| | BBC, ITV, Sky, everyone else launch ultimate reality TV show
27 Jul 2003
The BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Five and Sky Movies Gold One Plus last night launched a new series of "reality" television programmes in a unique partnership. The series, entitled Famous Castaway Celebrities' Surviving Big Brothers' Pop Idols' Interior Design Academy Island, brings together elements of many recent reality television shows, but is set on an island off the Scottish coast populated entirely by celebrities' big brothers' pop idols' favourite interior designers and stocked mainly with MDF, floral fabrics and "chocolate body paint".
The interior designers, all of whom will be under the age of 30, will do battle in a number of challenges, including building something that doesn't fall to pieces, eating spiders and, crucially, attracting as many viewers as possible by running around naked with glue guns and using the aforementioned chocolate body paint.
Each week, it is hoped that viewers will vote off anyone they vaguely dislike by calling a premium rate number, thus gaining the broadcasters valuable funds for making incomprehensible promotional trailers involving cliffs and people on horses. The winning interior designer will be the one left standing (naked) next to something they have built that looks at least marginally useful and/or attractive. The winner will be awarded £100,000, a trophy made out a jam jar and the right to have thousands of column-inches written about them in all tabloid newspapers for at least two days after the contest has finished.
The series will be broadcast 24 hours a day, 7 days a week on all channels "and possibly others, too" for 10 weeks "or until the public gets bored of it".
Television executives are hoping desperately that the show will be a success. "There is a lot at stake here," said one ITV executive who wished to remain anonymous. "Not only is this new show going to cost us a packet, but if it flops then it could mean the death knell for reality TV. That would mean us having to come up with some original ideas and, let's be honest here, we haven't got a hope."
The identities of the celebrities whose elder brothers will be taking part in the show have yet to be announced, but it is thought that such well-known personalities as that bloke who used to be on a game show, that woman off breakfast television in the 80s and "the cast of Crossroads" will be involved.
How cool is this?
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