Terrace House (Netflix, 2012–)
Behold, a new dawn – nay, a new yawn – for the chronically uneventful hidden-camera series: a Japanese franchise that swaps the oscillating buttocks of reality TV tradition for the composed, unassuming buttocks of unscripted affability. Bye-bye gurning yahoos and orchestrated bellendry: hello thoughtful housemates, unstructured mundanity and conflict-free conversations of the “Where did you put the teaspoon, no, don’t get up, I can find it, ah here it is, silly me” genus. The result? Tedium. But a new type of tedium. A nice tedium. A tedium that somehow transcends mere tediousness and is instead oddly comforting, to the extent that, engrossed in a protracted scene in which the housemates talk about beef, you find yourself thinking, yes, this cheerily relentless domestic monotony, this beef, this is … not as bad as it could’ve been. In the dog-bore-dog world of uninteresting reality television, there can be no higher praise.
Shattered (Channel 4, 2004)
Hosted by an ashen, haunted Dermot O’Leary, this pop-science/reality/gameshow turducken challenged 10 participants to stay awake for a week in a bid to win £100,000. The outcome? Confusion, mainly, as the awakees responded to the rapid disintegration of their faculties by swatting at invisible wasps, shouting at dust and staggering around their purpose-built compound like depressed, woozy bison. So brutal was the monotony that viewers were plunged into a sort of dazed metaboredom, blinking expressionlessly as it all gave way to endless footage of media graduates bumping into coffee tables and saying, “It gets easier if you imagine you’re a bird.” Just who were the real guinea pigs here, eh? Eh? demanded the eight viewers who hadn’t yet choked to death on their own yawns. Answer came there none.
Shipwrecked (Channel 4, 2000-2012)
The stupefied leviathan around which T4 (C4’s unmourned weekend “youth slot”) jet-skied, Shipwrecked offered a sobering accompaniment to the nation’s hangover; its ever-changing flotilla of braying trustafarians and preening Hollyblokes providing a numbing reminder that all flesh is grass, even when it’s the type of flesh that says “Hey, what’s up you guys” in low-rise nylon cargo shorts. While the premise – well-proportioned twentysomethings are Crusoe-d on an idyllic island in the south Pacific – promised unstoppable bikinied woohoo, here instead was irrevocable, stonker-wilting proof that tropical exhibitionism counts for bog all when it’s conducted with the verve of a run-over espadrille. Cue 11 years of passive-aggressive baristas arguing about rice while absentmindedly clawing sand out of their bumcracks.
Big Brother 4 (Channel 4, 2003)
“Tell you what,” bellowed a Big Brother visionary as he micro-scootered triumphantly out of an Endemol toilet cubicle. “This ‘bums and shouting’ lark is all well and good, but what viewers really want to watch is a yawning fish trader discuss the differences between protons and photons with a data strategist from Staines.” He was wrong. But it was too late. Because here was Big Brother 4: The Dullening, a groundbreaking attempt to rejig the then three-year-old CCTV juggernaut by removing the stuff that made it interesting (bums, shouting) and replacing it with stuff that made it not merely not interesting (no bums, data strategists) but powerfully resistant to the very concept of interesting, like a virus made of Philip Hammond and knees. Ratings shrivelled in the ensuing snore-storm, thus ensuring strict future enforcement of the Bums and Shouting (Reality Television) Act 2000.
Castaway 2000 (BBC1, 2000)
Some reality series are born boring, some achieve boringness, and some have boringness thrust upon them. Castaway 2000, uniquely, was a combination of all three, a proactively leaden clusteryawn beset by production issues and the palpable irritation of its 36 participants, who channelled their dissatisfaction with the venture into a cavalcade of combative dullery. They ate soup. They looked at trowels. They wore quilted gilets and stood next to logs, one of which had a chin and was called Ben Fogle. The castaways took to their year-long task – establish a self-sufficient community on an uninhabited island in the Outer Hebrides or else, you bastards – like ducks to mortar. The upshot? A “social experiment” so boring it was like watching time-lapse footage of tectonic plates. Tectonic plates in quilted gilets, eating soup with Ben Fogle.
