Rat-pack Matt is in for a reality cheque
I’VE blundered my way through my fair share of reality TV shows. Some 21 years after I chalked “immured” and “immolated” on the table, while wearing a leopard-print dressing gown and shades, before telling Big Brother to **** off and melting down in the Diary Room, I am still asked about it daily.
I joke that I always have something to talk about at dinner parties, but reprising those moments almost a quarter of a century later isn’t an ideal hors d’oeuvres accompaniment.
At the time I foolishly believed interest would last no longer than the next series. I didn’t realise I was a pioneer. As the first celebrity to fall apart on British television I would forever be frozen in the moment.
Now tears and tantrums are obligatory. There’s hardly a contestant who hasn’t snivelled, trembled and called for their mum. I just happened to do it first, and I’ve given up hope of living it down. Sure, I can tell the truth: my mother had just died, my husband had left me. There were no psychological checks then, and I was in no fit state to be incarcerated with a camera recording my every whimper. That doesn’t matter.The table scene is enshrined in TV’s collective memory.
I didn’t appreciate the Faustian pact I was stumbling into, because there’d been no precedent. Celebrity Big Brother 2001 was the premiere of its type.
MATT Hancock doesn’t have that excuse. He must know it’s dangerous. Wanting the public to see “the real me” presupposes you are a great character. But what if the “real” you is what Joe Public already assumes, and you are a dodgy, self-serving bore?
That’s the danger of reality TV. It might show that you lack charisma, that you are a show-off or in Hancock’s case, that you are a hypocrite, happy to impose restrictions on others and flout them yourself. What if the 24-hour footage confirms the viewers’ worst imaginings? What if you waltz into the jungle merely loathed and leave universally hated?
Has Hancock not seen celebs wriggling in agony as rats run over their faces, and how their unlovely responses ruined years of reputation management? Did he not see the once worshipped Vinnie Jones be hoisted by the petard of his own temper, or actor Nigel Havers repel fans with his whining?
Could the former Health Secretary be taking a foolish risk? Or could he – perish the thought – have his eyes fixed on the money?