Don’t Let ‘Death’ Fool You: Its Future Is Our Present

Ben Black, predatory host of a popular live reality series reveling in voyeurism and perversity, orders an assistant to find a dead body to display on camera. “I want a dead human being,” he barks. “Start making calls.”

Is this where television is heading? Bank on it.

To an extent, it’s already there, with the thickening smog of “anything goes” now choking some sectors of TV, from the Fox debacle of short-lived newlyweds Darva Conger and Rick Rockwell to the ongoing farcical mayhem of the World Wrestling Federation.

The condition makes a fat target for satirists.

Coming Saturday to BBC America, a cable channel airing an eclectic hash of British programming, for example, is “Sex ‘N’ Death,” a dark parody of contemporary television that is set (quaintly, you’d have to say) in “the very near future.” Ha!

It turns out that “Sex ‘N’ Death” is the name of that weekly TV series hosted by Black (Martin Clunes)--the twisted monster Brits love to watch--and produced by his ex-wife, Bella (Caroline Goodall). Exhibiting its debauchery and lechery like giant boobs, it’s a show whose ravenous appetite for offensive, destructive antics is matched only by the public’s desire to see them.

In other words, as Jerry Springer and other bottom-feeders have learned, there’s an audience for everything. Stage a lewd spectacle, and they will come. In an earlier day, didn’t good citizens have a fine time attending public executions?

Director Guy Jenkin’s teleplay has some sly humor. In a sex scene involving Bella and the show’s resident magician, doves fly from his coat when she begins undressing him, and a hamster peers through his open fly. As they snuggle in bed afterward, a white rabbit moving about on a pillow above their heads, she coos contentedly, “It’s so nice to sleep with a normal human being.”

Otherwise, there’s not much to “Sex ‘N’ Death.” In contrast to Paddy Chayefsky’s futurist “Network,” it prophesies the present, a universe previously depicted by Oliver Stone’s lurid “Natural Born Killers” and other tracts on the coarsening of the media and society.

What “Sex ‘N’ Death” does represent is just how disgustingly low many of today’s broadcasters are prepared to descend to attract and hold audiences in an era when viewers’ heads are being turned by an explosion of TV and Internet alternatives.

In this story, so low that Black offers 5,000 pounds to “the first person in this studio to strip completely naked.” His pulse quickens and eyes glow like porn marquees as clothes fall away en masse.

It’s never been difficult for TV producers to find Americans willing to publicly humiliate themselves for either fame or a few bucks, witness incarnations of that oldie, “The Newlywed Game,” whose inanely bickering couples created a strong argument against marriage.

And, more seriously, in the early 1970s, a PBS series titled “An American Family” exposed the painful breakup of a marriage and other intimacies.

Yet these seem almost benign compared with the shriller “gotcha” mentality infecting much of today’s TV, one that finds newscasts routinely deploying hidden cameras in a perpetual game of gratuitous video peeping whose origins are in Alan Funt’s harmless “Candid Camera.”

Just where “Big Brother” fits into this voyeuristic scenario is yet to be seen. That’s the U.S. version of a blockbuster Dutch series that CBS will begin airing in July, with a group of strangers confined to a house in which their every move is monitored by a multitude of cameras and microphones.

A memorable moment in the Dutch series came when viewers saw blankets moving suggestively. Memorable, because under the blankets a man and woman were having sex.

Preceding “Big Brother” on CBS, meanwhile, will be the May 31 premiere of “Survivor,” which will document the lives of persons (contestants, actually) stranded on an island near Borneo, with each getting booted off until only one remains.

With the bar ever falling, the eternal question applies: Is this creativity or crap?

In Black’s case, his driving ambition is to “cause really deep offense,” and one way he does it is to engage in dueling humiliations with an equally repellent competitor.

Yet Black knows, in his heart of dark hearts, that in this careening fast lane of depravity, even he is destined to be swept off the air one day by “some 19-year-old presenter who [fornicates] his granny on live prime time.”

Black does get his dead body, so to speak, after rejecting a woman who offers to let her freshly deceased husband decompose on the show in exchange for two weeks in the Bahamas.

Revolting? Yes. Not that dead bodies are a bold new concept on nonfiction television in the U.S. It was two years ago that a disturbed motorist with a shotgun left his brains on a freeway overpass here as mesmerized stations telecast his suicide live to Los Angeles. And only a few months later that several stations telecast live pictures of police shooting dead another fugitive motorist.

Although everyone apologized contritely for showing these incidents, you wonder if, in their heart of hearts, the big bang was exactly what these stations were seeking.

Still winding their way through the courts, moreover, are civil suits stemming from the rigid body of drug-overdose victim Michael Marich, a promising young actor, being graphically displayed on the syndicated series “LAPD: Life on the Beat,” against the wishes of his grieving, distraught family.

A year earlier, the same show had displayed the body of a man who had hanged himself, a fitting symbol of what may be happening to the medium on which it appeared.

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* “Sex ‘N’ Death” can be seen Saturday at 7 p.m. on BBC America.

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. He can be contacted via e-mail at calendar.letters@latimes.com.