By DAVID LAWRENCE
The Human Zoo began last week with a question: "Would you," viewers were asked, "electrocute a complete stranger?"
After considering for a moment we put it on the backburner.
A few minutes later we were introduced to a witness at a wedding who had found herself marrying the groom. "I thought something was wrong when I was asked to put the ring on his finger," she said, straight-faced.
The electrocution question clicked. The makers of this documentary series were not looking for answers like, "Depends on the stranger." What they wanted was, "I'd never do a terrible thing like that."
They would then demonstrate how, under certain circumstances, we would indeed electrocute strangers. There was even footage of someone electrocuting a stranger. So we settled in for a show about the extraordinary things conditioning can make us do. Then the voiceover said, "Tonight's programme is about the importance of first impressions." Fine. Whatever.
To see the importance of first impressions in detail required laboratory conditions, continued the scholarly voiceover, "so we had to build - a human zoo!"
Despite the ghost-story soundtrack it turned out to be an innocuous-looking house in England's Lake District. Inside, however, it was "bristling with hidden cameras." A dozen people were to be brought here and their behaviour scrutinised by two intense, bearded psychologists in a "secret control room."
Just as the first person was about to arrive the show cut away to another behavioural experiment, with yet more concealed cameras and secret psychologists. Three women were being interviewed for a job. The interviewer turned a dial up or down to indicate her approval or disapproval, while the psychologists said things like, "Caroline has obviously damaged her chances by picking her nose."
Back at the human zoo, the 12 had been ushered into a room with 11 chairs and someone (his name was Richard) was feeling awkward because he was the only one standing.
The watching psychologists were having a field day. "He's standing behind someone else's chair so the physical structure can come to shape the social behaviour ... he's still on the periphery ... this already sets him up as an outsider ... will he now do things to propel himself into the centre of the group?"
Then we were off to a railway station where two women - one attractive, one less so - were going to struggle up different sets of stairs with heavy suitcases ...
By now there was a growing feeling that this series - which promises to "push the boundaries of psychological research" and "explain the mysteries of human behaviour" - was not going to tell us anything we didn't already know. And so it proved.
We sat through the rest. Richard stole some beer and shared it around to ingratiate himself with the group. A couple of students accused of theft gave themselves away by showing signs of anxiety under interrogation. And the psychologists banged on and on, although no one mentioned electrocuting strangers again.
What happened at the railway station, as everyone knew it would, was that a lot of blokes offered to help the pretty woman and not many came to the aid of the plain one.
"The impression you make is affected by the way you look," said the voiceover, as if imparting something of great significance. What that boils down to is, "People are attracted to attractive people," which doesn't mean much at all.
But we can hardly expect programmes like this to boil things down. If they did, all that would be left would be truisms, hidden cameras and melodramatic music, and viewers might think they were wasting their time.
* The Human Zoo, TV One, 8.30 pm
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