How reality TV stars seduced the creatively barren BBC
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
We are living through the second coming of Smashie and Nicey. When Matthew Bannister ran Radio 1 in the early 1990s, he famously purged the generation of jocks brutally satirised by Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse.
Out with Dave Lee Travis. Out with Bruno Brookes. The excellent documentary, Blood On The Carpet: Walking with Disc Jockeys, captures some of the sourness of the ancien regime as the tumbrels drew up.
History’s page turned, and we were promised that the victory was final. No longer would men in their late 30s patronise a teenage audience.
Bannister’s watchword, his linking thought when describing his new generation of radio performers like Mark Radcliffe, Jo Whiley and Kevin Greening, was “real”. In contrast to the phoneys that had gone before.
Thirty years on, Radio 1 watchers might be forgiven for thinking that history is circular. The station’s star performer, Jordan North, co-host of the evening drive time show, Going Home, is off to Capital at the age of 34. A lucrative afterlife awaits in perhaps the most well-worn exit move for a youth DJ gracefully ageing out.
His replacement is Jamie Laing, best known for starring in Made In Chelsea. Laing is also a player in the podcast world, having scored a big hit with his NewlyWeds show, and his weekly interview podcast, Private Parts. He has since set up a company, JamPot Productions, to make more shows. He’s also 35. If he lasts as long as North, he’d be retiring to Capital aged 45.
How did Radio One replace North with a fresh face one year his senior? The short answer is that the world that birthed the Jo Whiley generation no longer exists. In 2024, if you run a youth media brand, if you want to make yourself heard in the cacophony, you may have little choice but to hire a familiar face from an existing franchise.
Of course, this shouldn’t apply to Radio 1, who have both the state funding and the mandate to seek out new talent. But increasingly it is the bankable tier of reality TV inhabited by the likes of Laing that is the feeder from which the product of “celebrity” can first be forged. Commissioners, and the production companies who pitch shows to tempt them, are prisoners of a perverse ecosystem.
That ecosystem has been layering-up for a while. Even a product of the previous decade like the documentary presenter Stacey Dooley began her career as the subject of a reality documentary herself, called Blood Sweat & T-Shirts. Now, as Dooley ages out of the youth docs, TV is attempting to fashion a replacement from the likes of Zara McDermott.
McDermott has so far made documentaries for BBC3 on “revenge porn”, and “rape culture”, “disordered eating”, and Ibiza. She’s an alum of Love Island (class of 2018), from whence she went to the finishing school of Made In Chelsea (2019 -2020) – confusingly, because she’s a Havering girl, and as Essex as they come.
In the coming weeks, McDermott will be tackling a new subject for BBC Three: The Idaho University Murders. “Zara McDermott heads to the small town of Moscow, Idaho,” the press release promises. “To uncover the story of the social media frenzy that sprung up following the tragic murders of four Idaho University students.”
Those who haven’t been following the media’s trajectory may be confused about why a fourth season Love Islander has been employed to hare round a small Midwestern town, contacting the former friends of murder victims.
The answer is that the people who commission TV, radio and podcasts, can’t afford to see their shows potentially sink. With so many media products now in contention, the ability of a big money show to go down entirely without a trace has never been higher. Ever more, commissioners want bankable stars, so that at least the blame game can be hedged.
Podcasting is a good example of how this new world works. Pitch your audio documentary to the big distributors – Apple, Amazon, Audible, Spotify, iHeart – and the first conversation will often be about the social media bona fides of the potential host. How many followers? What platforms? Often, execs won’t entertain hosts with fewer than a quarter-million followers. And knowing this, agents routinely market their clients by selling their social media clout first.
The tactic might be cynical, but it works. At the time of writing, the number one podcast in the country is Olivia Attwood’s So Wrong It’s Right, created by Bauer Media, the conglomerate who own Absolute Radio and Empire Magazine, among many other properties. Attwood, with 2 million Instagram followers, is another Love Island alum (2017), who solidified her brand through The Only Way Is Essex (again, confusingly, as she went to nothing but private schools in Surrey). Unfortunately, So Wrong It’s Right is not even so bad it’s good.
Attwood has also made a four part series for ITV about ‘the new world of selling sex online’. Yet another Made In Chelsea star, Sam Thompson, starred in Sam Thompson: Is This ADHD? for Channel 4.
Meanwhile, Made In Chelsea’s Spencer Matthews has become a kind of media knotweed, with no less than two weekly podcasts for Global, makers of The News Agents: Spencer & Vogue, and Big Fish. Are his insights that acute? Well, asked why he’d signed up for BBC’s reality walking show, Pilgrimage, Matthews said: “A pilgrimage is when you walk and sleep on church floors and eat dead rats and stuff, which I’m looking forward to.”
We were promised that the internet would enable a democracy of talent: more outsiders able to clamber up the ladder from more oblique starting points. At the lower levels, that is often what has happened. But above a certain point, the oligarchy of agents and human brands has become even more efficient than it was a decade ago. In a system now governed by clicks-per-mill, by micro-focused engagement metrics and the boardroom pie charts they propagate, like breeds like, and the plum jobs all accrue to the likes of Laing.
Individually, there are always good reasons behind these decisions. Laing is by no means a terrible fit. He’s an enthusiastic posho, who exhales the breezy inanity that is the hallmark of daytime Radio 1. Plus, for a BBC still struggling to locate younger audiences, tapping straight into his podcast following must have appealed.
But this rule by the Reality Class is a sign of a media that has become creatively exhausted, that lacks confidence in itself. Because almost by definition, as Matthew Bannister might say, these people are not “real”.
