The Honesty Box

C4

Channel 5 is usually the king of bad taste on terrestrial tv, but occasionally, C4 makes an attempt to steal the crown. This is evident in the stomach-turning programme Naked Attraction, in which people choose partners based on the appearance of their naked genitals. It’s enough to put you off your vegetarian sausage and two meatballs. But now there is Honesty Box, and although it doesn’t ask its chosen members of the public to strip naked, it does screw with their minds.

The basic premise is that 12 competitors are placed in a villa in Cyprus, where they are encouraged to find love. They spend the day lounging around the swimming pool, talking and deciding whether they are compatible with their chosen partner or whether anyone else app appeals to them more. So far, so Love Island - and I quite like Love Island, as it is generally sweet, with close friendships being built up between the young women and between the young men, and it allows typical relationship behaviour to be viewed and analysed. Liars, cheats, gas lighters, ghosters, are revealed through their behaviour, and honesty and decency are rewarded. Of course as with any young relationship, some sympatique people are disappointed by not being chosen by their preferred contestant and thus being evicted, but the general public vote for their favourite couple towards the end, and as with most reality programmes, and indeed, the jury system in court, the general public usually prove themselves sensible and discerning by voting out the cheaters and creeps.

But The Honesty Box is not a straightforward clone of Love Island. Its main feature is a building near the pool from which an intimidating droning voice emanates at intervals, and different contestants are called up to answer questions. If these were general knowledge questions, there might be some entertainment to it, as with seeing the nice but dim Stacy Solomon on Celebrity Mastermind. But they are not, they are questions about the contestant’s ethics and past in present behaviour, and the programme makers boast that they use state of the art lie detectors to tell whether the contestant is lying. If they are deemed to be doing so, they are later humiliated in public and money is taken off the prize total.

This is Jeremy Kyle in a different guise. What on earth are the producers doing pretending that lie detectors are infallible? There is a reason that lie detector results are not used in court, and that is because they are prone to inaccuracy if the person being tested is emotional at all. What are the chances that a young adult who has never been on TV before and is being interrogated on their feelings for people they have only just met would be nervous, anxious, fearful? Quite high, I would say. And these emotions cause a fast heart rate and higher blood pressure and rabbit in headlights eyes with startled vasodilation of pupils and eyelid retraction in the same way that lying does. So there is every chance that the young individuals who are exposed in front of their peers as liars are no such thing. So the ostracism and dumping that may result is completely unjust. The show’s executive producers themselves quote the accuracy of the lie detector used here as 88%. They say that the mechanism measures blink rate, pupillary dilation, and gaze fixation. But anyone finding themselves in an intimidating position, with questions being hurled at them from a booming machine would increase all of these parameters.

This is an exploitative and gratuitous programme based on a fallacy which is presented as absolute truth. Of course, the producers stick in a young and beautiful presenter with a broad regional accent, Vicky Pattison, herself a reality show alumunus. The inclusion of Lucinda Light, a highly emotionally intelligent woman from the reality series Married At First Sight Australia, as another presenter is the only good thing about the show. Lucinda is sunny and warm; she may be a little too spiritual and woo woo for some, but her genuine kindness suggests she could offer helpful advice to any contestant that struggles.

There have been suicides among previous contestants of several reality shows. This is why the Jeremy Kyle show was stopped - a man informed that the lie detector said that he was lying killed himself soon after appearing. Surely TV producers should have learnt that reality programmes have a duty of care, and branding individuals as liars in public based on lie detectors which are far from 100% accurate is an incredibly risky move. Tie that in with the fact that the young people announced as being liars will no doubt be treated with suspicion by their peers in the show, and you have an uncomfortable, dysfunctional setting where millions are watching - no doubt believing that the shamed contestant is an egregious liar - a bewildered and self-questioning youngster be snubbed by everyone else in their community.

At the very least they should be explaining to viewers and contestants that the lie detector only has an accuracy test of 88% at best. Have we really sunk this low, C4?