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The Scotsman accuses Channel 4 of hypocrisy.

Time for a reality check

Rick Hewett


If you thought Derren Brown’s fake Russian roulette stunt a few days ago showed British TV in a distasteful light, just wait until next week. Channel 4, in a triumph for Big Brother executives who have spent five fruitless years trying to capture rumpy pumpy through their peeping Tom cameras, is to show the first "live" sex on prime-time British TV.

The "consenting adults" are not your normal BB housemates intent on becoming minor celebrities. The giggling and fumbling under a duvet in a darkened room emanate from two 18-year-olds, Jade Dyer, a barmaid from Lowestoft, Suffolk, and Tommy Wright, a science student from Weymouth, Dorset.

The scenes are a dubious landmark for British reality TV, though what viewers are most likely to conclude is that the whole episode carries with it the whiff of classic TV hypocrisy.

Our young lovers appear in Teen Big Brother - The Experiment, a programme said to have been conceived with the notion of assessing the behaviour of a small group of teenagers in a controlled environment. It was commissioned by 4Learning, the educational programming department, and had been allocated a graveyard daytime slot as if to prove its serious credentials.

Predictably, however, when filming was completed, Channel 4’s ratings-hungry executives decided it had a mainstream winner on its hands, probably because the footage was peppered with yobbish behaviour and expletives. Suddenly, Teen BB became an "engaging, captivating and entertaining series about the world of Britain’s teenagers", deserving of "a larger audience". Which means we can all now enjoy this affirmation of teenage life at 10pm every day next week...

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