Gareth Edwards: Viewers losing touch with reality

'REALITY," said Albert Einstein, "is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one." The same could easily be said of reality TV, that peculiar genre of 'entertainment' which claims to lay bare the true nature of society by poking cameras into people's everyday lives.

In actual fact, reality has little to do with the format now, which instead involves taking a group of people, sticking them all in an enclosed space and poking them with a stick before editing the results together to form a fast-paced montage.

The idea of reality TV goes back decades, although the worthy social documentaries which made up early examples would not be classed in the same category as the modern shows today.

Contestants now take part in such shows as a fast-track to fame and fortune, and act in appropriately outlandish ways while faced with increasingly unreal situations.

It's hardly surprising, since reality is not the sort of thing that can easily be squeezed into an entertaining 60-minute highlights show every night.

Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the genre is incredibly persistent, with dozens of examples set to fill our screens over the next 12 months.

But ten years on from the first Big Brother – and as the show prepares for its last hurrah on Channel 4 later this year – is there a future for reality TV? Or is its popularity little more than an illusion?

Former Lothian and Borders policeman Jonny Gibb, 38, won the reality TV show Survivor in 2002, and believes that as long as people are nosey, such shows will continue to be popular.

"It is all to do with people's voyeuristic tendencies, so as long as folk still enjoy spying on other people's lives, these show will continue to be successful," he said. "With things like Big Brother, there's the added attraction of watching them perform stupid tasks, although the further they get from reality, the less popular they will be.

"The situations people are being put in are getting more and more extreme, and nowadays people just go on these shows to become famous, while a lot of people probably just watch to have a laugh at them.

"I left the country for a year after Survivor because I didn't want any of the celebrity side of it, although I still get recognised occasionally. I think that is maybe put-ting a lot of people off, as it is not so much about how people interact as who can be the most outrageous."

There is little denying that the formats have fast gone from novel social experiment to pure voyeuristic entertainment.

Despite scandals over phone votes and rigged contests, complaints about abusive and unacceptable behaviour and a general mumbling from certain sectors of society that reality TV is both stupid and, more often than not, boring, the ratings have continued to soar.

The last series of The X-Factor had a staggering 19 million viewers for its final, the most in the show's history.

I'm A Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here! was given a massive boost by the viewers' hatred towards Katie Price, with millions paying premium rate phone charges to ensure she suffered the gruesome bush tucker trials night after night.

When she finally walked, more than 10 million people tuned-in to see it, and her own ITV2 reality show regularly pulls in up to 4 million viewers.

The BBC reality show The Apprentice pulls in audiences of more than 10 million, despite the fact a large number of them could probably witness the same level of staggering business incompetence in their own workplace.

Even this year's Celebrity Big Brother, which like the original show is being axed due to a decline in popularity, attracted more than 6 million viewers on its launch night – quite an achievement given that 48 hours before the show started, there were concerns about whether or not producers would even be able to get any celebrities to take part.

Producers of a slew of forthcoming reality shows, such as Dancing on Ice, Pop Star to Opera Star and The Apprentice, will be hoping for similar viewing figures, not to mention the all-important audience participation of phone-line voting. For every success however, there have been the inevitable failures, shows which for one reason or another did not catch the public imagination.

John Naples-Campbell, 28, a drama teacher and theatre director from Grassmarket, signed up for the reality dating show Chained in 2000, in the wake of the Big Brother phenomenon.

The experience of being chained to seven men for seven days still gives him panic attacks, and he believes that the dramatic changes to reality TV mean the format is on the way out.

"Back in 2000, everyone was talking about it," he said. "People wanted to get involved, but my experience was really just a nightmare, and I think that now there is so little actual reality involved that people just don't care.

"I think reality TV has had its day."

Away from the big shows, the format of reality TV has seeped further down the schedules, from worthy-but-dull fare such as Channel 4's The Family, to borderline exploitation efforts such as the BBC's extraordinary Can Fat Teens Hunt?.

Driving this has been the unavoidable fact that such shows are cheap to produce, take up a lot of time in the schedules and bring in both big ratings and big bucks.

Colin Perry, who works with Edinburgh-based production company Those Media Guys, believes that while reality TV will inevitably become less popular, these basic facts mean it is a format that is likely to continue dominating the TV schedules.

"It is such a massive part of almost every TV channel now, and that is because it is a very bankable format – compared to drama it is very cheap to produce, and has the potential to bring in huge viewing figures and revenue, so it is very attractive for TV companies," he said.

Of course, whether it's real or an illusion, the only certainty about reality TV, as with all TV, is that until people start switching off it is here to stay.