Being blindfolded in the backstreets of Salford is bad, but being blindfolded and made to wear noise cancelling headphones while walking from a car park to an unknown building is worse. This is how my experience of Channel 4 reality show The Circle began, and over the next three hours, things only got stranger.
The Circle, for the uninitiated, is a television game show which essentially operates as the ultimate popularity contest – think Big Brother meets Facebook. Contestants each live in their own flat, entirely cut off from the other players, for just over three weeks with the hope of taking home £50,000. Enter The Circle, the interface designed to allow the contestants to communicate with one another and, ultimately, rate one another (more on that later). It acts much like the social media platforms you and I use; you choose a profile picture, write a bio, send messages, play games. In The Circle, you can be whoever you want. Literally.
Last year’s winner, internet comedian Alex Hobern, won by playing as his girlfriend, Kate, whose real name is actually Millie. Confused? Try being Alex, who had to spend three weeks pretending to know what ‘eyebrows on fleek’ means and navigating the gossipy world of a girls’ group chat. Of the four finalists, Alex was the only one who didn’t play as himself, unless you count flamboyant gay 20-year-old Freddie who decided to pretend he was straight and older. The Circle, it seems, actively encourages its players to tell lies.
Back in Salford, I was led to a holding room which was essentially an empty, unused flat with a table and two chairs. A runner sat with me for the whole time, presumably in case I started wandering and accidentally bumped into any other players. We were there for what felt like an age, though in reality it was around half an hour, and for the whole time I was referred to as “Player 4A” – my name, by this point, was irrelevant. After all, I could have been pretending to be someone else.
After half an hour in the holding room, two of the happiest people I’ve ever met bounded into the room to prep me for my time in The Circle. They were producers and wanted to check how I was feeling, to buoy me up for the game ahead and generally make me feel at ease. They also asked me about my gameplan.
On reality TV, to have a gameplan is to be sneaky and conniving, and to only care about the cash prize at the end. On The Circle, it’s the name of the game. It’s a game I wasn’t willing to play, though, and for my own clarity of mind decided to play as myself – a 25-year-old single writer who likes cats and beer. What’s not to like?
A quiet voice over the producer’s mics said I was ready to go in and before I knew it, I was stood in front of a nondescript white door with “4A” written across it. I couldn’t go straight in, I had to be counted down so the cameras could capture every microscopic reaction to my home for the next few hours. I haven’t seen the footage (and I never want to) but I imagine anyone watching me for those first few minutes would have found me fascinating: “how does she not know how to use the kettle?”
After a few minutes of pottering around the flat, which was very beautiful if you like the idea of Oliver Bonas throwing up everywhere and don’t mind wall-mounted cameras following your every move, a voice came over the speakers. This is what you don’t see on the televised version of The Circle, the players aren’t technically alone all the time – each one is assigned two producers (one for the day shift, one for night) who speak to them more or less all the time through the one speaker in the corridor. Mine, Coco, was a lovely woman with a children’s presenter demeanour (in that she agreed with everything I said).
After what felt like another three hours had gone by, The Circle kicked into life and I was able to set up my profile and have a snoop around the other players’ pictures. Straight away I spotted the catfish (the catch-all term for people pretending to be someone else online), Charles, who claimed to be a widowed, 69-year-old retiree. Sympathy vote, much? Everyone else seemed pretty legitimate, though the only other male player referred to himself as a “dog dad” which put him straight into my bad books. While I was having a nosey, Coco was asking me questions, encouraging me to comment on my fellow players – this is what you see on TV.
As a group, we played a game within which we had to either agree or disagree with a series of statements, ranging from whether it was okay to look at your partner’s phone to whether hospitals should all be privatised. They were topics designed to spark discussion, and at a push, cause conflict and form alliances. It worked – everyone except Charles agreed on every topic, and it did not stand him in good stead.
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The Circle appears to celebrate the downsides of social media, but is that such a bad thing?
When it came to the ratings, my fellow players placed me sixth out of seven. I’m fine with it now, but honestly, at the time it hurt; more so because I was myself. I know it’s meaningless, but perhaps that’s because I only spent a couple of hours in The Circle. Who knows how I would feel after three weeks there, thinking I actually knew the other people playing the game.
The first series of The Circle came under a lot of scrutiny for its encouragement of deviousness and catfishing, though some – including new host Emma Willis – say it acts as an example of how scary the online world can be. You never know who you’re really speaking to, is the lesson, apparently.
I don’t buy into that: it’s a TV show, after all, and goes directly against the zeitgeisty ethos of “be yourself”. Being yourself does not win the game (that’s what I did, and look how it turned out). But after a couple of hours in the flat, I did know one thing about The Circle no matter where I ranked: just as I’m addicted to Twitter and Instagram, I wanted to keep on playing.
