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Structured Reality: Designer Clothes, Fake Tans, Real Drama?

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British Youth Television

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Abstract

Reality TV plays a central role in British youth television, shaping channel identities in its noisy, cheeky, intoxicated image. Its popularity with the 16–34-year-old demographic together with its relatively low budgets (particularly in comparison with the development of original drama) have made it valuable in developing audiences for emerging digital youth channels. The celebrity docusoaps chronicling the lifestyle of former glamour model Katie Price virtually built ITV2 and, as Chapter 2 demonstrated, BBC Three’s sticky entanglement with reality TV in the mould of its reliable performers Snog, Marry, Avoid (2008–2013) and Don’t Tell the Bride (BBC Three/BBC One, 2007–) has indelibly shaped perceptions of the channel. This chapter continues my tracing of the relationship between teen TV and British youth television, exploring the early 2010s boom in ‘structured reality’ through analysis of ITV2’s The Only Way is Essex (2010–) (hereinafter TOWIE) and E4’s Made in Chelsea (2011–). Here the highly successful format of MTV’s Laguna Beach (2004–2006) and The Hills (2006–2010) was appropriated and glocalised to suit British audiences and channel identities, forming part of the transatlantic flows traced in Chapter 4.

An earlier version of this chapter was published as ‘Classed Femininity, Performativity, and Camp in British Structured Reality Programming’ in Television and New Media, 2014, 15(3), pp. 197–214

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Reading, Reading, Berkshire, UK

    Faye Woods

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Woods, F. (2016). Structured Reality: Designer Clothes, Fake Tans, Real Drama?. In: British Youth Television. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-44548-3_6

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