‘It came to me in a dream’: The strange history of madcap reality TV shows

In Squid Game, Netflix’s wildly successful Korean drama about a dystopian gameshow, the stakes are life or death. Contestants are prepared to risk it all for a shot at the 45 billion won prize pot – and might pay for one wrong move with their life. It’s disturbing stuff. But if you watched it and thought, “Hey, how hard can it actually be to beat that giant doll at Grandmother’s Footsteps?”, then the streamer has launched the spin-off just for you. Squid Game: The Challenge sees 456 ordinary people take on the childhood games familiar from the original drama, while living in an uncanny recreation of the show’s set, complete with Escher-like stairs and institutional bunk beds stacked five storeys high. Each of the green tracksuited players hopes to walk away with the highest jackpot ever seen in the history of reality TV: $4.56m (£3.6m).

It’s a pretty audacious concept: to take the drama’s searing critique of capitalism, and turn it into a cash grab. But the hit-and-miss history of reality TV is littered with big, bizarre ideas. There are glittering success stories and failures that land with a thud: for every Strictly Come Dancing, there’s a Splash! There are concepts that take a little while to warm up, but have you hooked by the end of episode one (like last year’s word-of-mouth hit The Traitors, or the weird but somehow wonderful Masked Singer). And there are shows that leave you wondering, “How on earth did they come up with this?” The ones you think you might have hallucinated, until you go down an internet black hole and confirm that yes, in 2005, the Channel 4 show Space Cadets really did convince a dozen Brits that they were undergoing cosmonaut training at a Russian military base, before blasting off into space (they were, in fact, in an old RAF base in Suffolk the whole time). 

So how do you know when you’ve got a Traitors-sized hit on your hands, and when your idea is best confined to Alan Partridge’s dictaphone? It’s not an exact science, of course, but a good reality concept tends to boil down to a universal truth: we humans like to see others being pushed to the limit, whether that’s physically or emotionally (and to wonder how we would react under similar circumstances). Would we become the alpha lad of the Love Island villa, or would we be more of a Curtis Pritchard? Would we start dry-heaving under pressure like one Squid Game: The Challenge contestant?

“There’s some [element of] putting yourself in the shoes of another person: do you measure up to them, or could you be better than them?” says Tim Harcourt, executive producer of Squid Game: The Challenge and creative director at Studio Lambert, the production company behind shows such as The Traitors and Naked Attraction. The original Squid Game, suggests his fellow exec producer John Hay, CEO of The Garden, was “an incredible drama for getting to the nub of this universal thing about examining character under pressure”. And that’s something that’s “at the heart of a lot of great unscripted formats”, he says, whether they are as heavily codified as The Challenge or a “very pure, no rules, super authentic version of a reality show” like Alone, another of The Garden’s recent shows, where contestants are dropped into the wilderness to fend for themselves. 

That drive to see what happens when humans are placed under really quite stressful situations was also at the heart of the largely forgotten reality curio Upstaged, which aired on BBC Three in 2008. Instead of being dropped into the wilds of Canada, though, contestants were placed in glass boxes in the centre of Bristol – and asked to perform to passers-by for six whole hours. Most of them were “hoping for fame”, explains author Ruth Kelly (this was the heyday of The X Factor, after all), who served as a writer on the show and relayed all the highlights from the live feed to readers online. There were musicians, pole dancers and “a guy called Terry the Odd Job Man” (the Bristolian tradesman alter ego of comedian Jody Kamali), who’d been voted into those boxes by the public. 

But during their six-hour stint, they’d tend to exhaust their sets and be forced to improvise, with one eye still on gaining enough votes to stay in the competition. “You’re trapped in a small, confined space, you have to perform and you don’t know what to do,” Kelly says. “So what comes out? Absurd things. People start saying weird things, and that’s when you see someone’s true personality, when the curtains are drawn back.” Some contestants, she says, “would just sit on the floor, almost out of protest, like they were just bored out of their brains. And I’m pretty sure someone kicked off at one point and got a warning”. Upstaged is far from the only time that reality producers have really leaned into the whole “goldfish bowl” metaphor. In 2006’s The Box, contestants lived in a glass box in Dublin, working together to build up a jackpot during the day then going head to head against each other in order to take it home. And in 2014, US network ABC aired The Glass House, a sort of super-transparent Big Brother, where 14 people lived in a house made of glass, with cameras recording them at all times. 

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And if any of those ideas sound like something plucked from a fever dream? Sometimes (albeit rarely), a concept might well be just that. “I literally woke up one morning, and the words in my head were ‘I wanna marry Harry’ – I don’t know where that came from,” says Danny Fenton, CEO of Zig Zag Productions and creator of the Fox reality show of that name. It was 2013, and Prince Harry was still a party-loving singleton. Americans, Fenton thought, tended to clamour over anything royal; plus, the US had a solid track record with dating shows like The Bachelor. So why not combine the two?  “I had this weird dream, I rang up my agent in America, he said ‘Give me an hour,’” the producer recalls. Fox snapped up I Wanna Marry ‘Harry’ almost immediately. “Sometimes the best ideas are a title and then you work out what the idea is from there,” he says. “I wish I’d had a few more I Wanna Marry ‘Harry’ dreams and woken up with a fully formed idea in my head. But that title, those four words, are the easiest and best sale I’ve ever done. If you can sell a show in four words, there’s nothing better than that.”

The show followed 12 American women who travelled to Englefield House in Berkshire to compete for the affections of “an eligible bachelor from Europe”, Fenton explains. “They were brought to a castle and the first thing they saw was a ginger-haired guy getting out of a helicopter on the lawn from a distance,” Fenton says. “And they turned to each other and said, ‘Oh my God, do you think it’s Prince Harry?’” The “ginger-haired guy” in question was actually 23-year-old Matt Hicks, an environmental officer from Exeter. Fenton’s team had “auditioned about 500 Harry lookalikes under NDA, everywhere from Ireland to Australia” before anointing Hicks as their chosen one. The contestants were never actually told outright that Hicks was Harry, Fenton stresses: they made that cognitive leap themselves. But there were more than a few hints to nudge them in that direction, like the photoshopped snaps of Hicks with Prince William placed oh so casually around the house. “A lot of people subsequently said, ‘Did you mislead them into the fact that they were going to marry Prince Harry?’” the producer says.“But in truth, they convinced themselves that it was Prince Harry without us having to labour the point.”  Some of the women, he adds, “believed it was Harry, some weren’t sure, but they went with it, and some were maybe more sceptical, but they were part of a reality competition show and didn’t want to break the premise”.

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Sometimes an idea is topical, ripped from the headlines. I Wanna Marry ‘Harry’ capitalised on our collective fascination with the “spare” prince’s romantic life. And more than a decade earlier, in 2005, ITV’s Ladette to Lady was inspired by contemporary reports of a new wave of hard-partying, heavy-drinking and foul-mouthed women (the tabloid press lapped up their antics but rushed to censoriously condemn them at the same time). “Some very smart person in the development team at [production company] RDF Television spotted that the word ‘ladette’ had been entered into the Oxford English Dictionary,” explains producer Rod Williams. 

The mid-Noughties, he adds, was “a heyday of social experiments” on TV, and a handful of popular reality shows “in which young contemporary Britons were put into historical experiments” had already been broadcast: That’ll Teach ‘Em on Channel 4 saw modern teens take exams in a Fifties grammar school, while Lads’ Army put a group of young men through National Service training (Penny Mordaunt would surely approve). “That was the backdrop that paved the way for [producers to ask]: why don’t we recreate a finishing school and see what happens when we send ladettes to it?”

At first, “it was not at all clear how to make [the show] work”; some were sceptical as to whether any ladettes would actually want to sign up for this process. The key, Williams says, was to double down on authenticity: rather than dreaming up a make-believe school, the producers had a stroke of luck when the family who owned Eggleston Hall finishing school in County Durham allowed them to reopen the premises for filming. They recruited teachers who’d worked at similar institutions, too. “Otherwise, the sense of artificiality and absurdity that hedged the idea could have proved fatal to it,” he says. “This grounded it in actual history and reality.” 

Would the ladettes, dressed in their new twinsets and kitten heels, rebel? Would they have an Eliza Doolittle-style reaction, bristling against their upper-class tutors? To a certain extent, yes. There was some not-so-sneaky drinking and smoking. But, Williams says, “one of our production issues was that they were flattened by the staff and so intimidated that they ceased to be ladettes to begin with and became diligent students”. At points, “they were so immersed in the school, we had to sort of remind them, ‘Do you realise this is actually a television programme? You’re not just at school,’ because they were so gripped by the regime.” 

The participants, Williams says, were essentially “people appearing in a documentary”; if you tried to remake it now, “everyone would have an agent”, as the reality game has become so much more commercialised. And maybe if it had been made a few years later, perhaps the ladettes would have gone into the experiment thinking that they had signed up for, say, a wild trip to Magaluf, only to learn the truth in a dramatic reveal. Those big switch-ups became a reality mainstay in the late Noughties (and they’ve stuck around: contestants on Netflix’s Too Hot To Handle tend to think they’re participating in a very different dating show). Tool Academy, which arrived in the UK in 2011, was all about that “shock reveal”, explains executive producer Shannon Delwiche. A group of men would arrive on set thinking that they had signed up for a show that celebrated their laddishness; soon after, they’d learn that their partners had in fact signed them up to Tool Academy, hoping that they would learn how to become a better-behaved boyfriend. 

Building elaborate tasks for this initial “fake” show could be logistically tricky – not least because the crew didn’t always know what was about to happen. “I always say it was like throwing a surprise party for 50 people,” Delwiche says. “I couldn’t tell my crew what was happening a lot of the time… If any of it gets out, then it doesn’t work.” And of course, there were ethics to consider, too. “We filmed their reaction [after the reveal] for one or two hours, then we set all the cameras down,” the producer explains. Along with a handful of other execs and the show’s psychologist Dr Sandra Scott, she would then “sit down with the guys and be really clear and say ‘this is what the show actually is’… We were sometimes in there for hours, just making sure that they understood, that they were happy, that they all went to bed content. Until they went to sleep that night, the whole run up to that night, we just didn’t know if we’d have a shoot.” Now, she notes, “if we were to try to do something similar, you would definitely need an even bigger team and even more formal protocols”. 

Sometimes the tasks were silly, sometimes they put the “Tools” through the wringer emotionally. “One thing that we did every season was tell the ‘Tools’ that their girlfriends had passed away,” Delwiche says. This element was a hangover from the original US version of the show. “In the final series, we had a film make-up and hair person come in and we set up a morgue.” Afterwards, Dr Scott would be on hand to explain that the women were in fact alive and well, and that “the purpose of this exercise [was] just to get you to express a bit of appreciation for your girlfriend”; the therapist “wanted to make sure that the ‘i’s were dotted and the ‘t’s were crossed”, Delwiche adds.  

Casting a show like Tool Academy was difficult: not only did they “have to be really careful not to false[ly] advertise anything and be upfront with the girls about what it was going to be”, they had to find women who reckoned that their partners would be up for the whole wild ride, too. “We generally had to do a two-pronged approach… We had to find girls who wanted to improve their relationship, but also to find guys who wanted to go out and have a jolly.” And if either half of the couple backed out, they’d have to return to square one. Indeed, you get the sense that a casting producer’s job is among the trickiest in the business: without a script to rely on, a show can live or die on the IRL characters that they’ve cherry-picked. 

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For Squid Game: The Challenge, the task was especially gargantuan. “The received wisdom is that you can’t really make a reality show with more than about 20 people,” says exec producer John Hay. “Obviously there’s only a limited number of people you can connect with.” Not only did they have to find 456 people (whittled down from 81,000 applicants), they needed to make sure that every single one of them would make good TV. “We didn’t know which one of our 456 contestants was going to win,” Harcourt says. “We didn’t know who was going to go far. So when we were casting all these contestants, we had to be pretty confident that they would be compelling or interesting or good at the game.” And yet this is Squid Game: if you get attached to one particular player, be prepared to see them unceremoniously eliminated. “We had to let go of people we fell in love with,” Harcourt adds. “But as that’s happening, you’re confident that in the storytelling for the audience, they’re going to feel the same way.” 

For him, even if a show’s concept is wacky, a great series needs to provoke real feelings in order to succeed. “What’s important to me in reality TV, and what I think audiences respond well to, is when people have genuine emotional responses to whatever it is they’re going through,” he says. Take The Traitors: yes, the players are faffing around wearing cloaks at night, but they’re also often forming real friendships with people who might just be deceiving them. “It’s a completely made-up conceit, but [players] are going through very genuine emotions – who’s lying to me, who’s telling the truth?” The Challenge, he says, is the same. “Can I trust this person? Does this alliance matter? Will this person come and stab me in the back? Am I good enough?” 

‘The Escape‘ by Ruth Kelly is published by Pan on 7 December