Whom the Gods of TV can create, they can also tear asunder

IT was a busy afternoon last July, by Tarbert pier on the Isle of Harris. As cars were marshalled for the ferry and tourists ambled about, I was being interviewed for an upcoming episode of The One Show – by Ben Fogle.

Television is a tedious medium, full of artifice. Fogle and I had to walk side-byside towards a cameraman walking backwards, and we had to do it six or seven times, soundbite upon soundbite, our smiles ever more glazed, before the gesticulating director was satisfied.

There was, too, incessant interruption – people running up with things for Fogle to autograph, or pressing forward offspring eager for a selfie. It struck me that this gentle chap with the tired eyes is really, really famous.

Most politicians can amble down a high street with little attention, as – off the pitch and out of kit – can many of the most eminent footballers. But Fogle cannot move, even in the Outer Hebrides, without folk gawking and pointing.

It was here it all began, of course, with the shrieky Castaway 2000 show, when the BBC dumped several dozen ‘ordinary people’ on the long-deserted Isle of Taransay, off Harris’s famed golden beaches, to somehow form a community and stick it out for a year.

It scored huge ratings and made Ben Fogle a celebrity. It was the first of the ‘reality TV shows’ that have dominated 21st-century broadcasting, brought fame and fortune to some and ignominious unhappiness to others.

We were reminded bleakly of this last weekend, when the body of Mike Thalassitis, 26, was found hanging in his local park. No, I had never heard of him either but two years ago the bronzed, fit young barber was very briefly a celebrity on Love Island, a creepy ITV2 show where improbably pretty young people are thrown together in a Mallorca villa.

We, the nation – or such as care for this sort of thing – then await their couplings, thrupplings and, for all I know, quadruplings. Thalassitis – ‘I’m the Greek god these girls have been waiting for!’ – lasted scarcely two weeks.

Described by those who knew him as thoughtful and sensitive – he became his grandmother’s carer – he never recovered from the exposure, or the passing of his brief fame.

HE was not Love Island’s first victim. Last year, Sophie Gradon died in unexplained circumstances, still reviled on social media as the girl who had ‘done it in the wardrobe’.

Tomorrow marks the tenth anniversary of the death of Jade Goody, a gormless if indefinably endearing Bermondsey lass made famous by 2002’s Big Brother and then ruined by imprudent 2007 return. She typified the talentless celebrity created overnight by such pap, and was still only 27 when she succumbed to cervical cancer, leaving two very small boys.

Even winning these shows is no guarantee of success. There was dancing in the streets of West Lothian when crooner Leon Jackson, frae Whitburn, in 2007 won the X Factor.

Yet his career failed to ignite. By 2009 he had been dropped by his record label and he has since been heard of performing on cruise liners and – oh, cruel world – his Wikipedia entry hasn’t been updated since 2011. Yet these programmes persist, even if Big Brother has now declined socially to Chan- nel 5, the X Factor is an increasingly stale, exhausted franchise, and even The Apprentice is now getting a bit… old.

They endure because they are cheap to make and tens of thousands want to appear on them – for free. Nearly four times as many people this year applied for the cast of Love Island as sought places at Oxford or Cambridge.

Yet there is a casual cruelty about these programmes which the British, even in the 1980s, would have refused to countenance. We have long enjoyed characters being put through the mill in fiction, from Tess of the d’Urbervilles to the dozens sent to horrible deaths in the darkly funny novels of Muriel Spark. But the people manipulated and humiliated in reality TV are not imagined and the damage is real.

At least four of the Castaway 2000 cast endured mental breakdowns even as the show grew nastier and more ruthless with each passing month.

It is far worse now. ‘The genre has changed and morphed beyond all recognition,’ says Ben Fogle. ‘In many ways it has become unreality TV – often heavily scripted, edited and produced. What hasn’t changed is its ability to produce instant, overnight celebrity.

‘It is the Pot Noodle of fame. And just like the snack, it isn’t healthy. Unlike actors, sportsmen and women and musicians, who have normally spent a lifetime building to their moment of fame, reality TV stars become famous overnight and the fame they achieve is superficial.

‘Everyone in the public eye has an expiration date but the less substance there is to your achievements, the shorter your time in the limelight…’

FOGLE himself had advantages most lured into the genre do not – well educated, training in the Royal Naval Reserve, a passion for adventure and for physical fitness and, from 2006, a happy marriage.

He has written a barrowload of books, made many awardwinning programmes, adopted assorted good causes, rowed the Atlantic and climbed Everest. Yet he, too, had a breakdown after Castaway 2000, and still confesses to ‘wobbles’, despite a strong support network and a close family life.

In 2013, he spent a night in hospital after trying to fling himself out of a window – some stranger had spiked his drink in the pub. In his company, in a most public situation, there is something palpably hunted about him, though Fogle’s patience and good humour never flag. One understands why so much of his work takes him to wild, isolated, places where he cannot be accosted or ‘papped’. But hundreds of others, granted brief celebrity (or infamy) by the reality TV industry, have since slid from obscurity into oblivion. Now, two young people are dead.

‘You get a psychological evaluation before,’ said Love Island co-star Dom Lever, after the Thalassitis tragedy, ‘and after you go on the show – but hands down once you are done… you don’t get any support unless you’re number one.’

Change will now come: practically everyone who ever appeared on Love Island has this week had a solicitous call from its producers. Yet they continue to sift through the thousands of auditioning hopefuls for 2019 – with an especially eager eye for damaged ones: the credulous, the vulnerable, the melodramatic and the attention seeking.

‘I read of the suicide of Mike Thalassitis, the 2017 Love Island contestant, with horror,’ mused one past Love Island contestant this week, ‘but no surprise that such a young, and seemingly lucky, man should be felled by his experiences.

‘It was only ever a matter of time until reality TV actually killed someone.’