The invention of the candid camera was closely related to the invention of cinematography, and the creation of the illusion that the camera is not there arose with the emergence of film acting. Verisimilitude in the arts of cinematography was contingent on the ability to convey the events we see on the screen as naturally as possible, as though there were no camera filming, no photographer behind the camera, no director giving instructions, and no team of technicians contributing their talents to creating the illusion that the camera was doing no more than transmitting real life events. Just as the cinema transmitted live and recorded scenes to viewers, so too did television later transmit similar scenes to audiences in their homes. Moreover, television began to create material of its own. The talk show, for example, was an addition that cinema could not have made, and it eventually became a basic feature on every television station. Soon other types of programmes arose exclusively for TV. Perhaps the most internationally famous today are the “candid camera” programmes. It is interesting to note that just as television borrowed its imagery from the cinema, it also borrowed its sound from the radio. One such programme was “The Candid Microphone,” which began broadcasting on 28 June 1947 in the US before making a rapid transition to the cinema with some very short films. The programme then moved to television where it acquired the name “Candid Camera”. Created and produced by TV producer Allen Funt, the programme began airing on 10 August 1948 in the US and lasted until the 1970s, when it stopped running regularly. Various episodes were re-broadcast at various intervals over the next two decades. In 1996, the US network CBS began to feature reruns of earlier series, and in 2001 PAX began to do the same. Although the show would stop on PAX three years later because the station was sold, it returned again in August 2014 with one hour-long episode. Candid camera programmes began to appear on Arab television screens around two decades ago. They began with the original “Candid Camera” and passed through other versions or clones from other countries, from Japan to Canada and from Canada to Australia. The “hidden camera” virus had struck Arab television producers, and it soon became contagious. The Arab versions used two methods to create their effects. One was to invite real people to take part in manufacturing the “trick” that would be played on one or more members of the public, although sometimes unknown actors would be enlisted to act as ordinary people as well. The second was to use a known actor who would disguise himself in order to stage the “trick”. Ibrahim Nasr, who created the character of Zakiya Zakariya who would reveal her true identity at the end of each segment, became a landmark in the history of Arab “hidden camera” programmes. In fact, the fame he created for himself and his character enabled him to produce a special film called “Zakiya Zakariya in Parliament.” As Arabic-language candid camera programmes developed, the ruses conceived by their producers diversified and the costs varied. Many of the tricks were staged in enclosed areas, including film studios. The studio often acted as the backdrop for everything the “hidden camera” could conceive, even the “shooting” of the show's host right before the eyes of the stunned and alarmed guest who would then be let in on the truth. The episodes would conclude with brief discussions on whether or not the guests who were the butt of the jokes knew in advance what was going to happen. They would often test actors' ability to “shock and surprise,” especially when actors, even famous ones, became the majority of the guests on the “hidden camera” programmes. It became possible to compare the reactions of celebrities who sometimes included football stars — once the case with former Ahly football player Mohamed Barakat. The candid camera phenomenon even spread to children's television. In a programme called “We were just Joking”, children staged a prank on an adult guest who was later informed that he was on candid camera. There then came a period when the “hidden camera” was associated with actor Ramez Galal. The production teams took the action from the land and the sea to the air. In one series, the episodes were named after Ramez Galal and included “Ramez the Lion-Hearted,” “Ramaz Akhenaten,” “Ramez and the Shark” and “Ramez in Control.” Along the way, the programmes moved from an elevator with two lions crouched in front of it, to a Pharaonic tomb where the mummy Ramez emerges from a sarcophagus enclosed in a sealed room protected by scorpions and snakes, and then to the middle of the sea where a passenger falls out of a boat and is gobbled up by a shark, with his blood then floating to the surface of the water to the astonishment of the guest. While these seasons were filmed in Egypt, Ramez added a new dimension to the illusion when guests taking part in the opening of a new luxury hotel in Dubai were invited to take an aerial tour of the city. In mid-flight, the pilot performed stunts that made it appear that the plane had malfunctioned and was about to crash. At one point a passenger was “ejected” before the horrified other guests. Eventually the plane landed, at which point Ramez Galal revealed his true identity with the words “you're on candid camera.” The celebrity status of some of the guests on the programme reflected its larger production values. They included actor Mohamed Heneidi, singer Abdallah Balkheir, actresses Sara Salama, Abir Sabri and Ferial Yousef, and football star Mustafa Younes. Curiously, the year in which Ramez's programme took its guests into the air, other programmes did the same. There was an emergency landing “directed from behind the camera” by actor Hani Ramzi and the programme “The Airplane” directed by Omar Al-Sherif for Tunisia's Channel 9 in which the lead had to skydive out of the plane. The “candid camera” programmes had been taken to new heights, in this case quite literally. The truth behind the programme was revealed through a staged crisis involving one of the guests on the fake airplane, Paris Hilton. Many believed that Ramez's programme and its sponsors would meet their end due to the lawsuits filed by Hilton's lawyers on the basis of what she had had to endure on this “nauseating” programme, as the Website the Huffington Post described it at the time. It later came to light that Hilton not only was in on the joke, but that she had been engaged on contract and knew all the details of what was to happen in the show. The programme drew a huge audience and major advertisers. In other words, Ramez's show, like other candid camera programmes, had a large market. The candid camera culture had become a part of contemporary reality. Not just candid camera: Indeed, we are constantly exposed to deception of some sort. We cannot always believe what we see, even if it is filmed before our own eyes. More often than not, we expect it to be exposed as a lie or a fake, an expectation reinforced by numerous non-televised examples: the artist whose death is announced on Facebook but then returns to life; another artist who is said to have committed suicide, only for us to discover that this is untrue. The culture of illusion has infiltrated reality. We have even become victims of our own friends (most of the victims of Ramez's pranks were his friends). Moreover, various “conspiracy theories” are the offspring of the candid camera phenomenon. The expression “it's all media talk” has been born out of the certainty, many times reconfirmed, that the media, whether print or audiovisual, is just one giant candid camera that fabricates the news. This certainty has been confirmed again this year, and not just by the “hidden camera” programmes. This year's Ramadan serials, such as “After the Beginning” and “The Diary of a Desperate Housewife” and even the children's serial “Super Heneidi,” were all built around a single idea. The newspapers plagiarise articles in foreign languages and then bill their translators as their authors. Television programmes fabricate “live” interviews to the extent that one is reminded of one famous TV presenter who brought “women of the night” onto her show and interviewed them breathlessly about their experiences. The women and their experiences were all faked of course, but the audience believed them as it became absorbed in another televised fabrication that spun out yarns as fast as hotcakes and put innocent people in the witness box. In accordance with the candid camera concept, everyone is a potential victim: the audience, the guests, the law, ethics, and the journalistic and media professions themselves. The candid camera culture pollutes everything it touches when amateurs and professionals alike take part in fabricating images and disseminating them across the social networks, generating wave upon wave of visual and psychological rubbish that sweeps away the truth and the reality behind such images. Efforts have been made to halt such lies and fabrications, especially when they involve matters of national security. For example, the armed forces media has recently resorted to publishing pictures of the terrorists it has captured or killed (while cautioning viewers that the images might be shocking) in order to counter the false rumours that pursue official army statements not corroborated by pictures. Despite the gruesome nature of the photographs, and the fact that the press picks them up and circulates them without the necessary cautions to viewers, this measure is a necessary response to the prevailing candid camera culture. The latest product of this culture has been brought to us by the marriage of the candid camera with more modern technology. The love affair between the candid camera and the video clip has been made possible by an actual camera, or the lens of a mobile phone, plus broadcast technology such as YouTube. Now everyone is complicit in the crime. People take revenge on one another. They spread secrets behind closed doors. They display the visually forbidden. If you are on the lookout for filmed scandals, finding them has now never been easier. You do not have to wait for Ramez's programme to watch celebrities tearing each other's hair out, or members of parliament in a brawl, or to hear recordings of telephone conversations that emerge from black boxes to become audible to all. One might well ask how we can ever stop this snowballing phenomenon. The first candid camera programmes carried out surveys to gauge audience reactions to what was then called “situation comedy”. As a result of the influx of sadistic responses, the programmes then evolved into a release for many repressed tendencies, many of them loathsome. The viewers manifest their sadism by laughing at the cursing and swearing that they watch. Once this has become familiar, scenes of kicking and beating just make them smile or laugh. Before long, things will have degenerated to blood and murder, and not just in TV serials but also in real life. The reason all this can happen is because those who merit punishment do not receive it. Violating the ethics of the media profession is a catastrophe because it does not affect just one or two people, but in fact impacts thousands or even millions, whether these are television viewers, surfers on the Internet, or readers of the press. In the past, convention and tradition stood as sentinels to guard against the morally wrong. Today, the media needs to be subjected to tougher laws that are not governed by the candid camera culture. The writer is editor-in-chief of the AsiaN.
