reality TV
Lisa-Marie Ferla
With a full-on commercial break in the middle of the programme and teary clips from the television show interspersed throughout, The Big Reunion live show really does play out like an extended episode of ITV2’s unlikely reality hit. Thankfully this means carrying over many of the things that made the TV show great, as well as giving late '90s/early '00s revivalists ample opportunity to purchase a £50 hoodie.It stands to reason that the performances were a bit of a mixed bag: while Cumbrian trio 911, who have reunited at the drop of a hat at various points since their 2000 split, genuinely Read more ...
Nick Hasted
When Matteo Garrone’s sixth film Gomorrah won the 2008 Grand Prix at Cannes, it announced Italian cinema’s resurrection to the world. When his follow-up, Reality, won the 2012 Grand Prix, opinion was more divided. Where Gomorrah rigorously exposed the inescapable impact of the Camorra gangs on Naples and the surrounding region, giving a grimly compelling tour of a hidden world, Reality is the more slippery tale of Luciano (Aniello Arena), an amiable, amusing Naples fishmonger pushed by his family to enter a heat for Italy’s Big Brother, Grande Fratello. The possibility of appearing on TV Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
What is the point of this? Someone somewhere must have imagined Cheryl: Access All Areas was a passably entertaining idea yet it makes Come Dine With Me look like Kick Ass. It’s the antithesis of watchable and a complete waste of time - boringly constructed, badly filmed, jam-packed with nothing revealing, amusing or exciting from start to finish. In short, there’s more fun to be had scraping burnt cheese off your cooker.The premise is that it’s a documentary about Cheryl Cole’s A Million Lights debut solo tour last month but the actuality is it documents only in the very loosest sense. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Don’t say this hasn’t been on the way for a while. For years now we’ve had the public working on television for free. They sing for free. They juggle and ventriloquise and suck up to Simon Cowell for free. They even live in glass houses for free. Meanwhile, back at home, the audience makes the key decisions about who stays and who goes. One blue-sky thinking-outside-the-box lightbulby brainstorming roundtable session later and you have the bizarre metatexual freak that is The Audience.In The Audience, the audience is no longer monitoring events from the sofa. Well, it is, but it’s also up Read more ...
Ismene Brown
So the chairman of Big Brother TV becomes chairman of the Arts Council. Is it good or bad that Sir Peter Bazalgette will now hold the purse-strings for our publicly supported arts, the most debated, the most fragile, the most ephemeral elements of our national cultural consciousness, the most opposite of the time-wasting that is reality TV?Bazalgette is descended from the Victorian Bazalgette who built London's sewers, and he has attracted verbal ordure for years for his development at Endemol TV of the reality shows about the petty minutiae of life (cooking, gardening, eating - heavens - Read more ...
Natalie Shaw
Cher Lloyd first appeared aged 16 on The X Factor with a storming cover of an unofficial bootleg version of “Turn My Swag On” - a song that peaked at just number 48 on the UK singles charts. Knowing so much about music at such a young age set her apart from the entire competition, and it’s no surprise that her debut album Sticks + Stones is the most feverish and bold set that anyone from the show has yet produced. Some 18 months after that first appearance, the singer headlined her first London show at a 2,500-capacity venue. Keeping it relatively intimate served a little too much as Read more ...
Veronica Lee
You may think that, eight series in, applicants for The Apprentice would rein it in a bit. Overblown egos, fantastical verbal imagery to describe their always unique talents, hyperbolic self-assessment - we had all of those, and so much more, in last night's hugely enjoyable series opener. Welcome to another bunch of hopelessly, and hilariously, deluded men and women in search of Lord Sugar's £250,000 investment.No longer about a serious search for a young business person or entrepreneur - it stopped being that in, oh, series three, perhaps? - The Apprentice is now pure entertainment but, Read more ...
Natalie Shaw
The X Factor has been rewriting the Gregorian calendar since its inception in September 2004. It’s now more acceptable (nay, expected) for major label pop acts’ careers to fall like dominos after the first year, while at the other end of the scale we’re sped into an accelerated, broader-spanning nostalgia - a longing sensation triggered mere minutes after the ITV1+1 broadcast. It’s with this in mind that the staging and characterisation of The X Factor Live caused such intrigue.Last year’s finalists were largely paraded before us, styled exactly how we saw them on television and singing songs Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's a quintessential Channel 4 idea. Take one hot-button issue (racial integration, or lack of it), go to Bradford ("one of Britain's most segregated cities," according to the voiceover), and shove a racially mixed bunch of locals into a thinly-disguised Big Brother house to see how they'll get along. To stir the pot a bit more, the eight chosen "contestants" all failed the government's UK Citizenship test.Not that that singles them out, particularly. The programme-makers staged test-sittings all around Bradford, from the Asian-dominated city centre or Manningham to predominantly white areas Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Ever since that first Saturday night when Simon Cowell pulled back the curtain on mainstream pop music's most underhand dealings, there has been a certain type of artiste that a certain type of person struggles to take seriously. What is often forgotten by those of us whose interest in chase-your-dream music-based reality television shows stops at the commercial breaks, however, is that between the tone-deaf girl group that gets voted off in the first week and the insipid, interchangeable boys beloved of teenage girls there is usually at least one remarkable voice. In 2010 that voice belonged Read more ...
Russ Coffey
For about an hour in Hammersmith last October it seemed that all 2011's new music had coagulated into some kind of supernova and was exploding on stage. There were two drum kits, nine musicians, and a nerdy, lanky man singing like an alien. The support act had told us to expect something special and was it ever: Bon Iver’s extraordinary live reimagining of their bucolic, eponymous album took in folk, prog, soul, metal and avant garde. It also pretty much embodied my review year.Decibel for decibel Justin Vernon's folkies were now up there with Queens of the Stone Age who'd brought the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
There are all sorts of reality shows, but the best ones really do strip people bare. It’s the reason why The X Factor is more interesting than Strictly Come Dancing, why Don’t Tell the Bride is more revealing of the gamble of love than Snog, Marry, Avoid? It’s the reason why Masterchef: The Professionals is more gripping than the estimable Great British Bake-Off.While it’s cheering to see talented amateurs like you and me win the original Masterchef, the most popular in the franchise, it’s far more exciting to see the culinary genius that so many college-trained chefs, beavering away in the Read more ...