Despite its ubiquity, reality television is showing no sign of losing momentum, indeed it's more than likely that there will be much more of it coming your way, writes Shane Hegarty.
On Tuesday night you may have stumbled across Wife Swap on Channel 4. It's the latest reality television show, one in which husbands do just as it says on the title. Two families put their dysfunction on show for our entertainment. Cue screaming matches, abuse, tears. It is exploitative, morally dubious and, of course, horribly watchable.
For some it is a programme too far, but then we've already heard that complaint. We heard it about Temptation Island (attractive singles attempt to split up happy couples), The Trench (volunteers recreate the conditions of the first World War) and The Fight (celebrity boxing bouts). Still the programmes come.
Tonight, Channel 4 begins The Salon, a fully functioning south London hairdressers and beauty salon rigged with cameras for which ordinary members of the public can make an appointment. They will become stars during a blow dry. For eight weeks, you will be able to watch the plucking, trims and highlights of the highlights live on E4 for seven hours a day. The floodwaters of reality television, it seems, show no signs of receding.
Yet, in recent months there has been a growing murmur that it is on its last legs. The November final of ITV's Popstars: The Rivals attracted eight million viewers, half the figure that tuned in to the final of Pop Idol. The BBC's Fame Academy limped along, with only four of its 31 episodes attracting more than six million viewers. ITV's reality-dating show Mr Right, meanwhile, was watched by only two million at its peak, and was eventually shunted into a graveyard slot.
For RTÉ too, there has been a blip on the upward graph as You're A Star proves an inconsistent performer.
"Popstar did have consistently higher ratings," admits Claire Duignan, RTÉ Head of Independent Productions. "You're A Star is more intermittent. Recently, it's been up one week, down the next and then up again. I don't quite understand it. It's definitely not 'appointment to view' programming, to use that cliché, although even Popstars took a few weeks to build up ratings. I do think that it will settle into a new rhythm now that it's in a new slot and with a new format as it leads to the finals." Last Sunday, she points out, attracted the largest public vote of the series so far.
By the time it winds its way to the Eurovision Song Contest in March, You're A Star will have been on air for a mammoth six months. "Of course there's a real danger of overkill, of running on too long. Popstars ran a long period too, and in fact its largest audience didn't come with the final but on the night the Nadine story broke. That had a 61 per cent share of the audience, which is massive. But it can go on too long; the drama's highs and lows can't last forever."
Given that You're A Star has the Eurovision Song Contest as a natural finishing line, RTÉ doesn't believe that it will outlive its shelf life. It's too early to say if it will be re-commissioned, however. "As with any programme, we'll re-assess it after its run." For a station originally nervous about adopting foreign formats - especially ones familiar to Irish viewers of British channels - RTÉ has found a friend in reality television.
"People engage so much more when the characters are Irish. I'm not sure that we've fully explored the potential for these shows in an Irish context. There are, I would imagine, a few more formats yet." RTÉ has yet to decide if - and with what changes - Treasure Island will return but either way, says Duignan, there will be another "big event series" over the summer.
In the UK, meanwhile, ITV has denied rumours that low ratings for Popstars: The Rivals mean it has developed cold feet over a new series. The BBC seemed to spend as much time defending Fame Academy against its critics as working on the show.
However, Boyd Hilton, TV editor of Heat Magazine, feels that rumours of the genre's demise have been greatly exaggerated. Comparing the ratings for The Rivals versus that of "a phenomenon" like Pop Idol, he says, is like comparing "an ordinary cup match with the England versus Argentina match". The third series of Big Brother, he points out, proved as big a success as the first. I'm A Celebrity: Get Me Out of Here! proved a surprise hit. Simple formats and good characters, he says, guarantee longevity.
"The purer the better," he says. "They may have tweaked Big Brother but it can still be summed up in a sentence. It's also all about casting. I'm A Celebrity had conflict and madness from day one. Celebrity Big Brother had none of that and that's why it didn't work. There will be flops, but to say that the whole reality genre is on the way out is ludicrous."
Of course, he works for a magazine that has gained more than any other from the success of these shows. Four years ago, Heat was said to be on the brink of closure, today it is the bible of trash television; reflecting the mixture of low irony and serious ambition like nothing else. The end of the third series of Big Brother gave Heat its biggest selling issue yet.
One contestant, Jade Goody, has been given three covers since June despite coming third in the show. "Never underestimate the interest the public has in these people, even six months down the road." As ordinary people became the new celebrities, celebrities realised that they needed to pretend they were ordinary people. Celebrity versions of reality television shows continue to proliferate, although this has now become a format in its own right, rather than one that supplanted the original.
The next big thing is Celebrity Boxing. With two successful programmes already under its championship belt, the BBC plans a lot more of it in 2003, despite it being a flash-in-the-pan in the US.
"The problem with Celebrity Boxing," says Hilton, "is that while the last one did well for BBC2, five million is not massive ratings. Neither is it likely to attract the mainstream stars it needs to become a hit." The big shows of 2003, he says, will be the return of last year's big shows: Big Brother 4, Pop Idol 2 and I'm A Celebrity 2.
However, Richard Hopkins, executive producer of Fame Academy and Sky One's Fear Factor, thinks that the boxing could yet prove a winner. "If you could do something along the lines of a Celebrity Fight School, if you could find enough of them willing to live together and also punch each other's lights out, that would make a great series."
If the term "reality television" has always been a disingenuous one anyway, the proliferation of programmes is making it redundant. There is the "Lab Rat" stream of Big Brother and Survivor; the "Way-They-Lived-Then" stream of Edwardian Country House, The Ship and The Trench; the "Reality Talent" format of Popstars and Pop Idol; and, the "Celebs-As-Real-People" stream of I'm A Celebrity and Celebrity Big Brother.
More programmes mean more failures that put the whole future of reality television under the spotlight. That there is so much, however, and in such variety, means it's also less likely to stand out. Instead, it is becoming the fabric of the schedules. It is the new light entertainment, factual programme or even documentary.
"I think that the term 'reality television' is becoming hackneyed and over-used and increasingly meaningless," says Hopkins.
"The idea of filming people's lives will go on, but they won't all be reality shows. The likes of Fame Academy are talent shows, and Fame Academy was simply a new way of doing a talent show with the added element of reality television.
"At the very least, what we call reality television is factual entertainment, documentary pushed to its extremes."
Even the veteran programmesare finding that they haven't reached the boundaries yet. When Nasty Nick was kicked out of Big Brother in the summer of 2000, the event was watched live on the Internet by millions, a landmark moment when it stole television from the television set. It was, though, a brief swing in the balance of power. In 2001, Big Brother became the first hit of the digital era. Viewers could tune in to E4 for 16 hours a day, and they did; often using it simply as background ambience, leaving it flickering away in the corner during the endless hours in which housemates slept.
"In setting up a reality show," says Hopkins, "you have to have every angle covered by a range of cameras. There were 35 in the Fame Academy house. It's a very expensive proposition, and that means that it must attract a big commission, with scheduling across the week and increasingly across channels. You must be able to take advantage of being able to broadcast live all the time." The future will mean more, not less. There will be a channel for every camera in the house - 57 channels - and the same thing on.
