[Amy]

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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[Skip]

Here in Australia, 2004 will bring 44 - 50 reality shows to air. Even now in February our main free2air stations are all competing at prime time with reality and the ratings are diving. Much of the interest and high ratings of reality TV seems to have dissolved and people are turning off. This is particularly true of the homegrown series. Australian Idol was the last big winner, and the current series of Survivor (All stars) & Queer Eye for the Straight Guy are winning viewers, but thats it. Big budgets are being wasted. Hopefully Big Brother will be able to stand up to this viewer back flip. I personally love reality TV, but there really is just far too much of it on tv in Australia.

[BusyBee]

I think we too have had reality tv overload with the tv companies thinking this it is a sure fire ratings winner to pick a selection of wannabees and put them in ever unrealistic situations and expect the viewers to watch.

Sorry we have more taste. For a reality show to be successful it has to be of top quality. This is one of the reasons why back to reality has not been a success - we just dont care enough about the people involved.