Oh and, apparently, there is more to this programme than meets the eye
See: www.pucrs.br/famecos/iamcr/textos/a_popcult.pdf

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Note added at 23 mins (2005-12-11 02:50:42 GMT)
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Here goes:
The meaning of the meaninglessness. On the cultural signification of popular television
entertainment in the Netherlands”
Stijn Reijnders
University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Due to liberalization policies in the nineties, the entertainment genre has marched to the
center of European television. Other genres, such as information or drama, are either shut
out from prime time, or transformed into entertainment clones such as infotainment,
reality TV or docudrama. This development makes research into the cultural signification
of television entertainment more and more important. Traditionally, television
entertainment is seen as meaningless: it is there ‘just to entertain’. Viewers are thought to
waste their precious time by watching television entertainment, getting dumber with each
game show while running the risk of getting brainwashed by the ‘capitalist’, ‘patriarchal’
ideologies of the broadcasting corporations. Since the seventies, research under the
umbrella of cultural studies has shown the shortcomings of this pessimistic view.
Researchers discovered the ‘producing consumer’, who ‘poached’ and ‘stripped’
eclectically from consumer society to construct his own ‘bricolage’. As an unintended
result the role of production in the construction of meaning disappeared into the
background.
In this article I attempt to include production and consumption in the analysis of
the cultural signification of television entertainment, by looking at the interaction
between the different actors – producers, consumers, participants and public – in the case
of Te Land ter Zee, the longest running entertainment show on Dutch television. In Te
Land ter Zee, groups of participants compete with each other in building decorative,
carnivalistic vehicles, before leaving them at the tender mercies of an obstacle course. Te
Land ter Zee is analyzed from an ethnological perspective: it is seen as a collective,
secular ritual, dealing with feelings of communitas and solidarity. What does Te Land ter
Zee signify for the concerned actors, and how do these processes of appropriating relate
to each other? What does this say about television entertainment in general?
For this purpose, thirty interviews were conducted with participants of Te Land
ter Zee in the 2003 season. Additionally, the developer and producer were interviewed, as
well as numerous spectators during the shootings. Furthermore, six seasons of Te Land
ter Zee - a selection of approximately fifty hours of television - were analyzed. Finally,
forty self-proclaimed viewers of Te Land ter Zee were asked to write down their opinions
on the program. These diverse research tactics created a polyphonic analysis, with
interesting outcomes. As it turned out, the meaninglessness is not so meaningless after
all, in functioning as a platform for the performance of group identities.