By David Free
I’m not old enough to have watched Candid Camera when it was being made in black and white. But I remember watching it in colour in the 1980s. By then into its fourth decade, the show was still hosted by the tireless prankster Allen Funt, who would eke out the new content by rebroadcasting grainy black-and-white clips from the show’s classic era.
One of these vintage clips came on frequently, and I always dreaded its reappearance. It showed a guy in advanced middle age working on a cake assembly line. He wore a short-sleeved shirt and tie. His trousers were protected by a poignant-looking apron. As the conveyor belt gradually sped up, cakes began slipping past him and tumbling to the floor. With dignity but mounting panic, the frazzled senior scrambled to deal with the unfolding disaster.
As old as TV itself: Allen Funt (with guest Laraine Day), who brought Candid Camera to air in 1949.
As a youngster, I wasn’t generally troubled by the ethics of Candid Camera. But there was something about this particular stunt that didn’t feel right. For a start, the guy looked way too old, and way too overdressed, to be taking work in a cake factory. He looked like Spencer Tracy, or possibly Spiro Agnew.
Had he recently been retrenched? Was he working a second job to feed his family? Was he gutted when Funt informed him that he had not, after all, secured employment in the pastry field? To subtract from the fun even further, it was hard to avoid the suspicion that a guy who had been that old that long ago was now almost certainly dead.
If the cake man were pranked on TV today, there would be no need to worry about his welfare. He could spend the rest of his life riding a geyser of monetisation opportunities. He could become an influencer with his own line of oldster energy drinks. But when he was punked by Funt in the 1950s, the original cake man vanished back into obscurity, having presumably signed a release form and received a modest cheque.
Candid Camera began its long TV run in 1948. The show made such a splash that its title entered the vernacular. People still say “Am I on Candid Camera?” when they feel as if they’ve fallen victim to a vast, Kafkaesque stitch-up. If we ever catch ourselves thinking that reality TV is a recent invention, it’s worth recalling that the genre is as old as Candid Camera, which means it’s almost as old as TV itself.
Jury Duty: the most elaborate candid camera prank ever pulled?
The wickedly clever Jury Duty, currently showing on Prime Video, is at one level the most fantastically elaborate candid camera prank ever pulled. But there are elements of Big Brother and The Truman Show in the mix too, and dashes of improvised comedy reminiscent of Curb Your Enthusiasm and This Is Spinal Tap.
None of the show’s basic ingredients is original in itself. But there is alchemy in the way they’ve been combined. A lot of clever TV is being made these days, but you rarely feel that you’re watching something entirely new. I had that feeling watching Jury Duty.
Except for one cast member, everybody involved in making Jury Duty knew they were participating in a colossal hoax. The exception was Ronald Gladden, the show’s unwitting star. In 2021, Ronald was 29 years old, and between jobs, when he responded to an ad on Craigslist, purportedly placed by the producers of a forthcoming TV documentary. Claiming to have obtained permission to make a behind-the-scenes doco about a real-life LA court case, the producers were seeking applicants to fill the jury pool.
So Ronald applied to sit as a juror on what he believed to be a real trial. He knew he would be on camera; he just didn’t know he would be on candid camera. He thought the other jurors were in the same boat as himself. In reality, they were all actors.
So was everybody else involved in the case: the plaintiff and the defendant, their lawyers, the judge. Using their improv skills, the actors steered Ronald into a succession of bizarre situations dreamed up by the show’s creators, Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky, who previously worked as writer-producers on the US version of The Office.
Over 2,500 people responded to the ad that launched the Jury Duty hoax. When the producers found Ronald Gladden among the applicants, they must have known they’d hit the jackpot. Ronald is the show’s tentpole. If he’d been a flake or a quitter, he could have brought the whole production crashing down at any time. If he’d been less nice – if the show’s contrived situations had revealed him to be a hypocrite or sleazeball – the project would have become an ethical nightmare for the producers, and a sour experience for the viewer.
But Ronald is a freakishly decent person. He’s a type familiar from literature. He’s like Candide, or Hans Castorp, or the naïve heroes of Evelyn Waugh. He’s the wide-eyed straightperson at the centre of the comic storm.
The comedy is generated by the troupe of weirdos he’s forced to rub shoulders with. It can’t have been easy for the show’s producers to fill these weirdo parts. For one thing, they had to be careful not to cast any actor whose face Ronald would recognise from TV or the movies.
As well as being obscure, the actors surrounding Ronald had to be unusually good at thinking on their feet. They had to stay in character around him all the time, even when the cameras weren’t rolling. A single dodgy performance might have made him smell a rat.
The patsy and the prince: Ronald Gladden, with James Marsden, on Jury Duty.
But how do you sell a show with no recognisable actors in it? This is where the creators of Jury Duty had their canniest flash of inspiration. They hired the movie star James Marsden to enter the jury pool as himself, or a distorted version of himself. After all, the fake trial was happening in LA, so it wasn’t implausible that a real-life celebrity would have been called up for jury duty too.
Marsden is exactly the right size of star to make this gag work. He’s not quite a household name, but he’s a household face. When Ronald meets him for the first time, he knows he’s seen him in something, but can’t remember what. Only after Googling him does he realise he’s the guy from The Notebook – not Ryan Gosling, but the other guy.
Marsden has told interviewers that he did, at one point, have ethical qualms about what he and the rest of the cast were doing to Ronald. “We’re fooling this guy for three weeks of his life?” he remembered thinking. “I started questioning the morality of this.”
You can see why Marsden was reassured once he got to know Ronald. The man is surreally unflappable. This is good news for the viewer too, since we’re as complicit in Ronald’s duping as Marsden was. Long before the final episode, we know Ronald well enough to know that he won’t spit the dummy or fall apart when he’s told the whole thing has been one giant scam. He’s just not that kind of guy.
Jury Duty works as a broad comedy. But it’s also psychologically revealing, as good reality TV always is. It shows us how much a human being can be made to swallow, especially when there are TV cameras around. “I’d like to think I pick up on things and I’m pretty intuitive but they all fooled me,” Ronald reflects in the last episode.
But Ronald has no call to think himself unusually gullible. Human beings are naturally trusting animals. If we didn’t have a hardwired tendency to believe others, and to obey authority figures, human societies would never have got off the ground.
Part of the fun of watching Ronald swallow the bait lies in wondering if we’d have swallowed it ourselves. It’s hard to be sure we wouldn’t have. These days the world is so full of shakedown artists that most of us have been conned, or half-conned, at least once. Even if we’ve never been persuaded to part with any cash, we know how easily a talented grifter can slip under our guard.
But the field is getting crowded, and our guards are more fully engaged than they’ve ever been before. These days a scam has to be very creative, and very new, to catch us out.
This goes for TV pranks too. For a long time, Sacha Baron Cohen mined rich seams of material by tricking interviewees into believing he was Ali G, or Borat, or Bruno. But finally these characters became too well-known to keep fooling people, and Baron Cohen had to retire them one by one. Nowadays, he’s so famous that his ability to work undercover has surely been blown for good.
Similarly, the high-profile punking of Ronald Gladden means that nobody is likely to fall for any fake documentary scam on such a scale again, at least in a courtroom setting. The makers of Jury Duty must have known, as they lured Ronald into their trap, that their glorious idea was only ever going to work once, if at all. It’s hard to see how they could have made it work any better.
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