From Channel 5’s ‘groundbreaking’ Touch the Truck to last year’s Dancing on Wheels – think Strictly but in wheelchairs – on BBC3, I didn’t think reality TV could get much more bizarre. But last night in France, it just did.
Game Of Death invited 80 people to take part in what they thought was a game show pilot. When other ‘contestants’ (played by actors) who sat in a torture chair got the answers wrong, the glamorous host instructed the players to administer electric shocks while a studio audience chanted ‘punishment’ over a rousing musical soundtrack. After much screaming in apparent agony, the person in the chair appears to pass out, or die.
Of the 80 people administering the shocks, just 16 chose to stop before administering a fatal voltage.
Far from Game of Death being the product of a TV exec’s particularly twisted mind, it’s nothing more than the latest televised version of a legendary/notorious psychology experiment. In the early 60s, Stanley Milgram, a Yale Psychologist, found that 65 per cent of his subjects, ordinary people from the town of New Haven, Conneticut, administered the fatal shock. (15 per cent fewer than the Game of Death).
Milgram was investigating obedience and authority and his experiment proved that when an authority figure tells you to do something, most of us do it. His thesis helps explain how once-perfectly decent people can do terrible things in Nazi camps, Iraqi prisons (remember Lynndie England?) and now on French telly.
Naturally, many of the Game of Death’s contestants were shaken up by the experience. One, whose grandparents were Holocaust victims, was filled with regret at her actions. No one wants to realise that, in another place at another time, they could very easily have been the Nazi prison camp guard or done their bit in the Killing Fields of Cambodia or Rwanda. But now we know all about Milgram’s experiment, and what we humans are capable of, it’s important to remember the minority of people who had the courage to say no.
The philosopher Edmund Burke put it best when he said: ‘All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing’. That’s why I think the 16 conscientious objectors were the real stars of last night’s show. Let’s hope, in all the predictable fuss that’s being made in the international press today, we take time to celebrate their actions and aspire to do the same if and when we ever find ourselves in a French television studio, or worse.
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