While spring-cleaning the TiVo last week I found we’d recorded the season finale of The Biggest Loser. It must have captured in error but as soon as I set it going I couldn’t tear my eyes away. The only reality show I usually have time for is Not Torture on Al Jazeera. Watching Republicans get water-boarded until they accept climate change and universal healthcare is remarkably cathartic but this final episode of Loser was pure TV gold.
If you don’t know the show, it’s essentially a chronicle of obese Americans crying about being fat and eating too much and wanting to lose weight. You can pretty much work out the whole show by watching the promos they run in any of the two million ad breaks that occur during live American sport broadcasts. Or so I thought.
For the season finale they travelled to a desert in Somalia for the big challenge. The fatties were made to hand out food aid to starving children and refugees. Ugh, those poor people. It’s sad and tragic, you’ve seen it all before; flies on their faces, distended bellies, and emaciated skeletal adults with eyes full of pain.
It’s truly a failure of humanity that the starving are still with us. I think people like to pretend we solved the world hunger problem in the 80’s or early 90’s, when the first wave of charity fatigue swept in and Kevin Carter committed suicide.
At first the contestants pitched in with the aid workers and distributed food to the starving but then the aid trucks drove away left them behind. The look of fear on their faces was priceless. The tears of pity for the children stopped and they began to get a little crazy. I paused it and went and got a beer and a little cold chicken.
The night passed with them huddled up next to a refugee camp crying in the dark and scaring each other with talk of lions and rebel soldiers and dysentery.
The next day the contestants had to help out the aid workers again, unloading sacks of grain in the hot African sun with only a handful of rice and an apple for breakfast. It was brutal and relentless and it went on and on and on. I’m sure the network producers planned it, by starving them like the refugees, but I was soon watching as one of the teams was caught on hidden camera stealing bags of Hershey Kisses for themselves from the aid trucks.
Yep, actually stealing food from starving children.
“It’s survival of the fittest,” said one of the contestants when confronted about the theft.
“No,” said the actor who played Tony Soprano who had been flown in as a surprise ‘special guest’ for some reason I couldn’t fathom, “It’s survival of the Fattest”.
Cue the dramatic music and tearful look of sorrow and recrimination.
Incredible. The world in a nutshell, right there. Over-consumption versus starvation in a one hour TV special. It was deep and deeply sick. My head is still spinning about it. Surely a new low, turning aid relief into the backdrop of a chintzy Reality TV show?
The whole world could be fed and clothed on a fraction of the money we choose to spend on our military and needless over consumption.
Of course you had to expect the riots across Africa and Middle East that followed the international airing of the show. The burning of the American flags, the viral footage of the fat American stealing chocolate from the mouths of refugees leading Hilary Clinton to apologize at the United Nations. Incredible.
I’m sure you missed it all however. The capitalist American media propaganda machine barely mentioned it at all. There was a two- paragraph story on it in Variety under the headline: ‘Biggest Loser Wins new season while causing International Incident’.
To make matters worse, the winning contestant turned out to be one of the chocolate thieves, much to the chagrin of the show's hosts.
