h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The show "I'm A Celebrity...Get Me Outta Here!" has a feature where the contestant has a glass bowl placed on their head, which is then filled with creepy crawlies of one description or another.

In whose world is this a reality? Whichever TV company executive dreamt up that one should be tested for illegal substances forthwith!

RF

Apparently one of the biggest gimmicks of that show was eating bugs. However, defeated Hun armies and Native American tribes have at various times survived for months by eating locusts. Many bugs are actually good for you, but we do not eat them, because our language does not classify them as food. Similarly, a tribe in some place like Borneo once died of famine despite the sea around them being full of delicious, nutricious fish. Their language did not classify fish as a food.

Now I've gone off on a tangent, and I'm not even sure what my original point was.

Books like Stephen Bachman - The Running Man which depicts a race across America - last man running wins - stop running and you're shot! Or the one about men on Death Row being given a chance to escape, while television viewers call in to shop his whereabouts - forget who that was by.... Showed a vision of 'reality TV' which we have not as yet succumbed to, given time ..... will we ?

"Bugs" may well be food. I still know of no race or culture that eats them out of a glass bowl fitted over their heads, though.

RF

actually they are both stephen king books (though he wrote the running man under the pseudonym richard bachman) and the running man is about the guy who enters a game show to save his daughters life.. and basically to win the game you have to survive.
and the one about the race is called 'the long walk' and anyone in the race who drops to a walk less than a certain speed is shot.
it was a kind of social commentary about how television was heading in a direction where people would watch anything and they actively enjoyed watching bad things happen to other people. (in the running man people called in to report where they had spotted the protagonist)
reality tv has a long way to go before it gets that bad, though right now a lot of it seems to focus on humiliating the contestants which isn't as bad as killing them outright though it seems unnecessarily cruel.
of course, if there weren't enough viewers, networks would stop producing the shows.. which says a lot!
i read those books long before i was aware of reality TV, which gave me a bizaare sense of deja vu.