Offbeat professions pique our curiosity. For this reason, they make a compelling subject for reality shows. They are likely to enjoy a viewership far and wide, even when they come with little local context. There are two professions — wildlife rescues and automobile modifications — that fit in with this argument. Let me illustrate this.
Unless I relocate to a distant land that crawls with mambas, their sinuous paths are never going to cross mine, yet I am hooked to Snakes in the City , lapping up how Simon Keys and Siouxsie Gillett rescue snakes, mostly mambas and spitting cobras, from homes in South Africa, as part of their regular day at work. The element of risk involved in handling venomous snakes, and the fact that wildlife has an appeal that does not diminish with distance, contribute to what makes this show engaging. An instinctual understanding that getting to know one creature is to know many others of its kind is probably another contributory factor.
The same logic largely applies to reality shows about automobile projects. It may have to do with a machine made for a foreign market and would never be seen on Indian roads. But the lack of local context rarely keeps us from enjoying these capsules of infotainment.
An example from recent times: Car Masters: Rust to Riches , a reality television series about vehicle modifications, arrived on the block in the second part of 2018, and the stories it tells revolve around what happens at Mark Towle’s Gotham Garage in California.
As with most other automobile-modification reality shows from the West, this new series, just one season old, offers stories that are engagingly told and, more significantly, with enough candour and humour that they command attention despite being divorced from our context. The local context in India is that modifications aimed at changing the specifications and essential character of a vehicle are not allowed. Not long ago, the apex court in India drew special attention to this fact.
In one of the episodes of Car Masters that I have seen, Mark Towle and his team at Gotham Garage, are carrying out a brief from owners of a winery that their weeny-little, largely computer-controlled smart car from Germany be turned into a monster that would head boldly into the rough patches around their winery.
With as many sensors as there are nerve-endings in the human feet, the smart car proves quite a handful for Towle and his assistant Caveman, as they go about the job of giving it greater ground clearance, big, high-profile tyres and making all the related changes and also fixing an exo-skeleton to complete the modification exercise.
After they think the main work is done, and take the vehicle out for a test drive, it just stops, beeping out its reluctance to cooperate when they try to speed up. They figure out they have rewired the car wrong somewhere, but the question is where; and also how to undo it. “We have modified the car so much, disconnected so much and rerouted so much that it can’t handle what we have done to it,” says Towle.
It dawns on the two that almost every component has more than one function. And then they notice that the ABS sensor isn’t connected. “Apparently, the smart car has a two-for-one deal. The anti-lock brake sensor is actually the speed sensor,” says Towle.
Reality shows can’t be entirely script-free, though that is often the stubborn claim. After allowing for a bit of ‘drama’, reality shows dealing with modifications of rare automobiles and wildlife rescues, especially snakes, are invariably more real than most other reality shows. (For one thing, there’s a real project and a client, independent of the reality show.) Therein lies their charm. The protagonists have to deal with befuddlement and uncertainty and the viewer can see it.
Launched in 2011 and still around, West Coast Customs , another automobile-mod reality series, has given stories interwoven with real befuddlement and dramatic hyperbole. One encounters this clearly in the episode ‘Virgin Gaming: The Armoured Lounge’, where the West Coast Customs team is building a gaming lounge in an armoured car for a gaming enterprise belonging to Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group.
But the real shines through the dramatic, making this episode one of its most popular, eight seasons down the line.
