Inside the emotion machine. In Germany, Jana and Juergen go to their bedroom for the first time in the Big Brother house.
Reality television seems to have two different origins.
One of them is the changing form of the talk-show, which from a very gentle format based on celebrities public relations evolved via presenters like Phil Donahue and Oprah Winfrey in the United States into something that shifted interest from the everyday life of a celebrity to celebrating everyday lives. Take the programma Queen for a Day as an example. It was a momentary reversal of social status, like putting the ordinary in the position of the king, which was done in medieval fairs and tournaments. In the 1960s, especially in Britain, this formed part of a cultural trend towards representing ordinary lives in cinema and television. And what you see there is a movement from celebration to something closer to scrutiny or surveillance.