The world is not as seen on TV

Editor’s note: This is the fourth of a four-part series about Married at First Sight, the international reality television show. The show originated in Denmark in 2013 and now has franchises in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. The first part was My VPN took me to Australia and dropped me into ‘Married at First Sight’. The second part was Heritage kids and the Great Australian Wedding confusion. The third part is The blokey blokes and their very narrow tastes

When I first started watching Married at First Sight (Australia), I expected to see lonely sheep farmers wearing wide-brimmed hats with corks on strings stumbling down dusty roads, brushing flies from their faces, and saying “g’day” to passing kangaroos, but what I got was candlelit dinners in waterfront apartments and perfectly folded napkins in dockside restaurants where not even one person wore an Akubra hat.

It reminded me of something I should have known all along. Most of us build our picture of foreign countries from movies and television. Which is a bit like learning about marriage from MAFS. It can be entertaining, emotional, and educational in a sideways sort of way, but it hardly ever gives you real geography.

When I finally went to the United States in the early 90s, I expected New York skylines, Los Angeles palm trees, Miami vice, pediatricians like Bill Cosby, and perhaps a helpful cowboy or ranch hand, possibly wearing clean Stetson hats. What I actually found were parking lots the size of Wales, air conditioning set to mimic Arctic conditions, and supermarkets that stocked several brands of Greek yogurt and feta cheese, none of which resembled any dairy product ever found in Greece.

Hollywood had not prepared me for the sweeping majesty of suburbia or the glory of trailer parks that stretched from the shining sea to the nearby swamps or a landscape tied together with ribbons made of freeways and flyovers.

Australia does the same magic trick. The global imagination is full of deserts, crocodiles, men called Dean, dingoes, koalas, boomerangs, didgeridoos, billabongs, and Ayers Rock at sunset. Then you switch on Married at First Sight (Australia) and there are rolling green hills, vineyards, and tidy waterfronts where the only flies are the ones in the soup at the group dinner.

You start to realise that most Australians live nowhere near the Outback. They live in apartments with floor-to-ceiling windows and cream sofas that are obviously impervious to red wine stains.

Which brings me to Ecuador.

When I first arrived in Guayaquil, the very first thing I noticed was not the heat or the humidity or even the traffic. It was the gutters. They were immaculate, almost suspiciously immaculate, like a South American sound stage at Universal Studios.

The streets looked as if an army of invisible municipal elves had swept them only minutes before I arrived. I come from countries where “street sweeping” means a truck at 5:00 am blowing trash from one side of the street to the other, but in Guayaquil, it looked like an Olympic sport. I remember thinking: if the television cameras ever showed this, it would utterly ruin the reputation of Latin America as the home of cheerful chaos where recycling is mostly the province of itinerant goats and feral pigs.

But movies and television like their clichés. Latin America gets car chases, sombreros, and a bit of improvised dancing in the plaza. What you rarely see is a Guayaquil city street at seven in the morning with a small army of cleaners in green uniforms performing a perfectly choreographed folk dance involving escobas while the buses thunder past. You also do not see how tidy Cuenca is on a normal weekday morning, or how often street are swept and cobbles polished before most people have even had their instant coffee.

Yet here we are, living in the real version, not the TV one.

And that is the trouble with screen geography. Paris is always a café beside the Seine and an accordian is always playing La Vie en Rose. We never see the suburbs where actual Parisians live in brutalist concrete towers.

Japan is all neon pedestrian precincts and cherry blossoms with Mount Fuji in the background, not the concrete apartment blocks that look oddly similar to the ones in Quito.

England is all rolling countryside dotted with National Trust properties, archeologists, and ruined castles, not the long grey stretches lined with slag heaps, electricity pylons, abandoned brickyards, scrap yards where cars with no wheels sit in muddy puddles, and public housing ‘estates’ between Birmingham and anywhere else.

Ecuador is no different. There are websites that show llamas, alpacas, misty mountains, and women in brightly coloured shawls wearing hats and stockings and sensible shoes. All true as far as it goes, but do they show the crowded aisles of Supermaxi on Sunday afternoons. the liquor stores shut down before elections, or $1 hamburgers near the departure gates at the Terminal Terrestre? No, they do not. All that is left for the intrepid tourist with sturdy boots planted firmly on the ground to find out for him or herself.

What surprises me is how reliable our first impressions can be once we escape what we have seen on television. In Guayaquil, my first impression was cleanliness and a lack of fast food detritus. In Cuenca, it was the cheapness of the taxis, in the United States, it was the sheer distance between one thing and the next. In Australia, it was the unexpected greenness and grazing cows instead of kangaroos.

Which makes me wonder if the next global TV hit is Married at First Sight (Ecuador) what clichés will it crush?

The producers would probably shoot the weddings in the Cajas, the honeymoons in Salinas and Montanita, and the commitment ceremonies in a rented Cuenca villa overlooking the Tomebamba. People abroad would watch it and say: “I had no idea Ecuador was so beautiful and so tidy.”

Which would make old Charlie smile, because for once they might be right.