Apparently one of the first questions this research would ask the applicants for the show was what medication they were on so she could work if they had the right kind mental disorder to make them entertaining!!
Theres an awful lot of that on these confrontational programmes. Theres a kind of person who is vulnerable and seeks a sort of reasurrance from being considered important enough to be put in the limelight like that. As an over-keen, under-thoughtful researcher (who’s just excited even to have the job) people like that are a shoe-in, they are the first people to come forward and if you had any sense of a duty of care they’d be the first people you’d politely turn away. But if you turn them away then the kind of people who have an interesting story, and are psycologically in the right place to be able to tell it are really hard to find. My gf had to find 5 contributors to a documentary – she had to make 3000 approaches (our home office wall looked like that scene in Homeland where Claire Danes loses her marbles) to get a short list of around 100 and then from that 100 filter out the ones that were a danger to themselves and the ones that were a danger to her. But that was for a doc that would take 6 months to make. Its not likely anyone is going to that length to churn out 5 programmes a week on ITV.
A friend of ours when they were at a low ebb, on their way to breakdown, called up to go on a Kilroy (I think) to talk about whatever their issue-du-jour was. For about two to three year afterwards researchers would call her up pretty much weekly -‘we’re doing a show about “x” can you come and be a person who’s been effected by “x” ‘, pretty much feeding her a storyline in the hope that she’d be suggestible enough to do it.
I don’t know if it was pre ‘the big hack’ but does anyone remember the thread here with the sister of the woman who’d been sucked into one of those “make women take their clothes off and cry” programmes that were the fad a few years back – she logged on to join the thread and gave quite an insight into the how entrapping the whole process was.