Neighbourhood watching

As the last few clumps of firework ash slowly drop from the skies over Elstree, Big Brother fans will be contemplating life without their favourite dose of carefully stage-managed 'reality'. After ten years spent dominating the schedules, the front pages of the tabloids, and conversations around the water-cooler, TV junkies are facing an uncertain future.

Or are they? It turns out that Channel 4 has another trick up its sleeve to satiate our hunger for interminable shows about ordinary people - stretching that particular definition to breaking point in the process. 'Seven Days' is a bold new concept in democratic documentary programming, in effect turning editorial control over to the viewers.

Focusing on the lives of the eclectic people of London's Notting Hill, the new show is described as "part-reality show, part-soap and part-documentary." Presumably, the eclecticism might actually involve a slightly more diverse crowd than the well-heeled white faces who exclusively populate the borough in the mind of Richard Curtis.

Ostensibly another long-running show about regular people doing regular things, it promises to make the output of Mike Leigh look like Michael Bay's back catalogue. But what's really different this time, is the role that viewers will play in the ongoing series.

According to executive producer Stephen Lambert, "This programme not only disobeys that conventional reality TV rule, it actively encourages it, through a new interactive part of the show called Chat-Nav." This oddly named function will enable viewers to connect with the show's characters between episodes, "offering advice on dilemmas and decisions they are making in their lives." It's not enough that these people will be suffering the trials and tribulations of every day life in front of a bank of cameras, they'll also have illiterate teenagers from Birmingham advising them on how to handle that big job interview.

Since the show takes place in the 'real world', its participants will also be encouraged to discuss pressing social issues - which hopefully will amount to more than just Katie Price's parenting skills or Gemma Arterton's shorts. Given the current state of debate around current affairs, it's a little ambitious to expect everyday people to get caught up in a heated exchange around matters of "religion, morality and sexuality." If the show's cast are anything like the 'ordinary people' we've seen on Big Brother, we'll be lucky if they know how to boil an egg.

Channel 4 might be trying to convince us that they've selected a fascinating cast of 'real people', but the claim that they "wouldn't think twice about revealing all about their lives" suggests another group of intolerable exhibitionists.

Another issue that may hinder the success of this admittedly bold concept, is the troubling issue of self-awareness. It's now commonplace for anyone leaving a reality show to complain about damning character assassinations planned in the editors' room. As though anyone with more than a few weeks' experience on Avid could misrepresent a mild-mannered university student as a chain-smoking, racist nymphomaniac.

With the show being aired in real time, the participants will be able to see how they're coming across to the general public and adapt their behaviour accordingly. The moment they see how the press is interpreting their behaviour, it's guaranteed that they'll dial those characteristics up to 11, making the fly-on-the-fourth-wall show about as authentic as Balamory.

Lambert might claim that "Seven Days is a new kind of reality, what happens when you take the walls down. In reality shows like Big Brother in the past we have put people in an enclosed space and watched what happened to them. Seven Days is going to break down those walls and break all the normal rules."

Unfortunately, the biggest rule the show looks set to break, is the unwritten one about "Ignore thy neighbour". Modern London life has become so insular that if someone's house caught fire, their neighbours would only intervene to ask them to keep the noise down. If we struggle to care about the people who live on our own street, what makes Channel 4 think we'll give two hoots about someone else's neighbours?

Size is everything

Pity the poor unauthorised biographer. Their lot can't be a happy one. All that time spent poring over back issues of OK! magazine whilst waiting for a root canal. Or fishing through the bins of their favourite celebrity in the hope of finding some greasy tidbit to help piece together the details of their private life. 

Given the lack of access they have to their chosen subject though, it's easy to understand how such a hack might grow to resent the very talent they're writing about. Take Alison Bowyer for example. She's an obnoxious hack who fills in her time between poorly-reviewed character-assassinations, by penning equally ugly little articles for the tabloids. 

Having already coughed up two dodgy 'biographies' of corpulent comedienne Dawn French, she's penned a new article about her favourite subject for the Daily Mail. Apparently, Alison thinks that Dawn is a hypocrite for criticising people who make jokes about people of girth, sorry - fatties. Because, according to Bowyer at least, Dawn has made an entire career out of fat jokes. 

Although it's tempting to wonder whether she even understands how comedy works. For instance, she cites Dawn's famous appearances as Pamela Anderson, suggesting that the joke was Dawn's size. Actually, the joke was actually the unconvincing and preposterous nature of the recreations - as with all of French & Saunders' spoofs.

Then again, maybe that's why Alison is so unhappy with Dawn's PC ouburst - because she clearly finds fat people hilarious. She describes the Vicar of Dibley as being funny thanks to Dawn looking "so gargantuan in her black cassock and absurd tartan pyjamas." If that's all it took to get the audiences falling about laughing, Richard Curtis could have just taken the the last decade off work. Maybe then we'd have been spared Love, Actually and The Boat That Rocked - so not a bad idea in itself. 

As usual with the Mail, money also has to come into it, with Bowyer claiming Dawn's "expanding waistline has been the making of her career (the spoils of which include a £3 million home in Cornwall and a £2million residence in Berkshire)". I love the fact that writers at the Mail still use words like 'spoils' - conjuring up an image of Dawn French dressed like a highway robber on a Thelwell Pony. 

Dawn's biggest sin, however, is her unwillingness to be disgusted and ashamed by her size. In Bowyer's skewed world view, Dawn is actively waging a "campaign against her slimmer sisters (she refers to non-fatties as 'coat-hangers')". Of course, none of this is true. In fact, the 'coat-hanger' comment was made in an interview 15 years ago, in relation to the skinny women that men choose to wear like accessories. Still, the way Bowyer spins it, Dawn thinks everyone should have cardio-vascular disease and a mobility scooter. 


Regardless of how many more unauthorised volumes Bowyer chooses to scribble, the fact remains, she'll never get any closer to understanding Dawn French. Not because she's an inordinately complicated woman, but because she's happy. She looks in the mirror and sees comfort, beauty and femininity, rather than a bunch of problems that can be blamed on someone else. In the world of the Daily Mail, that's the biggest mystery of all.