Years ago, real-life, real-time video footage was called a documentary. Documentaries were literate, cutting-edge pieces that provided a welcome break from the entertainment industry. That was before television executives stripped them of all redeeming qualities and dubbed them &uot;reality programming.&uot;

This so-called reality programming is huge, and the trend unfortunately shows no signs of tapering off anytime soon. What started with &uot;COPS&uot; grew to include programs like &uot;Survivor,&uot; &uot;Boot Camp&uot; and &uot;Temptation Island,&uot; and now includes a video account of life with Anna Nicole Smith.

Something has to be done to stop this trend before the programming quality sinks even further into the mire. Unless we act now, programs like &uot;Real Prison Life,&uot; &uot;Tenant Evictions,&uot; &uot;24/7 at the 7-11&uot; and &uot;Radio Shack Employees&uot; will be on the air within one year. The Onion, a weekly newspaper parody, once printed some fictitious television listings. One of the programs listed for FOX was &uot;Real People in Real Pain.&uot; Although a parody, it hardly exaggerates their standard fare.

My suggestion is to create a new trend altogether. To do this, we’d have to replace all of the current television executives with film school students and pay them in espresso to develop surreality programming. Their research could involve watching Swedish art films, Peter Gabriel music videos and anything directed by Andy Warhol. Following are some of my suggestions for surreality programs.

&uot;Winding the Clock&uot; would be a program about the Blochmans, an underwater family who believes they live in Atlantis but actually live inside the mattress of a giant waterbed. In the pilot episode, a cigarette-smoking duck named Louie walks into Scabby Blochman’s hardware store and demands candy corns. Grombo Blochman eats a cream puff and tells Louie to know happiness he must first know sadness. Ants crawl up and down the walls as Louie smokes pensively, crying out &uot;Mimi!&uot; for 17 minutes. The program ends on a cliffhanger, with a disgruntled clown looking at the rain through the window of a prison cell.

&uot;Magenta&uot; would be a nostalgia program made from old black-and-white home movies from the 1950s and 1960s, tinted with a magenta overlay for effect. The first episode would feature a one-year-old sitting in a high chair, crying and throwing food off-camera. Another would feature footage of a Fourth of July backyard picnic in Anytown, USA. The audio track would be played in reverse, and would alternate between silent and sound at one-eighth second intervals. If &uot;Magenta&uot; was a success, a rival network would probably launch a similar program called &uot;Cyan.&uot;

Of course, there would have to be the occasional surreal movie. The film &uot;Flicker&uot; would be perfect here. This very rare movie features nothing but alternating frames of black and white, shot at 32 frames per second. Movies don’t get much more surreal than that. Until now. Accompany the movie with a telephone dial tone pulsing at the same rate as the alternating frames, or that high-pitched tone they use during the test of the Emergency Broadcast System, and you will have quite a strange movie indeed.

“Carousel&uot; would be a program shot as a negative, so all the colors would be reversed. The first episode would start with a headshot of an elderly man in a straw hat, staring at the camera, speaking in heavily accented Dutch. Slowly he would begin to turn, speaking louder the faster his body would spin. Heavy metal music from the 1980s would begin to play, and the image would fade out, fading back in to the image of a pond. Louie the smoking duck would make a cameo appearance, and then swim off camera. The camera would then zoom in on a little boy on the other side of the pond. He would be wearing a plain white T-shirt emblazoned with the word &uot;glue&uot; in black capital letters. He would then turn on the television set mounted on the tree behind him, and tune in to the start of the program, with another shot of the elderly Dutch man, this time spinning in the opposite direction.

A few programs like these would be a welcome change from the reality programming we have now.

Dustin Petersen is an Albert Lea resident. His column appears Mondays.