Channel Five obviously thought it was onto a winner with Back To Reality. A £4.7m budget, 12 contestants from other reality shows - including Big Brother's Jade Goody and Pop Idol's Rik Waller - in a purpose-built house, their every move followed by a whizz-bang production operation featuring 80 cameras, 150 staff and 100km of cable. And the seal of approval from the ultimate arbiter of must-see TV, Heat magazine, which is sponsoring the show.
So what's gone wrong? Seven days into its three-week run, Back To Reality has more the feel of previous reality show flops such as Survivor or Jailbreak. Ratings for the main 8pm show dipped by 1m viewers from the promising 1.8m for last Sunday's opening episode, and have stubbornly held at around 800,000 viewers. This is still a pretty good result for Five in that slot - but pretty lousy for a show that the broadcaster has sunk around 3% of its programming budget into and marketed as one of the major events of its early 2004 schedule.
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