One of the series of articles we worked on with journalist, Kate Delmoder published on Irish Independent online platform.

After two decades of watching people being embarrassed in formats ranging from talent shows to pranks and Bushtucker Trials, humiliation has become an on-demand service. But has our taste for public vilification, first sparked by reality TV, given rise to online trolling and cancel culture?

Reality TV has come a long way from the heady social experiment that was Big Brother in 2001. An Orwellian concept marrying our need for celebrity with a growing thirst for post-Clinton authenticity, the idea was a hit for some 20 years until interest in 24/7 surveillance waned. Our fascination with voyeurism, however, didn’t.

Enter The Circle, in which contestants live in separate rooms of the same apartment block, permitted communication solely within a centralised social media platform. An instant hit, the show – which returns to Channel 4 next month – piqued interest with a fake-news-obsessed era, while also providing ample fodder for online trolls.

“I wanted to show that it’s something I, as a disabled person, could win,” Paddy Smyth, winner of The Circle 2019, tells me. The Dubliner, who has also appeared on First Dates Ireland, won over his fellow contestants on The Circle when he revealed that he has cerebral palsy. The reaction from the show’s viewers on social media was largely positive, but Smyth was also a target for trolls who accused him of playing up his disability to garner sympathy, and a cash prize. “I used my disability – something that has been used against me my whole life – and that rubbed people up the wrong way,” he says. “I was villainised for it, which led people to believe that mine was a ‘pity’ win. Now, I’m boxed in in terms of my reputation as this controversial, wild-child disabled guy. Of course I have some regrets, but at the end of the day I played the game and I won. And I won fair and square.”

Emotion has long been recognised in sociology as crucially important, but few feelings boast the social control shame has. Shame is coercive, borderless, and increasing in speed and influence. And for those boasting even a mild interest in pop culture, the concept of public reproach is near impossible to avoid.

From the vantage point of television, reputation is everything – as reality-TV participants such as the late Jade Goody learned to their cost. It’s social comparison, explains psychologist Anna Nauka; we look at the choices people make on TV and think, “I would never do that”, and, “Look at what happens to people who do that”.

“Often, it’s on a very subconscious level,” Nauka says. “Nobody really enjoys consciously cruel behaviour, but there is a part of people that seems to feel better when they see someone not doing well. It’s a certain type of coping mechanism, a projection of our own insecurities, and if we see someone else doing worse than us, it feels good.”

Understanding that audiences tire of the same humiliation format, producers have to push ever further. Hell’s Kitchen leans more into degradation than menu prep, dating shows have gone from a drink in the green room to Married At First Sight and Punk’d has thrown down the gauntlet for shows such as Put Him In Bucca – a candid-camera-style Iraqi television programme in which fake bombs are planted in a celebrity’s cars for them to be stopped and harassed at military checkpoints.

Pranked celebs aside, the majority of reality-TV contestants enter with a full awareness of the risks to their reputation. So why would anyone put themselves forward as a potential target for a public shaming?

Pamela Laird, founder of beauty brand Moxi Loves, featured on series 15 of The Apprentice in 2019. She says it was a desire to showcase her personality and eschew boardroom officialdom that pushed her to consider reality television.

“I was looking for investment at the time,” she says. “And a friend suggested it to me. I had done Dragons’ Den previously and noticed a jump in sales so thought, ‘Why not?’ The first two episodes were fine, but when I took the lead for the first time in episode three, Twitter came for me. Past candidates directly mentioned my name and called me a disgrace. Then it was totally forgotten about by the next episode.”