Beginning as a casual line in one Australian newspaper, the Fat Kids Can’t Hunt reality TV story is gathering momentum like a dawn run for the St Rupert and Parish Gentleperson’s Hunt.

Ten obese British kids will be followed as they live a traditional lifestyle with Aborigines for a month, just like a group of adults who lived with Namibian hunter-gatherers for Fat Men Can’t Hunt. Unsurprisingly, this is an Endemol production.

The scent has indeed been picked up, as I suggested (heh!), by senior Aboriginal figures of sensible mien. Warren Mundine is the first Indigenous man to lead the ALP, and a person of contemplative demeanor and measured power. He is not too impressed -

“”Here’s big fat civilised people coming down to frolic with the natives, I just find that almost hilarious – it’s so insulting it’s almost funny.”

However he did say if the local indigenous community was willing to participate, some good may come out of it. “They might actually see the lives that Aboriginal people live is not as laid back and easy as people think it is.”

The SMH also found Dr Stephen Juan, anthropologist of Sydney University. He already has an interesting history with both Endemol and reality TV, since he was “an advisor to the Australian version of Big Brother during its second season..” He is a dab hand at popularisation, for which he gets a gold star, with The Odd Body, The Odd Body 2, The Odd Brain and The Odd Sex all delivering a trickle of revenue to HarperCollins. He is the man who popularised the factiod that “Men who kiss their wives goodbye in the morning earn much more money than those who don’t” and “63 per cent of dog owners kiss their pooch regularly”. Which I guess means that people who really want to get rich marry their dogs.

He has a column in El Reg, for which he gets many more gold stars, and in which he exhibits a good deal of common sense.

The more I read about Dr Stephen Juan, the more I like him. Just last February, the SMH collared him to talk about an international survey on attitudes to retirement.

“A behavioural scientist, Stephen Juan, said young Australians were gripped by a “crisis of rising expectations”.

“The promise was that … machines would do the drudge work. Instead, people are working harder to pay for their machines,” Dr Juan said…

,,Dr Juan said young people had swallowed the Howard Government’s message of individual responsibility. “If you’re 20, that’s all that you really remember. The Government doesn’t really owe you anything [and] everybody has to stand on their own two feet.”

… When not surfing the net, retirees were most likely to be indulging in a hobby, volunteering, gardening or travelling.

“The baby boomers have been the luckiest generation of the last century,” Dr Juan said.

Australians were at the top of the list of people who believed individuals were responsible for funding their retirement, scoring slightly higher than Americans. The average working Australian saves $652 a month towards retirement, second only to the US.

Dr Juan said Australians were becoming increasingly Americanised in their attitude to work. “We’re following that pattern, and who wants to be like that? They’re at each other’s throats. They’re very fearful … in the midst of all this affluence.

“They have never had it so good, but they’ve never been so scared of losing it.”

On the 30th October 2000 , by the way, he gave a presentation about severed heads to Discovery Science. Unfortunately you have to listen to it, since there is no transcript.

I don’t believe a word of his resume, except his qualifications and the fact that he cares about teaching. But I do believe him when he said

“”It is destructive, foolish, ridiculous, humiliating for the audience as well as the contestants, but will probably score major ratings points…

.. “You can get people to stop smoking by putting them on a desert island without any cigarettes. You can put people in a prison cell and starve them, and they’ll lose weight.

“But this doesn’t really correct their behaviours in any way and when they come back to civilisation they’ll revert to their old habits again. So what is the point of this? What are they trying to do?”

Not to mention that is was an insult to the aboriginal communities as well. “Their cultural sensitivities will be stepped on as the contrast between ‘civilisation’ and ‘primitive peoples’ is shown.

“It’s an insult to everyone in this regard. No-one is unscathed in this.”

All this avoids the practical questions. If the British kids fit into a current Indigenous lifestyle, then it won’t particularly challenge their obesity. There are stores in Aboriginal communities for a reason. If Endemol sets up a kind of zoo, in which everyone “goes back to nature” together, then everyone is likely to crack the shits together.

What is more, the British kids won’t be able to hunt for a more basic reason than the chip butty engorged flab hanging off their underdeveloped frames. Hunting in traditional societies takes a great deal of skill and takes intensive one-to-one training to learn.

In documentary filmmaking, there is always a problem about the end. When should you stop filming? There was a recent case in which a very decent group of filmmakers spent time with an Indigenous family and discovered very clearly when they should stop. They were driven out with a shotgun.

I go in hope with Endemol.

I rather like the comments on a hunting website called Field and Stream.

And a food policy website called Rudd Sound Bites (no connection at all, honestly..) puts the problem well here:

“The children in this show are incredibly vulnerable targets of weight bias by the media, and I don’t see how the premise of this program will in any way help children learn how to eat healthily in our current food environment. If anything, it will likely only perpetuate the harmful message that children are to blame for their weight, and ignore the larger societal factors that contribute to obesity. If the program truly intends to help kids “tackle overeating”, then it needs to tackle the toxic food environment that targets children with billions of dollars in advertising and marketing for unhealthy foods, entices them with toys to purchase junk food, and simply makes it difficult for a child to be healthy in our society. Fortunately, it looks like critics don’t like the show either.”

Believe it or not, the Channel Four Big Brother community site has a go too.

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The story of Joseph Lycett, the convict and inveterate forger who painted the picture above, is also interesting in itself.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007 at 11:32 pm and is filed under entertainments, visual media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.