introduction
chapter 1
1 When citing programmes, the channel on which they first appeared will follow in brackets. Where a series or single programme is discussed at length the year of first broadcast will also be cited.
2 For a succinct account of the commercial development of reality formats and the formation of Endemol see the chapter ‘Format Wars’, in Brenton and Cohen (2003: 44–80).
3 On the format, critical reception and audience responses to
Big Brother specifically see Mathijs and Jones (2004), the special edition of
Television and New Media, 3, 3 (August 2002); Liesbet van Zoonen (2001); Douglas Allen (2003) and Janet Jones (2002). For a broad range of articles on reality TV, including those on
Big Brother, also see the collection edited by Su Holmes and Deborah Jermyn (2003).
4 Paddy Scannell’s (2002) definition of
Big Brother as television event is congruent with Nick Couldry’s in as much as he emphasises the non-contingent nature of the event (as opposed, for example, to the ‘happening’) but he also suggests the temporality of television events, arguing that they have the same structure as stories (beginning, middle, end) and correspond to the structure of the human life-span. The suggestion of an ending or closure here is problematic as the life of talk and the celebrity life-span of the characters can be unpredictable, uneven and fairly open-ended. Scannell rightly observes that shows such as these, running over nine weeks, have a real challenge to sustain themselves as events.
5 Pop Idol won the prestigious Golden Rose of Montreux in 2002 and was described by the grand jury as ‘perfect television’.
6 Peter Bazalgette, the Chairman of Endemol UK, in ‘
Big Brother and beyond’, Huw Weldon Memorial Lecture 2001.
7 There is a very good example, from the US, of a successful marketing strategy that really did turn a television series into event TV and whose finesse ensured that fans felt they had played a part in its formation. SONY courted fans of the teen-drama series
Dawson’s Creek and encouraged their involvement in the development of a media convergence project that interleaved the show with
Dawson’s Desktop in order to introduce transmedia storytelling. This convergence successfully combined marketing and entertainment. The
Deskstop sustained fans’ interest by filling in between episodes, providing email, chat, bookmarks and a backstory that provided in-depth character – knowledge that fostered a ‘cult’ engagement with the series. SONY worked so closely with the web scriptwriters that they could anticipate events, introducing tangential characters and events that would influence the show’s television content. The co-option of the programme’s pre-existing fans’ groups into the promotion of the new online show was highly instructive and raised serious questions about the future autonomy of fan cultures (see
Media in Transition 2: Globalization and Convergence, May 10-12, 2002 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA).
8 Castaway 2000 relocated a carefully selected group of 28 men, women and children onto a storm-blasted island in the Outer Hebrides for 12 months. The series was to be a social and psychological experiment. A group representative of British society would have their physical and psychological stamina tested to the limit (Stuart 2000).
9 There is a small but growing body of research underway addressing the relationship between programmes such as
Survivor and global imperialism. See, for example, Julia Lesage (2002) and Mike Hajimichael (2002).
10 Fear was filmed in a style resembling the ‘reality’ fiction horror-film shocker
The Blair Witch Project (1998) and
Fear Factor is a game show where contestants compete for $50,000 by eating fly-infested fruit and undertaking stunt-style acts of daring. These shows are somewhat reminiscent of the Japanese endurance shows that were broadcast in the UK in youth programming slots late night on Channel 4.
11 The logical extension of reality TV’s fascination with people under stress has been brilliantly satirised in Daniel Minahan’s feature film
Series 7: The Contenders (2000) in which six contestants, selected by programme makers without their consent, have to kill all their opponents in order to survive.
12 The material generated by the CPU has appeared in various formats; some of which aim to connect individual experience and national issues such as
Nation Goes to the Polls and
One Day in Scotland, and others which are themed such as
Life, Death, God and Everything.
13 For a detailed discussion of the possibility of access as exposition see Myra MacDonald (1998).
14 Stated on
Big Brother, Small World (C4, 2001).
15 ‘Nasty Nick’ Bateman became notorious for ‘breaking the rules’ by attempting to influence housemates’ nominations in
Big Brother 1. The rest of his housemates confronted him with the accusation ‘you’re so sick’ and he was roundly humiliated and driven from the set. Bateman’s defence that he was playing in a ‘game show’ seems reasonable enough but in the context of British culture, at least, he committed the crime of overtly trying to win. On the other hand, viewers seemed to take the eventual winner Craig Phillips to their hearts. The Liverpudlian builder reciprocated by donating all of his winnings to charity and thus demonstrating that he could really ‘play the game’.
16 The fact that Channel 4 was happy to promote programmes using their ‘working titles’ is designed to appeal to and perhaps flatter a youth audience who appreciate the rough-cut quality of reality programming and the idea of factual television as off-the-cuff work-in-progress.
17 Quoted in ‘Tv Insider’ column in the
Radio Times, 19–25 July 2003, 100.
18 Stated in
Big Brother, Small World (C4 2001).
19 In fact one of the earliest invitations for audiences to survey the subject’s personal space was afforded through web-based sites such as ‘Jennicam’ which surveyed the bedroom activities of Jennifer Ringley via a video camera attached to the computer in her college dormitory. The site was launched in 1996 and became a pay site from June 1997. Here spectators could view not only Ringley’s more intimate moments but also the banal everyday activities of her everyday life. As such it would be inaccurate to designate this as pornography since the sexual activity was simply part and parcel of her everyday activities (see Burgin 2002).
20 As Dan Waddell has noted, group-challenge reality programmes are essentially popularity contests and as such, in the British context at least, class continues to be a divisive issue. In
Survivor Panama teacher Susannah Mofat was continually quizzed about her ‘posh’ upbringing and it was suggested that she, least of all, needed the money. She never successfully combated their criticisms as her accent and vocabulary established an ‘almost insurmountable barrier’ (2002: 233). These scenes of conflict based on social difference are roundly de-politicised since they are articulated in a highly individualised context. As Mike Wain notes, ‘the trick of popular culture is to draw on and allude to the social dimension of signs and meanings and then, in a sleight of hand, fill up those meanings with notions of individual agency and responsibility’ (1994:55).
21 It is certainly the case that no matter how well film subjects are prepared they may well not fully understand the extent of their responsibilities to the reality project. Dan Waddell notes that in the second series of
Survivor set in Panama survivors were dismayed to discover they were going to be filmed 24/7, ‘something that came as a shock to some members of the group … [who] were of the bizarre opinion that they would only be filmed for an hour or two a day … the constant filming was not welcomed by a number of the survivors – some of whom seemed to think that it would be a free holiday in paradise, a view that did not last long’ (2002: 28).
22 The term ‘photographic image’ here denotes a whole range of images which, ‘originating in the camera’, also includes ‘images which share some of the mechanical, lens-based and analogue features of the chemical photographic process but which are registered by electromagnetic means: broadcast television and video’ (Lister 1995: 3–4).
23 Kevin Robins’ (1996) discussion of image technologies and visual culture was a valuable source for this opening commentary.
chapter 2
1 A number of critics trace the lineage of reality TV back to these movements. See, for example, Brenton & Cohen 2003:21–5; Barnfield 2002. See also John Dovey’s discussion of the relationship between these movements and factual television in
Freakshow pp. 29–30 and pp. 51–2.
2 For an extended discussion of the theoretical approaches to film realism see Lapsley & Westlake 1988:156–80.
3 Jon Dovey (2000: 29) provides an example of the long-term influence of Direct Cinema’s belief in the minimum impact of film crew on more recent observational documentaries. Apparently Roger Graef, whose series such as
Police (1982) employ the Direct Cinema method, instructed his crew to wear black and avoid direct eye contact with film subjects during a shoot.
4 For a discussion of the controversies around the film and their impact on its exhibition see Winston 2000:85–6.
5 For a full list of the films screened for all six Free Cinema programmes see Dixon & Dupin 2001:30.
6 For an account of Anderson’s contribution to the development of British art cinema see Erik Hedling 1997.
7 There was also a politicised aspect to Jennings’ work. For example, in a letter co-authored by Jennings published in the
New Statesman and Society (1937) promoting the efforts of Mass Observation, the authors contended that the behaviour of ordinary people needed to be charted ‘so that their environment may be understood and thus constantly transformed … the knowledge of what has to be transformed is indispensable. The foisting on the mass of ideals or ideas developed by men apart from it, irrespective of its capacities, causes misery…’ (in M.-L. Jennings 1982:17).
8 As Erik Barnouw (1993:234–5) explains that, up until this point, the use of synchronous sound was in any case extremely difficult to achieve for technical reasons. The cumbersome equipment required meant that documentarists emphasised movement with people actively doing things for the camera rather than speaking to it – the commentary therefore dominated as a way of fixing meaning to filmed action. The Free Cinema group certainly employed sound more innovatively by allowing ordinary people to speak more but their stance in relation to the film subjects was also more ambivalent since they tended not to comment on these voices.
9 For a discussion of the British New Wave influence on
Coronation Street see Richard Dyer 1981.
10 Tim O’Sullivan’s interviews with people who acquired their sets between 1953–58 supports this. One interviewee commented, ‘If you had a car and a TV set, you’d really arrived’ (1991:166).
11 The father of this family was quoted as saying, ‘The tellie keeps the family together. None of us ever have to go out now’ (Young & Willmott 1957: 143). There is still work to be done on the role of early television as a disciplinary technology in working-class life. The usage and financial costs of television, together with the lack of pubs and clubs around the new isolated council estates, helped alter masculine and feminine working-class behaviour. Women were more confined to the immediate area, further from their extended families and men, who had less money and less opportunity to go to the pub after work became more home-oriented. Overall the family became more self-contained (Young & Willmott 1957:143–6), which fostered the perfect conditions for television viewing.
12 The growing importance of television as a form can be seen in the fact that it was a televised extract of
Look Back in Anger that helped to make it a resounding popular and critical success (Jacobs 2000:157–8).
13 Documentary drama is only one variant of a range of documentary forms that employs either dramatised reconstruction or the filmic codes and conventions of drama. In fact documentary appears in so many hybrid formats that a taxonomy undertaken for its own sake would not be especially useful. Readers should note, however, that debates about ‘drama documentary’ often occur alongside discussion of ‘documentary drama’ which is distinguishable by its greater emphasis on the documentary style or technique (Kilborn & Izod 1997:147–8). To add to the confusion writer Jeremy Sandford referred to
Cathy Come Home as ‘dramatised documentary’ (in Paget 1998: 160). In this book we choose to use the term ‘documentary drama’ to refer to any format that marries extensive dramatisation with documentary style or conventions.
14 Z Cars, screened from 1962, was set in Liverpool and filmed at the same time and in the same locations as the New Wave film
A Kind of Loving. One of the originators of the series, John McGrath, has commented, ‘the series was going to be a kind of documentary about people’s lives in these areas and the cops were incidental – they were the means of finding out about people’s lives’ (in Lacey 2000:119; see also Laing 1991).
15 In fact Granada, the production company for
Coronation Street, has consistently refused to refer to the series as ‘soap opera’ (Geraghty 1991:4).
16 The traumatic realism of this scene was effected by filming it with a hidden camera; so that the expressions on the faces of the members of the public passing by, as the children were dragged away by social workers, were authentic (Fuller 1998:23).
chapter 3
1 The fact that Woolcock becomes deeply involved in the community should not suggest that the film’s subjects always approve of the completed film. Woolcock has described, on a number of occasions, how she had to cope with the consternation and disapproval of local people following the screening of
When the Dog Bites, for example.
2 This kind of viewing fascination is also invoked by the British comedy
The Royle Family and the Amercian docusoap featuring the chaotic lives of heavy metal star Ozzy Osbourne and his wife and two children (
The Osbournes, MTV). The latter family, excessive and carnivalesque, seem very far from the normative ideal and yet at the same time they invite recognition in that despite their celebrity lifestyles they play out scenarios of parenting, neighbour relations and domesticity.
3 Neighbours from Hell is an ITV series that uses mainly amateur footage to recount tempestuous and sometimes aggressive neighbourly disputes. The series is very popular and in 1999 was listed by BARB in the top twenty programmes for terrestrial channels in the UK with an audience of 12.8 million.
4 The growing performativity of observational documentary is even more apparent in Watson’s later documentary
The Queen’s Wedding. Here the central subject, a gay man who also works as a drag queen, addresses the camera in both personas, each one often contradicting the other and undermining the ‘truthfulness’ of the documentary project.
chapter 4
1 Michael Renov locates Clarke’s work alongside that of ethnographer/filmmaker Jean Rouch whose breakthrough work in the 1960s helped inspire the Direct Cinema movement in the US and the
nouvelle vague in France. Rouch’s African work was characterised by novelties such as ‘shared anthropology’ and ‘ethno-fiction’ and is noted for an embrace of daily life and the imagination of a new generation of Africans (
http://www.frenchculture.org/cinema/festival/rouch/rouch1.html accessed 13.09.03). Rouch’s interactive explorations from the late 1950s revealed a fascination with the encounter between filmmaker and subject and had explored the role of film and confession. In an interview in 1969, Rouch responds to an interviewer querying the camera’s influence: ‘Yes, the camera deforms, but not from the moment that it becomes an accomplice. At that point it has the possibility of doing something I couldn’t do if the camera wasn’t there: it becomes a kind of psychoanalytic stimulant which lets people do what they wouldn’t otherwise do’ (in Renov 1999:91).
2 For a discussion of this work in context of Warhol’s video ventures see Callie Agnell’s account (2002: 278–81).
3 See for example Allie Light’s discussion of her 3-minute sequence
Dialogues with Madwomen (in Stubbs 2002:199–206).
4 See Bill Nichols (1994: 92–106) for a discussion of these performative documentaries.
5 As John Corner has noted, ‘The extent to which a concern with formal attractiveness “displaces” the referential to make the subject itself secondary to its formal appropriation has been a frequent topic of dispute’ (1996b: 123).
6 Ian Goode has similarly noted the shift in documentary between ‘looking through’ and ‘looking at’ as a binary which structures documentary practice and critique. He argues that, ‘any pure sense of “looking though” reproduces the fallacy of transparent access … although a temporary sense of unmediated access continues to be a powerful and necessary feature of many documentary sequences’. On the contrary, he argues that, ‘a pure commitment to “looking at” blocks the documentarist’s engagement unless it occurs only as one element or movement in a larger referential design’ (2003:98).
9 Shawn Rosenheim gives a detailed analysis of this and a number of
Interrotron Stories (1996).
11 As John Ellis notes in
Seeing Things, ‘Witness is a new form of experience; it arrived with the development of mechanical media which accord with how we perceive everyday reality … Only in the second half of the twentieth century did commentators begin to explore its specific nature allowing us to experience events at a distance, safe but also powerless, able to over-look but under-act’ (2000:15).
12 Here, Bill Nichols’ use of the term ‘voice’ to signal both the physical voice and the authorial imprint of the filmmaker is relevant to Morris’ technique. See Nichols in Stella Bruzzi (2000:164).
chapter 5
1 Kate Boorstein, a lesbian transsexual who has appeared on
Geraldo, Donahue and
Jane Whitney, has argued that whilst the talk show may be an extension of the nineteenth-century freak-show circus, it now provides the oppor-tunity to represent her specific identity publicly: ‘What’s different now is that we, as freaks, are doing the speaking. It isn’t the barker telling the story for us’ (in Shattuc 1997: 93).
2 Here I am indebted to Robins’ discussion of the worlds of virtual reality (see 1996:ch.2).
3 The term ‘Trauma TV’ has been coined by Jon Dovey, who defines it as: ‘Individual tragedies which would once have remained private but which are now restaged for public consumption’ (2000: 21–2).
4 The factual information on the Apology Line was taken from Jonathan Freedland’s interview with ‘Mr. Apology’ in the
Guardian, 30 July 1994, 27.
5 See, for example, Ulrich Beck’s
Towards New Modernity (1992) and Anthony Giddens’
Modernity and Self-Identity (1991).
chapter 6
1 I have used Susan Moeller’s (1999) phrase ‘compassion fatigue’ which is developed in her account of media constructions of war, famine, pestilence and death.
2 Jane Shattuc (1997: 113–21) outlines the way ego psychology gained precedence in post-war America and illustrates US talk shows use of therapeutic concept of rational self-actualisation.
3 See also Bill Nichols’ account of the documentary insistence on the presence of the body to substantiate the magnitude of historical or social events and of historical or narrative agency (1991:229–66).
4 See also Sonia Livingstone and Peter Lunt’s (1994: 64) account of Kilroy’s therapeutic performance.
5 Langer’s analysis is concerned primarily with news narratives but the description of the victim overcome with unexpected misfortune compares with the accounts of trauma on many talk shows.
7 The story of Walsh’s loss of his child has been dramatised in two films – the 1983 NBC television movie
Adam and the 1986 sequel
Adam: His Song Continues.
9 As Cathy Caruth has argued: ‘The story of trauma, then, as the narrative of a belated experience, far from telling of an escape from reality – the escape from a death, or from its referential force – rather attests to the endless impact on a life’ (1996: 7).
10 In the last week of April 2003,
Get a New Life (BBC2) scored 2.8 million viewers,
Escape to the Country (BBC2) 2.3 million and
Home Front (BBC2) 2.1 million,
Selling Houses (Channel 4) 3.2 million and
Location, Location, Location (Channel 4) 4.2 million. Jon Plunkett noted in the
Observer (4 May 2003) that, at their peak, house re-style programme
Changing Rooms and garden re-style
Ground Force were so popular they were moved from BBC2 to BBC1 where they were watched by 12 million viewers. In April 2003 they were rating around 7 million viewers,
http://media.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4661192,00.html, 1, accessed 14 August 2003.
11 In the
Guardian review, ‘C4 drives audiences over the limit’ (11 June 2003), Deans notes that both
Reality Check and
The Dinner Party Inspectors lost audience shares to more conventional documentaries running on rival stations.
http://media.guardian.co.uk/overnights/story/0,7965,975203,00.html, accessed 12 August 2003. See also Mark Lawson’s comment on these programmes in the preceding Monday’s
Guardian (9 June 2003),
http://www.guardian.co.uk/avantgostory/0,6347,103689-4686799,00.html, accessed 12 August 2003.
12 Under their factual programming category Talkback Productions list a number of extremely successful lifestyle/makeover shows all screened in 2003:
How Clean Is Your House (Channel 4),
Jamie’s Kitchen (first screened November/December 2002, Channel 4),
Property Ladder (Channel 4),
Escape to the Country (BBC2),
Grand Designs (Channel 4),
Apply Immediately (under production in summer 2003 for BBC),
Other People’s Houses (Channel 4),
Your Money or Your Life (BBC2),
Life Doctor (Channel 5),
Would Like to Meet (BBC2) and
Dinner Party Inspectors (Channel 4). See
http://www.talkback.co.uk/intro2.html, accessed 22 August 2003.
chapter 7
1 For an insider’s view of the filming of emergency services documentaries see Currie 2001 and Docherty 2001.
2 Surveys and classroom discussion with younger male students showed this to be the case. We are indebted to students on the ‘News, truth, power’ course at Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College for sharing with us their perceptions of this programme and its audience appeal. Kathleen Curry has also demonstrated in her sociological audience study of crime television that part of the interest for viewers in these kinds of scenes resides in their sense of the ‘other’; that these crimes occur in other social settings than their own (2001: 179). So another line of enquiry might ask whose social space is being filmed here and how does it relate to the space of the viewer?
3 Caplin quoted in the
Radio Times, 4–10 March 2000:103.
4 Ariella Azoulay (2001) examines these new alignments of power and space with great clarity in her chapter on the video footage of Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination. Here she examines the role of the camera in that event and the ways in which it is not merely a technology of witness but an interventionist protagonist in its own right.
5 The saturation of public space by CCTV is exemplified by the statistic that the average city dweller is likely to be filmed between eight and three hundred times in the course of a day (Carter 2001).
6 Terry Honess and Elizabeth Charman found in their research into public awareness and perceptions of CCTV that the majority of people were only really aware of CCTVs in places such as shops and banks (rather than on housing estates, for example) (1992: 6). A substantial number of respondents ascribed this awareness to television programmes such as
Crimewatch UK. This, and other crime detection programmes therefore, may have fostered the perception that all cameras are set up to
prevent and
detect crime. In fact many camera recordings are not viewed at all but stored on tapes only to be reviewed as evidence well after the crime has taken place.
7 This virtual police presence through scopic technology is doubly underlined in the three part television series
Shooting the Crime (15 November 2001, ITV). Here ‘shooting’ refers to the use of police photography and video footage as weapons in the fight against crime. The stories covered in this series are both authorised and effectively authored by the police, as they use police sources to portray a variety of ‘crimes’ from hostage situations to anti-capitalist demonstrations.
8 The phrase ‘carnival of crime’ is taken from Presdee (2000), who draws on Mikhail Bakhtin’s work in order to think through the operation of law-breaking as the ‘second life’ of citizens lived out in the interstices of the ordered society.
chapter 8
1 We are drawing on Douglas Kellner’s definition of media spectacle: ‘phenomena of media culture that embody contemporary society’s basic values, serve to initiate individuals into its way of life, and dramatise its controversies and struggles, as well as its modes of conflict resolution’ (2003:2).
2 Factual programming such as documentary has also become increasingly explicit in its representations of suffering, physical trauma and the body. See, for example, the series
Body Shock and the documentary
The Boy Whose Skin Fell Off (25 March 2004 – all Channel 4). The latter charted the decline and death of a man suffering from a rare and dreadful skin condition that finally precipitated the cancer which was to kill him. His decline and death was filmed in explicit detail leading one doctor to observe, ‘that there will never be a final frontier for the media when it comes to dealing with human suffering’ (McKie 2004:6). The programme was akin to the Blaine event in that its screen counter noted time passing in a countdown to the film subject’s death. See also Blacker 2004.
3 Interviewed in ‘Above the Below’, directed by Harmony Korine, 2003. On the Channel 4/Sky 1 broadcast Korine’s film was shown intercut with the live broadcast entitled
David Blaine: Above the Below.
4 Interviewed in ‘Above the Below’ (Korine 2003).
5 ‘Hang on in there: Blaine holds a mirror up to Britain’, leader in the
Observer, 21 September 2003.
6 For extended discussions of ordinariness and celebrity in reality TV and popular culture more broadly, see Littler 2003.
7 ‘Above the Below’ (Korine 2003).
9 Guy Debord (1967) notes in paragraph 18 of
Society of the Spectacle: ‘the spectacle as a tendency to
make one see the world by means of various specialised mediations … naturally finds vision to be the privileged human sense … [spectacle] is the opposite of dialogue.’
10 Extensive media coverage of the Atkins diet’s celebrity advocates, in particular, helped form a strong discursive relationship between star glamour and bodily morbidity. Such was the growing speculation about the diet’s ‘unhealthiness’ and its unpleasant side effects that Hollywood star Catherine Zeta-Jones threatened to sue anyone who associated her with it.
11 Blaine had bulked up his weight before the event, so that even with this weight loss, his body appeared reasonably normal.
12 The only condition more private than illness or suffering is death itself. Foucault notes that as power has adopted the role of administering life (bio-politics) ‘death is power’s limit, the moment that escapes it; death becomes the most secret aspect of existence, the most “private”’ (1976:138). In the light of this observation it makes more sense that some critics of the event would only be satisfied with Blaine’s death; although this, of course, would also have been unrepresentable.
13 Blaine’s major set pieces have much in common with what is usually referred to as ‘performance art’ in that they are usually live theatrical pieces and frequently motivated by a redemptive belief in the transformative capacity of art and/or a radical merging of life and art (Jones 1998:13).
14 Comment made in the film
Vertigo (Jacob Septimus and Michael Dimich, 2002).
conclusion
1 We are choosing to use the term ‘celebrity’ in its broadest sense of people who are objects of pronounced media attention over which they may have only a limited amount of control. We are also excluding elite persons who, for example, first come to the attention of the media and are newsworthy through their work in the traditional ‘masculinised’ public sphere of politics, big business or the City.
2 See, for example, Vivian Nicholson’s well-known autobiography
Spend, Spend, Spend (with Stephen Smith, 1978), which chronicles her football pools win and the subsequent notoriety that made her a media celebrity. The National Lottery was established in Britain in 1994. For accounts of lottery winners and their encounters with the media see Hunter Davies 1996.
3 Photospreads of the characters from the series have, appropriately enough, appeared in
Hello!, 14 January 2003, 14–18.
4 Ex-
Mirror editor Piers Morgan described Victoria Beckham, for example, as ‘the new Diana’ (
Tabloid Tales, BBC1, 2003).
5 Not only achievement but also dramatic failure will bring individuals into the celebrity matrix. Most recently the attempt by Charles and Diana Ingram and their accomplice Tecwen Whittock to defraud the British quiz show
Who Wants to be a Millionaire transformed them from celebrity winners to celebrity criminals. The documentary
Millionaire: A Major Fraud (ITV1), which broadcast the show and revealed the frausters’ methods, shown on Monday 21 April 2003 attracted nearly 17 million viewers, the biggest audience ever for a factual television programme on ITV.
6 Pop Idol won the prestigious Golden Rose of Montreux in 2002. It was cited by the judges as ‘perfect television’ (
http://www.elstree.co.uk). Will Young and runner-up Gareth Gates both were given recording contracts with BMG.
7 The appeal of the competition and its lure as a springboard to celebrity status are illustrated by the number of applications to audition for the 2003
Pop Idol. The programme-makers Thames TV/19 TV Production received over 20,000 applications just prior to the 28 February 2003 closing date. See
Pop Idol official website,
http://www.itv.com/popidol/, accessed 18 March 2003.