Almost famous

by Olivia Foster

For the past ten years television has been taken over by reality TV. From Shipwrecked to the X Factor our screens have been overrun with people hankering after a place in the spotlight. These shows characteristic of the noughties take relative nobodies and catapult them into  sought after superstardom.  

In the ’90s if you wanted to get your face on TV you would have to apply for a gameshow, programmes like Gladiators and Blind Date would give you quite literally 15 minutes of fame. These programmes gave ordinary members of the public a chance to get on the box, but aside from the slight notoriety in their local area appearances would often go unnoticed.

Reality TV changed this, Big Brother which first hit our screens in July 2000 was a new kind of show, taking 11 unknowns of various backgrounds, placing them in a house together and monitoring their every move, on a 24/7 surveillance system.

The show was an instant success with an average of 4.5 million viewers tuning in each night. This was never ‘seen’ before on television and produced the Jade Goody phenomenon. We would follow these shows out of sheer curiosity, as watching other people made us appreciate our own sense of normality.

But was the message these programme put across a good one? Reality TV made becoming famous for being talentless a popular thought in people’s minds, and in 2007, according to the Learning and Skills Council, one in seven UK teenagers wanted to gain fame by appearing on a reality show.

Professor Ellis Cashmore told BBC News in 2009: “Celebrity is like a vampire's kiss–once bitten, the victim develops an uncontrollable desire for blood or, apparently in this case, fame”. Rejects of programmes like the X Factor clamber after fame despite being rejected time and time again to gain the success of winners like Leona Lewis (pictured bottom left).

The noughties has seen the conspicuous rise in celebrity obsession, but as 2009 draws to a close and the last series of Big Brother is set to be aired next year, have we fallen out of love with reality TV? We no longer need to watch Wife Swap to realise that we have a dysfunctional family, or How clean is your House to know we have to do a bit tidying.