Reality Matters_ 19 Writers Come Clean About the Shows We Can't Stop Watching - Anna David [18]
My first thought was: Why me? I might have attracted a little bit of notoriety in connection with How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, a book I’d written about trying (and failing) to take Manhattan, but I was hardly a household name. This would surely be held against me in the yellow press. I imagined various articles complaining about the fact that such a total nonentity had been selected to take part in a program supposedly featuring “celebrities.” I would end up being ranked somewhere below Kato Kaelin in the micro-celebrity pecking order: I’d become famous for not being famous.
Shortly afterward, I was offered another reality show—only this one was even less appealing. It was called Celebrity Wife Swap, and the woman I would have to exchange Caroline for was Jade Goody.
For the uninitiated, Jade was a contestant on the third British series of Big Brother whose main claim to fame used to be that she was…well, not very bright. Here are a few of the things she said on the program:
“Where is East Angular? Is it abroad?”
“Rio de Janeiro—that’s a person.”
“Saddam Hussein—that’s a boxer.”
“A ferret is a bird.”
“Who is Heinzstein?”
“Mother Teresa is from Germany.”
“Sherlock Holmes invented toilets.”
“What’s a sparagus? Do you grow it?”
“You see those things [on peacocks’ feathers]? Don’t think I’m being daft…but them things that look like eyes, are they their real eyes?”
“Jonny, I’m not being tictactical here.”
“They were trying to use me as an escape goat.”
“Do they speak Portuganese in Portugal? I thought Portugal was in Spain.”
Jade subsequently got cancer—a fact she learned while participating in the Indian version of Big Brother—and was instantly transformed from a standing joke into a national treasure. Indeed, her last months were played out in another reality show—this one about her life—and there was something weirdly impressive about the total shamelessness with which she exploited the genre. What Oprah is to afternoon talk shows, Jade was to reality TV—and she made a small fortune.
But it wasn’t just Jade I was worried about when it came to Celebrity Wife Swap. Her then boyfriend was an attractive, twenty-three-year-old television host called Jeff Brazier. He was precisely the sort of cheeky Cockney geezer that Caroline had a weakness for. What if something actually happened between them? I could envisage a scenario in which I woke up the day after Celebrity Wife Swap had been broadcast to discover two dozen reporters camped on my doorstep, all of them wanting to know how it felt to be cuckolded on national television. Front and center would be the News of the World, having concluded a six-figure deal with Caroline courtesy of her newly appointed publicity agent. The most I could hope for would be an appearance on a special edition of Jerry Springer in which half a dozen men who’d been betrayed by their partners on reality shows would have a chance to confront them. It would very quickly spiral out of control and Jeff would end up flooring me with a right hook. I would officially become Britain’s biggest loser. No woman would ever go out with me again.
Still, the prospect of appearing on a reality show was mighty tempting. The emergence of “reality” as an all-conquering television genre—both in Britain and in America—was one of the biggest media stories of the decade, and as a journalist I longed for an opportunity to get a look at this phenomenon up close. In contrast to Celebrity Wife Swap and Celebrity Big Brother, The Other Boat Race felt relatively