Fake reality TV

Katrina Borthwick - 15 April 2024

Recently there has been a bit of media coverage about the show ‘Country House Hunters’ New Zealand being faked. It has been proven that at least some of the house hunters were already the owners of the properties they were viewing.

The show has responded that they were just re-enacting the first viewing experience. However this seems implausible, as in one case the ‘house hunters’ had owned the property for 30 years, and in another they were already operating Bed and Breakfast out of it for two years. Overseas versions of the same show have had similar issues reported.

In a small country such as New Zealand, the producers must have known they would be discovered, but perhaps they were hoping that it might happen after they were paid, and the views were already had. It feels like they are shrugging it off, and have a ‘what does it matter if it is good entertainment’ attitude.

This isn’t the first time that this has happened in New Zealand. In 2022 it was reported that the show ‘Rich Listers’, a reality TV show on luxury property sales, was fake. They didn’t sell the properties they claimed, mostly made up the prices, were driving borrowed cars, and often the properties were listed with other agents.

There are also a number of further shows that have been accused of selective footage (Piha rescue), helping the competitors, and adding music for extra drama (Masterchef). The Psychic murder solving reality TV show ‘Sensing Murder’ also gets the stuffed monkey award for the worst exploitation of participants, and for not managing to solve any cases at all. It’s pretty obvious all the psychic experiences were just made up.

Sue Nicholson of Sensing Murder at the 2013 NZ Skeptics Conference

Although this might be par for the course for overseas, it isn’t the sort of behaviour you expect in New Zealand where everyone has only a few degrees of separation, and all the people on the show are someone’s aunty. New Zealand is also a pretty low key, low drama nation, and I think it is wise to be suspicious of any show that offers a good amount of high drama or excitement within production timelines. There is a view that the main reason the reality tv series ‘The Block’ crashed was because they just couldn’t get enough drama. Although they did make the mistake of inviting back reality TV veterans who quite rightly, kept their traps shut so they wouldn’t embarrass themselves on the telly.

Anyway, back to our ‘Country House Hunter’ national scandal. So outraged was one viewer of the Country House Hunter that he took it to the Broadcasting Standards Authority (BSA) who recently dismissed it on a technicality. Although the headline and first part of the media coverage would lead you to believe that the substance of the complaint was dismissed by the BSA, that’s not true. It was dismissed because it was a complaint on a series of programmes (not one) and it contained conditional wording that did not make it clear it was intended as a complaint. Apparently, people contact the BSA just to have a bit of a natter about something bugging them, rather than lay a complaint?

So, it’s possible chapter two may await this saga, and perhaps someone could make a TV programme about that….