Former Miss South Africa Melinda Bam in a reality TV audience - at Idols.
I recently realised that there's an urgent need for reality TV studio audiences to be liberated from feeling as if the only response they can give is to cheer or clap - especially during evictions, results shows and finales. Audiences need to feel free to give realications. (Reality TV reactions, pronounced: re-a-li-actions)
It really struck me during the Strictly Come Dancing 6 finale. I was in the live audience and as things heated up between the two finalist couples the audience went through moments of weird silence.
Everyone would cheer one moment but then went silent in moments where it was inappropriate to cheer. For instance, Zakeeya Patel and her partner Ryan Hammond scored a perfect 10, which naturally got loads of cheers and whoops.
Their routine was followed by Lalla Hirayama and her partner Grant Esterhuizen who missed a perfect 10 by one particularly influential point.
As the judge raised their banner to reveal their flawed score, the audience was silent - obviously we couldn't cheer because it wasn't a good state of affairs so it would have felt and sounded wrong.
The trouble was there was no vocal response at all so it made things feel odd and undramatic. My gut instinct was that I wanted to let out an "Awwwww" - that mix of sympathy and the sub-text "You weren't as good, poor things". Which of course I didn't do because of how silent everyone was.
Thinking about it afterwards though - we
should have done it. It seemed to me that the silence was because everyone didn't want to vocalise their instinctive response in case we were perceived as being rude.
The thing is, we wouldn't have been - we would just have been an added element of the drama and an important part of the emotional music of the evening.
I'd even go so far as to say that "boo's" have their place in a reality TV audience. Not vindictive, mean boo's but boo's with a sense of humour. Boo's that acknowledge it's a reality show and that all emotions need to be expressed. It's tricky to explain but hopefully you'll know and hear what I mean.
In a nutshell I'm putting out a call to all live studio reality audiences: let's be more honest and dramatic! Let's sound off how we feel, sincerely, with a flourish and let's make our responses dynamic so that they aren't just cheers but emotional responses to the action and contestants.
Bring it on!!