The TikTok generation can’t believe their eyes and ears. Barely born when reality TV first hit our screens like effluent from a fire hose, today’s teens and twentysomethings are discovering the very worst of 1990s and Noughties television.
Shows that held millions mesmerised in horror when they first aired two decades ago are experiencing a resurgence on social media. Clips, soundbites and snippets from series that broadcast executives thought (or hoped) were long-forgotten are being discovered to a fresh outcry of disgust.
The reactions of Gen Z – who are aged 27 and under – are not so different from those of the original audiences. These programmes were designed to evoke shock, and cries of, ‘I can’t believe what I’ve just watched!’
But while the youngsters of 2024 are often aghast, it’s for very different reasons. Easily triggered and constantly offended, they regard British culture at the turn of the millennium as almost feral.
This generational gulf was highlighted last week by a three-part Channel 4 documentary called Miriam: Death Of A Reality Star. It revisited an ill-judged and troubling dating show from 2004 called There’s Something About Miriam, and explored the wretchedly sad story of its central figure.
An ill-judged and troubling dating show from 2004 called There’s Something About Miriam
Humiliation reached new heights in 2005’s Space Cadets, where three unsuspecting members of the public were tricked into believing they were going into orbit as space tourists
On the face of it, Miriam Rivera was every red-blooded male’s dream girl. She was gorgeous, she was sassy, she was 21. She was also a trans woman, with breast implants but no other sex-change surgery.
And to the six young men who spent a fortnight vying for her favours on camera, that came as a humiliating shock.
Most of them hadn’t the slightest suspicion Miriam was a biological male — and to realise exactly who they had all been ogling and kissing was more than they could handle.
One man smashed up the set in his rage and the director of the show, Remy Blumenfeld, had to be rushed to safety by security men.
Present-day viewers discovering the show for the first time watched the documentary with mounting disbelief — but not disbelief in the existence of trans women.
In an era when high camp and glamour are primetime staples, with extravaganzas such as RuPaul’s Drag Race UK on BBC1, the real surprise was to realise how alien all this seemed to ordinary lads just 20 years ago.
Crass variety show Balls Of Steel ran for three years from 2005 on Channel 4 with stunt performers and actors staging feeble practical jokes, such as The Naked Man who appeared in nude in public.
As late as 2012, TV was still getting a frisson from blurring the division between hetero and homo. Dating show Playing It Straight UK sent ten guys and one girl to a Mexican hacienda
Everyone who grew up immersed in social media during their teens is also hysterically aware of what can or cannot be said.
Words and phrases that not so long ago were innocuous, or vulgar at worst, are now unprintable. Actors, academics, journalists and politicians have all seen their careers wiped out by a single word out of place.
Many young people can’t understand why life hasn’t always been like that. It’s incomprehensible to them. At the same time, social media addicts are fascinated and thrilled by the spectacle of all their taboos being shattered.
No comedians would dare plaster boot polish over their faces like a ‘black-and-white minstrel’ — but clips of David Walliams and Matt Lucas in blackface on Little Britain circulate on X and YouTube. And today’s under-25s are as agog to hear outdated clips of sexist or fatphobic jokes as six-year-olds discovering toilet humour.
What they also don’t fully grasp is that ‘laddism’ was equally obnoxious to older Brits at the time. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the UK’s culture embraced a brutal hedonism fuelled by drugs and alcohol. Television revelled in it.
Intelligent conversation on chatshows hosted by Michael Parkinson or Terry Wogan was replaced by telly that aimed to entertain by being outrageous, the more raucous and obscene the better.
Chris Evans presided over a celebrity circus on TFI Friday, with segments such as Fat Lookalikes, where overweight people were dressed up to resemble stars such as Liam Gallagher or Cher.
Search for Fat Lookalikes on TikTok now and you’ll see endless howls of, ‘How could they get away with that?’ and, ‘They’d be cancelled instantly today.’
But that was the point then too — TFI Friday was daring to make the kind of jokes that had once been unimaginable on television.
Evans was a driving force behind ‘lad culture’, with his Channel 4 morning show The Big Breakfast. One of its most successful features saw the ultimate ‘ladette’, Paula Yates, sprawling on a bed with her interviewees.
Sometimes this was innocent and silly, like the time she got cosy with all five members of boy band Take That. On other occasions, in particular her interview with Aussie rock star Michael Hutchence, the encounter radiated erotic tension. According to legend, Paula and Michael — who first met that morning — disappeared into a dressing room for sex as soon as the cameras went off.
When reality TV broke through, with the launch of Big Brother in 2000, it had to be more transgressive, more reckless, more disruptive than anything that had gone before.
This was a time, after all, when a men’s magazine could get away with projecting a photograph of TV presenter Gail Porter completely naked on to Big Ben as a publicity stunt.
The sexual element in some of the new gonzo TV shows wasn’t just lairy, it was openly homophobic. In the aftermath of the Aids epidemic, being gay was no longer completely ignored but it was certainly not celebrated.
There was still an overt sense that homosexuality was shameful, which was highlighted by There’s Something About Miriam.
Viewers were meant to bellow with laughter because the show had somehow tricked six boys into ‘being gay’. The whole point of this spiteful, puerile exercise was to laugh at them, and enjoy their humiliation. The cruelty of it was vile at the time, and still is.
This wasn’t the only contender for Most Shocking Format Ever. Crass variety show, Balls Of Steel ran for three years from 2005 on Channel 4, with stunt performers and actors staging feeble practical jokes, such as The Naked Man who appeared in nude in public.
The stock joke for one act, Eric Page, was to approach men at random in public and proposition them for gay sex, in the coarsest terms. Most reacted with disgust or fear, a few with violence. Only one spotted it was a set-up and punctured the ‘joke’ by playing along — Radio 1 DJ Chris Moyles.
As late as 2012, TV was still getting a frisson from blurring the division between hetero and homo. Dating show, Playing It Straight UK sent ten guys and one girl to a Mexican hacienda.
All 21-year-old Zoe from Kent, a PA with almost no romantic experience, had to do was pick her favourite and share a £100,000 prize with him.
A different kind of baiting and cruelty underpinned Fat Families, a Sky 1 show from 2010 that posed as a hardcore dieting challenge but just mocked the obese
The stock joke on Balls of Steel for one act, Eric Page, was to approach men at random in public and proposition them for gay sex, in the coarsest terms.
But it wasn’t so simple, tittered Hollywood actor Alan Cumming on the voiceover: ‘Some of these men represent every girl’s dating dilemma. They may be good-looking, attentive, well groomed, sensitive and unattached. But some of them are… gay!’
To make it even tougher, all the boys were dressed as cowboys. In the wake of Brokeback Mountain, the gay Western which swept the Oscars a few years earlier, every fella in a ten gallon hat looked like a same-sex porn star.
‘Zoe thinks she’s the only queen in this fairytale,’ sighed Alan, ‘but if she goes for a gay guy, he’ll keep the whole hundred grand for himself… she will walk away with nothing.’ Before the show began, all the male contestants had to sign legal documents stating they were gay or straight, not bisexual. Many were metrosexuals, unashamed to admit using moisturiser.
‘I’m scared of spiders,’ said one. ‘I go to a gay gym,’ admitted another to presenter June Sarpong. ‘I spend a lot of time on my hair,’ confessed a third.
With so much money at stake, no one could be trusted to utter a straight word.
The show was based on a U.S. show, cancelled after just three episodes. In the UK, it ran for one series. ‘There were discussions about doing one man and ten lipstick lesbians,’ said producer Peter Davey, ‘but what are the cliched signs to spot a lesbian? I felt it was a one-joke show and best left at that.’
In 2000, Davey also masterminded an all-action reality show on Channel 5 called The Mole. One challenge, called Release The Dogs, saw four contestants dressed in boiler suits going on run with their legs shackled. Five minutes after setting off, dogs and their handlers set off in pursuit.
‘My original plan,’ said producer Peter Davey, ‘was to release the dogs and make it a real hunt. Everyone said, “You can’t do that”. I was adamant — and finally was forced to put the dogs on leads, which still irritates me.’
A different kind of baiting and cruelty underpinned Fat Families, a Sky 1 show from 2010 that posed as a hardcore dieting challenge but just mocked the obese.
‘Watch out butter mountains, I’m coming to melt you!’ jeered presenter Steve Miller. ‘I’m in North Porkshire to meet two right massive fatty siblings.’
Steve liked to call himself ‘the lard police’ and insisted that phrases like ‘blubber bellies,’ ‘wobblers’ and ‘jelly-bellied jumbos’ were well-meant insults.
‘They are actually trapped in a body of lard,’ he lamented, before ordering people to follow his tough regime of nutrition sheets and constant exercise.
One woman reported that, when she stepped off the treadmill in her living room and flopped onto the sofa, a production crew member phoned and ordered her to get back to her workout. Producers were watching on a spy camera.
The brutal methods worked. In the first series, the six featured families lost a total of 38.5 stone.
But the audience reaction was very judgmental. One female participant said viewers had reported her to social services for the way she spoke to her children.
Humiliation reached new heights in 2005’s Space Cadets, where three unsuspecting members of the public were tricked into believing they were going into orbit as space tourists.
The lavish hoax was partly dreamed up by novelist and gameshow presenter Richard Osman, then a creative executive at Endemol TV, Space Cadets required a squadron of actors, Hollywood special-effects and a rocket simulator.
How exciting was this? ‘It’s like Chessington World Of Adventures times 10,000,’ gasped one of the participants, Sarah Jane.
The three were selected using psychological tests that revealed how suggestible and credulous they were. As it turned out, all three could believe anything, if the information came from someone claiming to be a scientist.
They cheerfully accepted that Earth’s galaxy is known to astronomers as the Hazelnut Cluster, that gravity is under human control, and that Minsky ‘the first monkey in space’ gave her name to the Soviet city of Minsk.
After a flight over the North Sea, the contestants were taken to a ‘Cosmonaut training camp’ in Russia, complete with tanks and men in fur hats. In fact, it was a disused RAF base in East Anglia.
But inflicting humiliation on people as easily fooled as this felt cheap, despite the budget.
One of the actors, Charlie Skelton, harboured real regrets. ‘The contestants thought their lives would change for ever. People were saying: “I’m going to be friends with Tom Cruise,” or, “I’m going to be on Oprah”. But I had the harrowing knowledge this wasn’t the case. It was like taking a bunch of kids to meet Santa, then revealing he didn’t exist.’
Presenter Johnny Vaughan took it far more badly. ‘I thought it was pretty grubby. It was the last time I worked in TV actually,’ he said in 2021. ‘I saw it as signalling an age of contempt for the viewers.’
Deception and lies are still crucial ingredients of today’s reality shows. The difference is players on Claudia Winkleman’s The Traitors, for example, all understand that deceit is part of the game.
Anyone who thinks the excesses of Noughties TV can never be repeated is being naive. Physical degradation is still the basis of shows such as Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins, and I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out Of Here! where the challenges have become more extreme since its 2002 launch.
Last year, reality show Scared Of the Dark was filmed in total blackout to simulate blindness, and starred Paul Gascoigne, despite his mental fragility.
And in a U.S. abomination entitled Milf Manor, eight middle-aged women in a villa took it in turns to cop off with each other’s sons.
The fire hose of filth hasn’t run dry yet.
