The reality show of shows, that which has been held to define the genre – Big Brother – will, after next year’s 11th series, be gone from Channel 4. But that will not be the end, nor even the beginning of the end – as Churchill (see below) put it: merely the end of the beginning. It flourishes still elsewhere, as Grande Fratello (Italy), Bolshoi Brat (Russia), Gran Hermano (all over Latin America) or Ha’Ach Ha’Gadol (Israel). As its British pioneer, Peter Bazalgette, puts it in Prospect magazine this month, “it’s become one of the ways in which television is made”.

It’s certainly one of the dominant ways in which Channel 4 is broadcast. This past week it launched two new series of previously successful formats – Gordon Ramsay’s F Word (Tuesday, fifth series) and The Family (Wednesday, second series). The first – reality eating – reflects Britain’s late but welcome mass experiment in elevating its culinary habits – as do Come Dine With Me (C4), Celebrity Come Dine with Me (C4) and The Restaurant (BBC2), as well as UKTV’s Good Food Channel.

A prime mover in bringing Big Brother – a Dutch invention – to the UK, Bazalgette is a celebrator of reality TV’s charms, dismissing as cultural snobs those who dislike or affect to dislike the programmes. There is much in this: the parade of frenzied scenes, self-justifications, posturings, clumsy lusts, joy in putting down others and occasional outright brutalities makes for a certain kind of discomfort – namely, the discomfort of those, accustomed to watching scripted emotions, who are confronted with something closer to themselves. It feels both voyeuristic and oddly humbling. Yet for many, especially those raised with it – Big Brother first aired in 2000 – it’s a laugh, a gasp and an education: it’s other people, not as Hell (as scripted by Jean-Paul Sartre), but as people.

The reality eating shows retain much of the discomfort of Big Brother. One last month – an episode of Come Dine With Me set in a prosperous pocket of north London – had four rich cosmopolitans striving to out-hospitality each other; one contestant spent hundreds of pounds on prime steak and fine wines to put the others in their lower-income place, and parked his Bentley in his forecourt to humiliate a fellow contestant, who drove a mere Porsche.

Ramsay’s new programme is also structured round a competition. Viewers nominate their favourite local restaurants, which are then sorted into national cuisines, and from each of these groups, two finalists emerge. The first week’s pride of place went to the Italians; the already chosen finalists were Salvo’s of Leeds and Prosecco of Bristol – the first southern Italian cooking, the second Venetian. Diners’ votes decided the outcome – which went to Salvo’s, narrowly. Ramsay said “f**k” somewhat less than he has in other programmes (though the title still capitalises on his love of obscenity); his main role is to harry the contestants to keep them nervous. Janet Street Porter popped up, and was shown getting kicked by a veal calf, possibly a discerning viewer. It seemed horrible to me, but the competition was tense enough.

Reality shows are often constructed as pressure cookers; the more interesting, though, are allowed to unfold slowly – as did C4’s splendid The Force, broadcast last month.

Meanwhile The Family, in its first series, had followed the Hughes family, mum and dad in their 40s, four kids, first daughter getting married, the teenagers sorting themselves out with the usual, and fascinating, bumpiness.

The scene has shifted to the Grewals, British Sikhs; mother a matronly housewife, father a coach driver. The first dive into their world revealed that Sunny, the oldest (33), was about to marry Shay (24), whose mother is against the marriage – although Shay sees the Grewals as substitute parents. It is promising; it did what reality TV can do incomparably, which is to let you see the accommodations people make with each other, and with the world outside. The fact that this is one way of making TV is no bad thing.

Honourable mentions: a one-off, Into the Storm (BBC2 Monday) gave a portrait of Winston Churchill (played by Brendan Gleeson) during and immediately after the second world war that finely caught both his bulldog and his rabid sides. He saw more clearly than anyone else round his cabinet table that anything other than defiance to Hitler would ruin his country; he did not see that the Labour party, led by Clement Attlee, his loyal wartime deputy, was a world removed from creating a “Gestapo”, the smear he gave it in the election campaign he lost.

Garrow’s Law (BBC1 Sunday), which is about an idealistic young barrister in the 18th-century Old Bailey, was on its first outing too one-dimensional for me, though its hero may deepen. And Spooks (BBC1 Wednesdays) is back, as demented and narcotic as ever. Once again, it is determined to show that the real enemies of the British state are the CIA, aided by “rogue elements” in MI6 – this time discovered to have plotted to take weapons-grade uranium into Iraq to prove the existence of WMD. The famous five who are the entire staff of MI5 stopped that, of course, and gamely continued the fiction that the Americans – with MI6 the true axis of evil in the Spooks universe – are our allies.

john.lloyd@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/lloyd