Halloween’s nearly here – and as is their custom, all our telly channels have dusted off their old horror movies to ‘entertain’ those of us too old for trick-or-treating.
Well, all but one. E4 have actually gone to the trouble of creating an original gore-filled miniseries for our delectation. Dead Set is a five-parter in which zombies attack the Big Brother house. In a way, it’s the sort of programme that could only have come from the Channel 4 family.
Not being a big fan of mindless bloody violence perpetrated by (or on) the undead, I’ll be giving Dead Set a miss. The closest I’ve come to watching this sort of thing is Shaun of the Dead – and that’s as far as I wish to go (yep, I’m a wuss. A big girl’s blouse. I don’t care; nightmares are no fun).
But there’s one reason I do find Dead Set of interest: it’s on our screens just two weeks after Peter Kay’s Britain’s Got the… (you know the rest). In the space of a fortnight, two channels who’ve made a considerable fortune from ‘reality’ TV formats will have put on shows mocking those very programmes (or in the case of Dead Set, brutally murdering them). You can’t help but wonder if this is a sign that the often-predicted reality TV backlash has started for real. Somehow, I think not.
GEORGE LUKE 