Fort Boyard : circus and vermin

At the same time as the movement in many French towns against circuses with animals gains ground, France 2 is screening the second edition of its televised ‘middle-age style’ circus show, Fort Boyard, which starts this Saturday. 

It is a shame that a public TV channel is broadcasting these types of programmes. Without doubt, the sports challenges and the boldness of the competitors are admirable, which alone is worth seeing. But the Fort Boyard concept repeats the Fear Factor principal, a phobia based game which involves the presence of some four hundred animals shut up night and day, from June to August in a fort in the La Rochelle sea, who are used to scare the players, make the spectators tremble, and to impress viewers.

The ‘ferocious’ big cats are always part of the game, even if in the real world it should be their decimation that is generating concern, not them. Myn, Cali and Kanji, the tigers in the programme, were born in captivity. Trained from the beginning of their lives, they mope around all day long in their damp cells on the ground floor, bored, beneath the Treasure room. They wouldn’t hurt a fly, well aware of the price they would pay for a roar too far. Yet they perform the role of the blood thirsty tiger. Big cats don’t cope well with production sets and bright stage lighting. This is why contemporary cinema has stopped using them, as well as large primates and other animals, and has replaced their use by computer images. But French TV hasn’t stopped, or at least, not yet.

The eels, maggots, cockroaches, bats, craps, toads, grasshoppers, frogs, lizards, flies, tarantulas, rats, scorpions, snakes, mice and other little swarming creatures who participate against their will in the Fort Boyard challenges since 1998 play into the old cliché, from ancient times, defining ‘vermin’. 

Vermin, for the much older generations, was the dark mass of pests swarming under the wooden boards of the thatched cottages, and descended from the devil. According to the chemist Van Helmont, this shady fauna was born spontaneously, a generation at a time, in a dirty shirt rolled into a ball in a bottle, in a time when the noxious vapours of pests, black bile and rat invasions were chased by processions. This same evil vermin was thrown at people’s heads to treat anxiety. Just some poor rats that drown, some spiders that are crushed, some cockroaches that are trodden on, some snakes handled violently, some mice bred to feed the snakes, all conscious and sentient beings, who experience fear and are capable of suffering.

By incessantly repeating the same phobic stereotypes regarding ‘vermin’ and big cats, France 2 can maintain the public’s interest. Nothing is more fun than reaffirming old anxieties and preconceived ideas. But surely the role of public television is to move forward, to distance itself from this blind clamouring for market position and to renew TV content with modern paradigms? Jacques Chancel said: “We mustn’t give people what they like, we must give them what they could like”; a citizen-based approach, based on morals and respect for the living, for example? Surely people would like this!