Recalling reality TV’s strangest chapter

They quit their jobs and left their homes, but the TV fame they were promised was an elaborate mirage

By Helen BROWN

Is this part of the game? Is there another camera around here or something?” asks Jane Marshall, 21, as she wanders round a park in New Cross Gate, south-east London. It is June 2002 and she, along with a group of equally bewildered young people, has no idea why she is there. Wobbly, handheld-camera footage captures the group, soaked to the skin in the pouring rain, passports ready in their backpacks, as they slowly realise they have nowhere to go. They were supposed to be on television. They were supposed to be famous.

In Amazon Prime Video’s threepart documentary The Greatest Show Never Made, we learn that Marshall was among 30 “lucky” contestants selected – from among hundreds of applicants who replied to a small advert in The Stage – to take part in a new reality-television show that required them to leave their jobs and homes for one year in exchange for £100,000. Marshall and her fellow “contestants” gave everything up for a shot at realityTV glory.

However, on arrival in London, there was no show, no money and no place for them to stay. They were handed contracts challenging them to find food and shelter, and make themselves £1 million by a charismatic young “TV producer” – then calling himself Nikita Russian. In essence, they were told to earn their own prize money. Unwilling to relinquish their dreams, Marshall’s small group decamped for a week to the home of amateur cameraman Tim Eagle – just as confused and hoodwinked as the others – to give Russian a chance to make good on his promises. Eagle kept the camera rolling.

“If that kind of thing happened today,” says the documentary’s director, Ashley Francis-Roy, “they’d all have had their phones out, googling to see if it was a scam. People are more tech and media savvy now. But 2002 was a more innocent time. Reality TV was just starting to make stars of normal people, and these young people all thought they were on the brink of transforming their lives.” He sighs.

Reality TV, however, was changing, with what Francis-Roy describes as “the innocence” of the first two series of Channel 4’s Big Brother (2000-2001) giving way to “a real nastiness”. The small screen’s anthropology lab was becoming its coliseum.

“Those early shows were quite simple, weren’t they?” he says. “People sitting around, drinking tea, feeding the chickens.” But by series three – which began airing a few days before Nik Russian’s contestants assembled in London – Francis-Roy says it was starting to become clear that the show was making “heroes and villains” of its stars. That year was the first to divide housemates into “rich and poor” areas, with the winner, Kate Lawler, recently admitting that she barely remembers her time in the Big Brother house because of the unlimited alcohol that the contestants were all encouraged to drink. In a neat twist, Eagle’s footage captures the group huddled together in his living room, watching Big Brother, still hoping they too were on some sort of reality-TV show.

That series of Big Brother would make enduring stars of its contestants, including Lawler (now a DJ on Virgin Radio), Alison Hammond (This Morning and Bake Off), and Jade Goody, the relentlessly cheery daughter of a drug addict and a pimp, who got drunk, got naked and admitted she had no idea where East Anglia was (“East Angular? Is it abroad?”), before going on to be known in the tabloids as “the most hated woman in Britain”.

“A lot of people think public shaming and cancel culture began with social media,” says Francis-Roy. “But although it happens faster today, it was still happening back in 2002.” It happened to Russian when his contestants found out that he was not a big-shot producer but “just some guy who worked in a bookshop”. So they trapped him in Eagle’s flat and invited reporters from London Tonight to grill him over why he’d upended their lives. “We wanted to hoist him with his own petard,” says Eagle.

However, while the contestants’ anger with Russian is understandable, the footage of him being held hostage and then hauled over the coals now makes uncomfortable viewing. “He really felt wounded, scared,” says Francis-Roy. “He was recognised in the street, in pubs. He talked to us about having been left homeless, marooned, becoming an alcoholic. He says he was in a really dark place for 10 years.” After his dubious reality-TV escapade failed, Russian disappeared completely. The documentary, with some difficulty and a private detective, tracked him down.

Francis-Roy says Russian – now a novelist, under a different name – was “very nervous” about participating in the documentary. “He’d been demonised before. It was a long journey, convincing him that we just wanted to understand what he was trying to do and why.”

More fantasist than con man, Russian turns out to have been born Keith Anthony Gillard, in Surrey in 1977. Francis-Roy tracked down comedy videos that Gillard had made as a boy, which he says reveal a sharp wit and “amazing creative energy”. But Gillard suffered some kind of trauma in his mid-teens that caused him to leave home. He legally changed his name, first to Jack Lister, before beginning an English degree at Goldsmiths, dropping out and rebranding as Nikita Russian.

“I didn’t ever get the sense that Nik was malicious, or that he wanted to harm people,” says Francis-Roy. “I think he really wanted to make a reality-TV show.

BIG BROTHER

2005

So many to choose from, but arguably the nadir was the moment an inebriated Kinga Karolczak became, er, intimate with a wine bottle. A nation’s jaw dropped

He had some good ideas and the right intentions. But something went very wrong.”

Looking back now, the contestants all agree that Russian was a compelling salesman. Tall, handsome, clever and just a little enigmatic, he added a dash of glamour by auditioning them on Ravens Ait island in the Thames.

While The Greatest Show Never Made humanises Russian – “He’s still a smart, charming guy,” says Francis-Roy – it doesn’t let him off the hook. We see his victims thoughtfully picking through the emotional damage caused by his thoughtless – arguably narcissistic – stunt. Participant John Comyn, for one, says that the incident left him unable to take further risks in life. Working his way through the hours of footage they shot during their week together, Francis-Roy saw their giddy optimism melt into helplessness, anger and despair. “Even now, they are all hurt and embarrassed,” he says. “There was another documentary about them made shortly afterwards, and people joked about them being ‘a bunch of idiots who got conned’. They didn’t keep in touch.”

Although Francis-Roy says he would have loved to let them all sit down and speak with Russian, he ended up having to interview them separately. “Nik would have just found it too overwhelming to meet them again.” He tells me he was particularly pleased to show Russian his footage of Marshall saying the whole experience gave her the boost she needed to change her life. “Nik almost couldn’t compute that,” he says. “None of them was going to say, ‘Oh, Nik, we love you.’ But I think everyone now has a more nuanced narrative in their minds about what happened and why it happened.”

So, does Francis-Roy feel that he is part of a more sophisticated, compassionate media? “Yes, I think so,” he nods. “We always wanted this documentary to leave both Nik and the contestants feeling able to move forward feeling a little better, a little lighter.” Does he think the new series of Big Brother – which begins on Sunday on ITV – will be any kinder to the contestants? He shrugs: “Viewers and contestants are all much more aware of how reality TV is constructed these days, aren’t they? But it’ll be interesting to see if it tries to go back to its roots.”

The Greatest Show Never Made is on Amazon Prime Video from Wednesday; Big Brother begins on ITV on Sunday, 9pm

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