Reality TV is not dead. The end of Big Brother marks its coming of age

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/aug/28/big-brother-reality-simon-cowell

The genre is more dominant than ever and has made extraordinary incursions into reality, as in the place we all live.

Marina Hyde guardian.co.uk, Friday 28 August 2009 22.00 BST Article historyThe demise of Big Brother resembled the funeral of a much-loathed relative, at which no one really knows what to say. At weddings, there's always "you must be very proud", but when you simply can't trust yourself to deliver "he'll be sorely missed" convincingly, the risk of blunder looms large. And so it was with Channel 4's rich-but-racist uncle of a show, where the uncertain tribute that occurred with most embarrassing frequency in the obituaries was: "Is this the beginning of the end for reality TV?"

The most gauche of inquiries, unless it was deliberately designed to join the annals of majestic Daily Mail headlines to which the answer is always no (see "Are we being run by a lesbian mafia?", "Is this the face of Christ?", "Are giant squids invading the UK?"). Far from signalling decline, Big Brother's passing marks the coming of age of reality TV, and more specifically its audience. Not in a good way, obviously – it's all exactly as predicted in the Book of Revelation – but rest assured, the genre has much bigger brothers to fry.

For all its initial technical innovation, Big Brother had looked terminally unsophisticated for a while. If people wanted to watch adults dressing up and play silly games, there was CBeebies. Even the manner of its departing reflected the show's debilitating tameness. It wasn't axed, it was simply "not renewed", in the manner of a road tax disc or membership of Worthing library.

Yet reality TV is more dominant than ever, providing both the BBC and ITV with their season tent poles. Phone voting thrives, despite the scandals. At America's Fox network, evil genius president of alternative programming Mike Darnell continues to spew out Octomom specials and current hits like More to Love, wherein plus-sized contestants look for love, the better to reflect back to themselves the obese neophiles he believes make up his audience.

But most significantly, Reality, as in the genre, has made extraordinary incursions into reality, as in the place we all live (with a few notable exceptions like moat-encircled Douglas Hogg MP and Trudie Styler). Indeed, there has been such a weird shift in relations between these two notional spaces over the last few years that people have continually suggested that reality needs to borrow the clothes of Reality in order to exercise any kind of hold on the popular imagination.

Back in the 1890s, Oscar Wilde remarked that the increased prevalence of London fogs was entirely down to the Impressionist painters, and that sunsets were beginning to imitate Turner's paintings. Life, he opined, was a failure from the artistic point of view, and so it has often seemed in the age of real life programming. A few years ago it was vogueish to sigh that more young people voted in Big Brother than did in general elections. It wasn't true, of course, but had the much more important ring of truth, and so it was that Simon Cowell began to be touted as the man to revitalise politics. Naturally, Simon is busy – too busy to accept a recent invitation to meet with Barack Obama – but a few months ago he gave an interview in which he declared he wanted "to give politics the X Factor".

Think he couldn't do it? If only Simon shared your doubt. Consider Afghan Star, the Kabul-based imitation of American Idol. "The fact we're allowing the public to make the decisions most of the time is a really good thing," Cowell mused of the format. "The great thing is when you start seeing it in places like China and Afghanistan. It's democracy. We've kinda given democracy back to the world." Liberation via pitchy R&B vocal: a worthy successor to the shock and awe doctrine.

We might well be raising an entire generation who will not understand anything unless it is presented as a three-judge talent show, but it is an odd paradox that such stagey artifice should be the most popular way to make something feel real. Similarly, there is a reason young people are given to sexting and filming themselves having sex and all those other modern pursuits many of us are far too ancient to fathom – and it is not that they have discovered the erotic potential of crappy camera phone lighting. They don't appear to regard sex as having happened unless it has been committed to a format which makes it easily distributable to a feedback-giving audience.

Elsewhere, the blurring of the boundaries between Reality and reality feels even more sinister. In a previous column about surveillance culture, I mentioned that the Shoreditch Trust trialled a scheme in which residents of two rundown estates were given access to live CCTV footage of their communal areas, and were encouraged to watch them to assist policing. This week, the author James Harkin noted that the council's report on the trial had found that "viewing figures for the scheme were as good as that for primetime, weekday broadcast television".

So it's fair to say the Big Brother legacy lives on. Sure, we've seen the heyday of cloistering fairly attractive people in McMansions. But just as the early makeover shows eventually became surgical makeoever shows, so the format has given way to real Big Brother, while year nine are gripped by your daughter's fellatio technique, and the Idol franchise is taking credit for overthrowing the Taliban. If anything could make you nostalgic for Davina and friends, it's Reality 2.0.