TV format is beginning to look as old as The Hills

Ireland gets a new reality docu-drama with the launch tonight of ‘Fade St’ – but has this type of show got anything left to offer?

THE PIONEERS of fly-on-the-wall filmmaking were clever, academic types with elbow patches and woolly jumpers and grand ideas about documentary purity and truth. Frederick Wiseman left stationary cameras in public buildings for months at a time – however long it took for people to stop noticing – to produce intricate portraits of institutional follies. His unlikely spiritual heirs at Big Brotherleft stationary cameras in private buildings – however long it took for people to realise the cameras were rolling – in the hope that somebody might have the good grace to flash their underwear.

The story of Reality TV 2010 is the story of a strange covenant between that medium's "stars" and the audience, a tacit, unspoken agreement that the people on telly will act like people on telly and not like regular old proles. In theory, this arrangement provides prizes for all: the viewers at home get a show and the "contestants" make the cover of Chat or Starz.

This is not necessarily a new innovation; on the contrary, MTV's pioneering reality shows The Real World and Road Ruleshave been plagued by allegations of fakery and exaggeration since they first appeared in the mid-1990s.

The former music channel’s response was to blur the distinction between reality and reality TV even further with a sequence of scripted “documentary” entertainments set around such decadent locales as Jersey Shore and Laguna Beach.

Of these, The Hills, which ended earlier this year after six successful seasons, was the cubic zirconia in the MTV crown.

In a crowded satellite marketplace, The Hillscould be relied upon to produce drama because its stars could be relied on to be dramatic. A showcase for the trials and tribulations of four Hollywood wannabes – Heidi Montag, Lauren Conrad, Audrina Patridge and Whitney Port – the show has disappeared from our screens yet continues to play out across the front pages of supermarket tabloids.

Can RTÉ really hope to replicate a formula that has produced a flurry of headlines about drug busts, plastic-surgery addiction and shotgun divorces? Possibly not – it's hard to imagine that Irish youngsters, however privileged, have the cash to bankroll Heidi Montag's surgical quest to look like Barbie. But that doesn't mean that Fade Street, a new Dublin-set riposte to The Hills, is not without its ambiguous charms.

As with the MTV hit, Fade Streetoffers a parade of the kind of 20-something girls that tabloid journalists like to call "beauties". They include Louise Johnston (22), the hostess of Krystle nightclub, model and DJ, Vogue Wilson (24) model and student Cici Cavanagh (19), and body piercer Danielle "Dani" Robinson (20).

As a veteran MTV junkie might tell you, part of the fun is determining just how much they’ll come to hate one another in real life. The first episode, which airs tonight, does, at least, muddy the boundaries between documentary fact and documentary fiction to a degree that suggests we’ll be pondering onscreen-offscreen cat-fights for some time to come.

In the meantime, we can marvel at their postmodern patois. We can’t be sure if the girls are being on the level when they say things like: “It’s aimed towards 18- to 25-year-olds and that’s where I am with my life right now”, or “I’m kinda happy because you’re kinda gorgeous and I was really worried you’d be some freak”. We do know, however, that their heavy reliance on such Valley-friendly adjectives as “awesome” and “sweet” indicate that these ladies have, indeed, studied the masters. Now if the producers can arrange for a few quickie divorces, we’ll be set.

The early practitioners of cinéma véritécannot have seen that coming.