The last newsprint on X Factor and Strictly Come Dancing’s sensational (in the original sense of the word) Christmas climaxes is being sent off for recycling as 2009 prepares to unleash the first of its celebrity-gawk show titillations.
With an abashed Celebrity Big Brother slinking out of its cupboard it may feel that shows based around talent and tears of opportunity and hope will be replaced by those of bullying, claustrophobia and fame-envy as another D-list of has-beens go through the Mill to come out with lucrative if brief contracts with the Daily Star.
However, hope comes from other quarters – firstly from India where the winners of the first ‘Million Dollar Arm’ competition have just landed deals with the Pittsburgh Pirates. This is no fifteen minutes of fame but a genuine life-changing opportunity, as their blog shows. It’s a brilliant read - you almost cant believe that this isn’t a Tom Hanks rags-to-riches film, even as they talk with wonder about Hollywood special effects and how they are going to be television stars as well as sporting heroes.
Meanwhile on the other side of the entertainment fence there are plans for a reality television show hunt for the star of a new $50mn Emmanuelle prequel. This seems a natural follow-on from the likes of How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria (itself a fallout from X Factor, which in turn came out of Big Brother) cross-fertilized with the ‘real girl’ searches that FHM pioneered six years ago and every other lads mag has since followed.
High Street Honeys started off as a relatively tasteful way for the magazine to run pictures of hot girls but since has become a grottfest which is less about the looks and more about the leeriness as the entrants try to enact the fantasies of the adolescent readership.
Reality television has always encouraged salaciousness, from Big Brother’s desperate efforts to get its inmates to have broadcast sex through to tv’s fame-hungriest couple Jordan and Peter Andre. A recent episode of Jordan and Peter: The Next Chapter was somehow even more explicit than the porno they once made, as they described and even demonstrated how they give each-other head and complained about how loose they are (in both senses).
Unfortunately they are not the only ones mistaking porno for real life, and when others emulate it – most famously the Man Utd roasting party this time last year – it can move from cringingly sordid to just plain wrong.
So Hunting for Emmanuelle seems a natural extension of a wider trend and could well be a preferable seventies soft-focused execution of it, while cutting out the pretense that we are interested in anything else…
As the Krypton Factor also makes a straight-faced return to our screens one wonders if this is the missing piece, and that reality contestants of the future will have to perform complicated sexual maneouvers while answering trivia questions. A new take on television's hardest quiz...
