THE BRITISH ARE COMING AND THEY WANT TO SWAP OUR WIVES

It’s widely believed that the British started reality tv – in fact most people agree we are responsible for the whole lot of it.

Sorry about that.  

Yes, I am a Brit. I have a chirpy manner, an insatiable desire to correct Americans’ use of the word ‘irony’, and an unnatural love of “chim-en-eys”.  

Of course, if I were personally responsible for all of reality TV I’d be happy to welcome each and every one of you round to my place up on Mulholland Drive for another raucous night of champagne Jacuzzis and all night partying with the catwalk models I would have bought with cash from Tyra Banks.  

Yes, that would be nice.  

For those of you paying close attention, I did not come up with The Apprentice, Survivor, Who Wants to be a Millionaire, The Weakest Link, Wife Swap, Super Nanny, Dancing with the Stars, American Idol nor America’s Got Talent… but I know some people who did.  

They’re indeed British. And they have very nice houses.  And no champagne left this morning.

But, today’s blog is about a strange phenomenon in this tv invasion that I find quite puzzling. Some of you might even find some hope in it.  

I was recently back in the UK, and watched the finale of the British version of ‘The Apprentice’. In the UK this BBC smash hit/cultural phenomenon has whipped up the nation in ways not seen since the awesome ‘The Queen Visits Some People’ newsreel, or the last public hanging of a dentist.  

Maybe it’s me, maybe it’s the last 5 years of my living in the USA – but frankly, I found the show really, genuinely, mind-numbingly boring. Yes, as a Brit some of you will think that last sentence rather strongly worded.  

I’m sure in some olden-days time, this would have been considered treason.  

Over there, instead of The Donald, they have a graying businessman, with an equally chequered business history as Trump, by the name of Sir Alan Sugar. He’s bombastic, cheeky and charming in turns. Nothing wrong with that casting at all. Nor with the arrogant, smartly dressed assortment of hopeful Apprentices. Nothing wrong at all.  

What WAS wrong was that it was just, well, boring. Nothing happened. It was slow, it was ill conceived, it was lacking in any drama at all. It was better shot that the American version – I’ll give it that. Yes, it is a longer slot to fill, showing as it does on the BBC with no commercials, (about 8 minutes longer). Yes, the British audiences are ok with leaving a talking head on screen for longer than 5 seconds, unlike their US counterparts.  

But it was more than that. Screening as it is on a public broadcaster network – it felt to me just LAZY. There’s no real balls to it, no competitive edge, the sort that I felt we are constantly in pursuit of in the USA working on shows for ABC. We are always trying to raise our game, get better shots, tell better stories, think of even bigger, better ideas, all the time. We have competitors, we have peer pressure – we have Nielsen figures.  

So it struck me, suddenly in a moment of strange, guilt-ridden clarity, (the kind that you get when you realize for the first time that your parents are real people and might actually be talking bollocks from time to time), that while the British might have come up with the ideas for these shows originally - they just don’t have that, ‘killer’ instinct, and still need a good ‘ol chunk of American market forces to make the best of them.  

I think, uniquely, in reality tv it is exactly that mix of British ideas and American desire for raising the stakes that creates the quality of production we’re used to over here. And while I’d rather watch a British soccer match in Britain, there’s nowhere in the world I’d rather watch a Wife get Swapped, a Super Nanny, or an American Idol do their stuff than in America.