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Boys and Girls Alone - Big Brother meets Lords of the Flies
Leitner
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Registered User regular
So there’s been some controversies over this new TV show by channel Four.
Still unsure of how I feel on this. Though at the moment I'm leaning towards the view espoused by Mackenzine. And find a fair amount of the moral outraged espoused a tad ridiculous. I doubt this is going to do any longterm damage to the children, and could be a real learning experiance for them.
Channel 4 wrote:With endless headlines about the dangers faced by kids today, there are fears that parents, obsessed by their children's safety, are raising a generation of 'cotton-wool kids', restricted and protected from the real world in a way that was unthinkable a generation ago. Boys and Girls Alone sets out to test the wisdom of those fears by constructing a world without grown-ups - a world ruled by children.
In this new documentary series, 10 boys and 10 girls, aged between eight and 11 years old, are given the chance to experience life without adults.
Living in two 'villages' and separated on gender lines, they decide everything about how they live - what they do, what they eat, when they get up, whether they clean and wash and how they organise and entertain themselves.
Who will cope best without mum and dad? Do girls really grow up quicker? Are boys naturally more aggressive? And who will build the better world - boys or girls?
The Telegraph wrote:Childcare experts and politicians fear that the series, which will see the eight-to-11-year-olds fend for themselves for two weeks, will degenerate into "voyeuristic and low-grade entertainment" and leave the young participants traumatised.
Despite denials by Channel Four, they are also concerned that the series will become "a mini Big Brother" as the boys and girls are filmed on hand-held cameras in separate cottages in Cornwall coping with day-to-day chores without any parental supervision.
Called Boys and Girls Alone, the four-part documentary, which will air in November, sees the children cook for themselves, clean their rooms, make their own sleeping arrangements and decide how to spend their own money.
Watched on CCTV cameras by their parents - who do not feature in the programme - they will be seen living up to gender stereotypes, with the boys running riot with water pistols and the girls baking cakes.
The documentary is being made by Love Productions, the company behind The Baby Borrowers, a BBC3 series which left teenagers to look after other people's children.
The programme was attacked by childcare experts as "a sick" reality show. Local authority officials were so concerned about the "very real risk" of physical and psychological damage to the children that they urged the BBC to cancel it.
Andrew Hibberd, the director of the Parent Organisation, said he feared that some of the children taking part in the Channel 4 documentary risked being bullied by their classmates, especially if they were caught on camera crying.
"If the documentary is intended to be educational in its output, that's good, but I doubt it will," he said.
"The big danger is that the producers will have preconceived ideas of what they expect to get from it. I think they will expect the boys to fight more than the girls, be unable to cook and be dirtier, and I fear the editing will reflect those ideas rather than being fair and unbiased. I'm sure the programme will serve no useful purpose and will simply be voyeuristic and low-grade entertainment".
David Davies, the Conservative MP, said: "It sounds appalling. Given how hard adults find it to cope with reality shows like Big Brother, to put children in that environment is asking for trouble. There's a danger this could leave children traumatised."
Eileen Hayes, a parenting advisor for the NSPCC said: "I think the children are too young to be in the programme. It looks like another experimental situation that the media has set up for good television.
"It's really a cause for concern. Producers of these kinds of programmes always say that the children have given their informed consent but how can an eight-year-old know what the implications might be?"
Andrew Mackenzine, Channel Four's head of factual entertainment, defended the programme, saying the safety of the children was "absolutely paramount".
"Parents are effectively on the other side of the gates watching on CCTV. There were also security guards and chaperones," he said. "The parents thought it was an incredibly positive experience for their kids to go through. We were taking them away for two weeks so they were highly monitored.
"You are just left with this positive feeling that these kids are wonderful. We've got this generation here of brilliant kids. If they're let off the loose they're brilliant."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2603181/Channel-4-condemned-over-documentary-putting-children-in-house-alone.html
Still unsure of how I feel on this. Though at the moment I'm leaning towards the view espoused by Mackenzine. And find a fair amount of the moral outraged espoused a tad ridiculous. I doubt this is going to do any longterm damage to the children, and could be a real learning experiance for them.
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http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20414428/
A girl also had her face splattered with hot grease while cooking among other things.
I think the main controversy about the show here was that it violated child labor laws and that CBS let it get a bit too "Lord of the Flies." CBS ended up calling it a "summer camp" but that really translated into "fend for yourselves in the desert" I think.
The kids are far too old to measure any of this.
I've never heard of this show until now, but geez, what kind of parent signs something like that? That was more of a rhetorical question but I'm sure I'll get some suggestions anyway.
Parents that are greedy fucks.
That's because you're a pedophile.
Uh, I know first time my dad took me paintballing at fourteen he had to sign that. It might be common place in TV/Film productions. Any guys in film able to clarify?
Its partially a farce and all contestants are budding child actors....thats the least disturbing possibility I can think of. And its still kinda disturbing.
So they don't have to do all the paperwork that putting a child up for adoption entails by letting child services do all the work?
how did that turn out, anyway
They tried to build a dirty bomb and are now being held in Gitmo.
I think it was the "you can't sue us if your kid dies" part of the waiver that we thought odd.
Thankfully Fox have cameras in there and it'll be broadcast in the fall.
That is in literally every waiver for every set ever.
Well, it was nominated for an Emmy. I had a friend who watched it and made us view some of the more bizarre and interesting parts. There was one girl who objected to the butcher's kid killing chickens so she locked herself in the chicken coop. At one point, the 'kid council' decided to mandate religious services and nobody showed up. At the end of it, the kids also completely trashed the town, setting fire to random shit. That's all that really sticks out in my mind though.
I stand informed.
Still it may be more pertinent to this type of show.
I'd watch this, especially over the reality shit that normally comes out. Oh, and that Kid Nation stuff sounds amazing.
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sleep forever if you wish to be a dreamer
I watched the show, and the problem with most of it was the stupid "journal" that the council had to read about the town's "history" every week that put ideas into their head. Like the forming of a religious service. It wasn't like a bunch of kids got together on their own and were like, hey, let's start a town church.
Pussies.
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I wouldn't exactly call it educational but it was fairly entertaining and it does raise a fair point about kids knowing nothing about how to look after themselves. Of the 20 kids in there I think 3 or 4 of them could cook, at one point a boy fails to cook a pot noodle because he can't boil a kettle.
It's also quite interesting seeing them tear around for 2 days doing whatever they want, and then becoming depressed as they realise that not washing, living in a dirty environment and having no set boundaries or routine is not particularly nice at all. They very quickly realised they needed to establish a set of rules and responsibilities.
How did I not hear about that part? That sounds awesome.
They have to save something for sweeps.
The thing is, it fails at its stated goal of seeing if today's children are more incompetent because it has no point of comparison.
I think the very fact that parents everywhere are rising up to try and PREVENT these kids from undertaking this task sort of proves the whole theory.
I don't care what anyone else says, Kid Nation was awesome and not nearly as lord-of-the-flies-y as I'd expected.
Nah, this is an interesting show.
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About the show, where can I catch it in America?
Are you sure you aren't thinking of Battle Royale?