there is a street full of student houses: the students are hosting an annual “kegger” that turns the entire road into a 500-pissheads party. At one house, the lettings agent comes to admonish them gently to be safe. They take the mucked-up carpets out of the deposit, but the overall attitude is just: “Well, kids have gotta have their fun, too.” In Blighty, the fun police would have tasered the lot within minutes.
You can slog through all The Mekong River with Sue Perkins you like, but reality TV is by far the best way into a new culture. It takes you, literally, into the people’s living rooms.
MasterChef Australia gives a picture of modern Oz a million miles away from dunnies and multiple Bruces. The show – far longer than its UK counterpart – is a brochure for the country that gave the world the flat white. (Yes, we know New Zealanders disagree.) This is the chi-chi, newly wealthy land of plenty, where a beer costs nine quid and Melbourne pastry chefs have achieved rock-star status. It is a land of fair go cheery multi-ethnicity and really strong video-editing skills.
For opposite reasons, anyone touching down at Johannesburg’s OR Tambo International should already have a few episodes of Come Dine With Me South Africa on their iPad. In a deeply suburban country, this was the ideal franchise to lift the lid on the tensions sizzling behind the electric fences.
When the well-spoken young gay black man comes for dinner in Camps Bay, take the best Sidney Poitier you have ever seen, multiply it by a thousand Get Outs and you are not even close. Yet for all the producers’ delight in pairing opposites, part of the joy is that it also revisiting the optimism of the Rainbow Nation and finding it in sound health. People are always trying – they are just trying across comically vast gulfs.
When I lived in France, I learned all the best bits of the language from watching a dubbed version of Gordon Ramsay’s US Kitchen Nightmares – coyly, Gordon says: “O, la vache!” when he is effed-off (“Oh, the cow!”). Imagine my joy when I realised there was also a local version, in which pompous chef Philippe Etchebest, a Ramsay avatar carved from solid gammon, would turn up at failing Languedoc bistros to pontificate over the aligot.
Etchebest’s vision of France shook off any last ooh la la cliches. The early seasons often seemed to be essays on rural poverty. France’s long economic stagnation was everywhere. There was a hopelessness that seeped from these dying mom’n’pop brasseries in the Alsace that the Americans never had. No one seemed to know much about food, either. Finally, my lunchtime experiences of dry pork medallions in salty gravy made sense.
Sometimes, pairing a country with its opposite can make for the greatest insights. Dublin Wives – a “Real Housewives of” sub-marque – put a snooty, bitchy format into the world’s most collegiate and easygoing culture, with un-explosive results.
MTV Canada’s Peak Season was billed as its answer to The Hills. The snowboarding scene is a cool backdrop, but the real heart of the affair is in Canadians desperately trying to act out US levels of conflict – all you need to know about the nation’s love-hate inferiority complex about its southern neighbour. “Whistler’s crazy and it makes people crazy,” as one character has it, without a drop of irony.
Hearteningly in an ever-more-homogenised world, what franchised reality TV proves is that, deep down, even spewing youths spew in their local argot.
