Two decades after a British reality TV show was exposed as a sham, a new three-part docu-series explores how the contestants have coped since – and what drew them in the first place, writes Louis Staples.
It started with an advert. In 2002, a new British reality TV show was about to be launched. The prize? £100,000. The concept? Unclear. The wannabe contestants? People who thought of themselves as"characterful, resourceful and energetic". All they knew was that they would have to give up their lives for a whole year. They didn't even know what channel the secret show was going to be on, but that didn't matter. Hundreds applied.Jane Marshall was one of them.
Two decades on, The Greatest Show Never Made – a new three-part docu-series that launches on Prime Video today – re-tells the story of the one team of contestants who stayed in the game and the show's mysterious creator. Through a mixture of archival self-filmed footage, interviews and colourful re-enacted scenes, we learn about how they were each using the show to chase their dreams.This bizarre story didn't actually start with a misleading advert in the paper.
At the time, the first two series of Big Brother had aired on Channel 4. The major controversies – like"Nasty" Nick Bateman being removed from the house – were relatively small-scale compared to how conflict-driven the show eventually became. The housemates reared chickens, and the emphasis was on"back to basics" living, not drunken arguments and celebrity.On The Greatest Show Never Made, the contestants are representative of this era.
There is a particularly interesting moment where, holed up in the East London flat, the group sits down to watch Big Brother together. They discuss their opinions on the housemates as they longingly watch them living the reality TV dream. It was like a show in itself. Part Big Brother, part precursor to Gogglebox."I spent weeks watching the tapes over and over, and I got sucked into it," Dalton says."It felt like a soap opera unfolding in front of my eyes.
This might sound far-fetched, but it was where the reality genre was heading. In 2005, Channel 4 aired the reality show Space Cadets. The show was a hoax at the expense of its contestants, who were told they were being trained as astronauts at a Russian military base. The contestants were misled to believe that they were entering space – including a rocket flight in astronaut suits and looking down at what they thought was the Earth, but was actually just a green screen.
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