Reality TV bubble bursts as companies fail ‘duty of care’ responsibilities
The tragic death of Love Island star Mike Thalassitis, whose body was found in a north London park earlier this month, has raised questions about how fame, especially reality TV fame, is handled by the people who go through it.
It has also left many people, from former cast-mates of 26-year-old Thalassitis to British Health Secretary Matt Hancock, saying such shows need to do more to protect their contestants from the position they propel them to.
In 2000, the early days of what we now know as reality TV, no one gave much thought to ordinary people and the effect TV fame would have on them. ‘‘Duty of care’’ they now call it.
Television didn’t feature ‘‘ordinary people’’. It was reserved for actors in dramas or comedians or game show presenters. All already famous.
There were a few ordinary types, but not many. They featured in vox pops on local news bulletins, showing concern about new building developments. Or as a guest on a quiz show with a prominent name badge: they had to have a name badge because otherwise we wouldn’t know their name. We’d never seen them before, we’d never see them again. No one unknown was made famous by television. It just didn’t happen.
But in 2000, things started to change. In January that year, Castaway 2000 began and, in July, Big Brother launched. But even they weren’t supposed to turn unknowns into celebrities. They were social experiments, where members of the public were left on a Hebridean island or locked in a house in east London to see how they got on.
The latter had been a hit in the Netherlands, native country of show creator John de Mol, but hadn’t made anyone famous. In Britain, they didn’t become famous either, at first. The early weeks saw ‘‘housemates’’ have intense conversations into the early hours or feed the chickens or read a book.
Then one contestant, Nick Bateman, tried to fix the show and he was suddenly ‘‘Nasty Nick’’, the reality TV scoundrel who was thrown out of the house and into a celebrity world where he was invited to film premieres, had his photo taken with Brad Pitt and ended up on the front page of The Sun.