In this very special guest post writer/performer Kara Jensen-Mackinnon shares with us her experience as a contestant on Recipe to Riches season one (Channel Ten in 2013). We all know reality TV is, at best, confected but this sheds a whole new light on the process…
The second season of Recipe to Riches has come to a close and I’m not going to lie I caught a few episodes… partly because I’m drawn to any television show broadcasting high definition images of food, but mostly because I was a contestant on season one and so watching it now is an entirely different reality experience.
See, I entered the show largely as a joke to my work colleagues, but I got a lot further than we all anticipated, and as a result gained first hand experience how reality TV actually operates.
THE APPLICATION:
All potential contestants were asked to arrive at some weird hotel and we spent what felt like hours being lead from grey carpeted room to slightly larger grey carpeted room, filling out forms with oddly personal questions like:
– How often do you feel like outside entities are trying to control your thoughts?
– Do you gain satisfaction from seeing others suffer?
I spared a thought for all those honest chumps who found out they were in need of immediate psychological attention via their application to be on a cooking reality show. After completing an aggressively awkward screen test, I was lead into the largest grey carpeted room complete with giant mahogany desk resembles the sort of business bench American Psycho CEOs might enjoy metre-long lines of cocaine. Aware that the panel of lofty bigwigs were sizing me up to ascertain what sort of television I would make, I dressed cute and told them a romantic origin story for my recipe that was largely fabricated… it was hard to hear their response over the cartoon dollar signs rolling around in their eye sockets.
GOLD TICKET AUDITION:
After a week I got a call inviting me to come audition again, but this time on camera. The next stage – The Gold Ticket process – was characterised by hours of standing around with a handful of production crew filming me clap from every angle. I can confirm that the majority of people that you meet on audition day that don’t make it to the final cut are actually insane or just legit creepers. People are so obsessed with the notion of being on television they’ll do anything.
I was asked by a cameraperson to hug one particularly strange man who had been following me around all day for one of their insert shots, and as we reluctantly embraced, he whispered into my ear, “you give the most amazing hugs.” My whole spine turned into jelly as I realised this guy was just sizing me up to determine how many bits he would have to cut my corpse into to fit into his human meat freezer. (Said man managed to find all my contact details online and emailed me for sometime there after.)
HOUSE CALL:
A few weeks later a small production team was sent out to my house to film a two-hour interview and all those twee little ‘life vignettes’ that are spliced between the onscreen action. These are entirely fabricated. I was introduced to people who worked in shops I’ve never been to, moments before I had to pretend we were old friends as the camera was rolling. All the furniture in my house was shifted to arrange for better shots, and at one point I stood in the middle of a goddamn park with an easel pretending to paint a painting I had finished three years earlier, and spoke about art. I told the crew I was uncomfortable with lying so blatantly, they told me not to worry – it makes for good vision.
ELIMINATION:
Upon arrival at the elimination quarters, I was immediately locked in a room for several hours without my phone or any notion of what was happening, I figured this was a careful ploy to increase my anxiety to record heights, a tactic they must employ to get every second person tearing up on Masterchef. I was filmed walking back and forth in corridors for about 40 minutes before being introduced to my fellow contestants, both of which I had been conveniently filmed speaking to at very early stages in the production, leading me to believe that the majority of the final contestants were already predetermined.
Though it looks indie, there were no less than 50 production people present in the kitchen. By the time the filming started, I was so anxious I could hardly speak. Several of my ingredients were incorrect, even though they were simple things like cream, and I knew that my complaints on camera would be left on the cutting room floor. The judges were clearly setting me up to fail, and my worst fear was that I would be edited to be made to look incompetent. As machines broke and things dropped around me, the cameras were always there to capture any fleeting moment of angst.
While the judges were deliberating, I was told by one of the contestants that they had actually made her stand on the ruins of her house that was destroyed in the floods, she said she didn’t want to but they insisted. I suppose it made for good vision.
Hearing her story, I realised having no obvious hardships in my life meant I had no chance at winning. When it came time for judgment, I was spent. Even though they called my product “genius” in the Gold ticket process and said it would “fly off the shelves” it was all a different story now. (I should note here that the contestant who came third this season made almost an identical product to mine but apparently the judges had changed their tunes on the definition of innovation.)
I was eliminated, which was kind of humiliating because so many people were there. I stood on a marker and gave a small impromptu speech and then walked out with several cameras in tow. It was especially humiliating because in the end we had to film it four times. The exact same thing, and each time I had to smile and pretend I had no idea what was about to happen, my goodbye speech got significantly shorter each time. They said it was sound issues, but I was convinced they were trying to get my to cry. At this point I had been there 10 hours and wanted to leave, we conducted the “loser interview” (their words) and they asked questions like, “will you ever cook again and will your boyfriend would still be proud of you?” They’re ruthless, but I wasn’t going to give them tears.
After everything, I peeled the tiny skin colour microphone off my chest and admired the residing red itchy rectangle it left on my skin, I still couldn’t believe how far this whole thing had gone. I said goodbye to all the production crew but I was quickly ushered out, honestly, it felt like they had already forgotten my name. Being on the show has given me a new found appreciation for people who can talk off the cuff on camera, and a new found sympathy for people who burst into tears over nothing.
It’s all about the vision.
Kara Jensen-Mackinnon is a full time writer for ABC2’s political satire program The Roast, a food critic at Concrete Playground and the auth or of ‘The People You Will Meet at University’. She writes as a freelancer for Thought Catalogue, Medium, Larrikin Post and Hijacked and elsewhere, and spends her spare time making art, patting pooches, and playing video games.