Wednesday, November 16, 2005

UnReality TV

[Via The Guardian] Channel 4 has yet another "reality" TV show in the pipeline. This time they have obviously decided that reality is no longer good enough so they have created a show where the contestants are fooled into thinking they are competing to win a trip into space.

Channel 4 is pulling an elaborate hoax with a new reality TV show in which a group of people believe they are in Russia training for a space mission - but are in fact having their every move filmed at a disused airbase in Britain.


It will be on Channel 4 every day at 9pm for 10 days, there will be round the clock coverage ala Big Brother on E4, and on the Channel 4 website.

I'm all for the public humiliation of Reality "I wanna be famous" TV contestants, and in fact find the idea of filling a real rocket with a group of them and firing it into outer space quite appealing. However I think that this show is just another in a long line of shows created by lazy TV executives throwing out variations on the reality TV theme and passing it off as new entertainment. Reality TV has gotten so bad that the contestants now exist in a reality different from the one they think they are in, if you get my drift. Perhaps the next evolution of reality TV will be a camera crew filming another camera crew that thinks they are filming a reality TV show made up of people who think they are famous celebrities on a reality TV show but who never actually appear on TV. At which stage I presume all our TVs will fold in on themselves in some quantum physics nightmare and blink out of existence.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You're just scared in case this kind of opportunity ever arose for you and then you found out you were duped!

Declan said...

Yeah you caught me :-).
I'm off down to the RDS to audition for X-Factor or what ever is there this week ;-)