The only reality is that people still care about TV

FAMOUSLY wrong pronouncements from the past: “The automobile is only a novelty” — a bank president in 1903 advising against investing in the Ford Motor Company.

“Four-piece groups with guitars particularly are finished” — a recording company executive in 1962, turning down The Beatles.

“The director of the MIT Media Lab predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the internet. Uh, sure” — a Newsweek contributor in 1995, dismissing the notion that e-commerce would ever catch on.

Famously wrong pronouncements from the more recent past: “Reality TV is dead” — just about every professional and armchair TV critic who ever felt like plucking out their own eyeballs and stuffing them in their ears to block the footage of yet another wannabe talking about the eviction nominations by the public who are talking about her talking about them talking about... you get the point.

Yet despite the obituary for Big Brother and its ilk having been written time and again in recent years, reality TV not only seems to live long but also to prosper.

Speculation surrounding the contestants in the latest series of Celebrity Big Brother was more intense than the guesswork that preceded the revelation of the third secret of Fatima.

It’s Mike Tyson! No, it’s actually another pugilist — bare-knuckle fighter and ‘star’ of My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, the one and only Paddy Doherty. It’s Pamela Anderson! Close! It’s actually Pamela Bach, girlfriend of Baywatch’s other leggy lovely, David Hasselhoff.

They’re joined by a collection of other oddities, dubiously titled celebrities, who make the main Irish interest, Jedward, look positively Hollywood A list.

In fact, with contestants like Kerry “human train wreck” Katona and Tara “I’ve just married a man who is not my boyfriend” Reid on board, the danger is that John and Edward will appear nice, normal and boring; a ratings disaster.

But where once Big Brother reigned supreme and solo, now it could be a contestant in a reality TV show chronicling the travails of reality TV shows.

Schedules are packed with shows urging other-wise ordinary folk or their celebrity counterparts to Come Dine, Dance, Ice-Skate, Sing, Muck Out Horses, Gobble A Maggot, Manage A Football Team or Boil A Live Lobster With Me.

TV3’s autumn line-up, revealed this week, was bubbling over with the genre, the latest additions to their reality-rich schedule being Southside Housewives, the absolutely fabulous lives of recession-resistant yummy mummies, and Tallafornia, which will chronicle the adventures of four mates and four mots sharing a house, with habits mature people shouldn’t really have.

And then there’s X Factor. Resuming tonight, it will once again showcase a group of gleam-toothed individuals battling it out for supremacy amid backbiting, bitching and breakdowns. And that’s just the judges.

So what’s the appeal? There is the lofty, intellectual explanation — that in our cold, modern, disconnected world, where we no longer know our neighbours, we crave intimacy and interaction, and watching people invite us into their daily lives, revealing their hopes, dreams and struggles, makes us feel less isolated.

Or, we’re just innately nosy, gossipy, pass-remark-able and begrudging and love it when others climb up a tall poppy stem so we can shake them back down and watch them scramble in the dirt for remnants of their dignity.

And what about those who claim to hate reality TV to such a degree that if there was a reality TV show featuring people who love to hate, they’d be first on the producer’s list?

Well, possibly they protest too much and despise not the programmes but the fact that they are a little fascinated with shows that draw out their nosy, gossipy, pass-remarkable, begrudging, intimacy-craving side.

Because one thing’s for sure — the reality of reality TV is that rumours of its death have been greatly exaggerated.