- ‘Sink Gunk’: unidentified food scraps, which amalgamate and coagulate in the plughole of the common households kitchen sink.
- Sultanas - they ruin otherwise perfectly good food.
- Wearing a skirt and forgetting to wear underwear (Circa grade 3 I was taking the short walk to school and realised it felt a bit drafty. Needless to say, I ran straight home. My father still occasionally refers to me as ‘Knickerless’).
- Reality Television
- My Ipod play list being exposed to the general population. There are some CDs on there that would severely deplete what limited street cred I have.
You may be surprised that reality TV is on this list. Admittedly, I am not terrified of all reality television – just the vast majority. I’m actually terrified of most television shows. Crime dramas come a close second to reality TV in the aforementioned list. If the show is solely referred to by an acronym and involves a greying middle aged man sporting sunglasses in a science lab – I freak. News on the commercial stations almost drives me to distraction, the day the status of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolies relationship was reported on the 6pm news, I began to boycott.
Now, all this being said – there are two reality TV shows I enjoy. These are Beauty and the Geek and Masterchef. I like that Beauty and the Geek challenges the stereotypes we pin on people and how quickly we pigeon hole others. Masterchef appeals to my love of cooking and although George Calombaris’ constant state of melodrama and emphatic arm movements leave me fearing his arm is going to protrude out of the TV and poke my eye out, I am a devoted viewer.
Watching Masterchef the other week I found myself thinking that I didn’t really like one of the contestants. This saddened me. Watching reality television shows, it is so simple to fail to remember that the contestants in these shows are just that – contestants. Unlike the crime dramas and sitcoms that are on our screens that comprise of fictional characters, reality TV is just that – reality. These contestants are not actors playing imaginary roles written by a team of scriptwriters, they are real people.
Obviously, the producers of Masterchef paint certain contestants in a particular light and this can lead us to make judgements or observations about those partaking in the show based on nifty editing techniques. If I was on reality TV, I wonder how I would be portrayed? I know I have positive and negative traits and it would be interesting how the editors of a reality television show would piece my personality together. Would I be a hero, a villain or an underdog? How would the people watching me on television perceive me?
Thinking about reality TV in this light, really alters my perspective. Firstly, how can I sit there and make judgements about others? And secondly, even if for some insane reason, my judgments were founded – how do I know if a person’s character and personality is being truthfully depicted in the first place?
Passing judgement is a terrifying notion and next time, before I criticise the personality of a reality TV contestant, or the way they make a soufflé, I’ll think about how it would be if the tables were turned and look at the areas of my character that need altering and my soufflé making skills.
"Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. "Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye.” Matthew 7:1-5
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