Presenting duo, Ant and Dec have insisted that reality TV is not dead. Thank God, or Unreality TV would certainly be out of a job!

The pair say that just because Channel 4 have canceled Big Brother, doe not mean that the genre is on its way out.

Ant told the Daily Star: “It changed TV, like Pop Idol. But reality TV is here to stay. People who want to kill it off are going to be disappointed. It’s not the root of all evil.”

Sir Terry Wogan has hit out at cheap, modern TV shows saying that programming has deteriorated over the last fifty years. Terry is also unimpressed with the language of TV chefs like Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay.

Wogan told the Sunday Mirror: “Television has changed. It’s not what it was like 50 years ago. Light entertainment is no longer the expensive quality that it used to be. It’s all quiz games, reality TV and talk shows.

“Talk shows these days are just cheap TV. In the same way that reality TV is cheap television that humiliates people.

“There’s no point saying there can’t be any humiliation, because the public seem to respond to it, it seems to be something they want. But then again the public liked mass executions as well, but we don’t do those any more. To be honest, I don’t know where we go from here.”

Wogan then turned his attention to the language of celebrity chefs like Gordon Ramsay and Jamie Oliver.

“I see people like Jamie Oliver use the F-word in an attempt to achieve what I think he assumes to be credibility and I think it’s reprehensible and demeaning,” he explained. “And in terms of someone like Gordon Ramsay it’s ultimately self-defeating.”

Proving that reality TV can be a power for good, music star Goldie revealed that the shows he took part in helped him pay for his expensive divorce.

Goldie starred in Celebrity Big Brother and Maestro and told thelondonpaper: “It’s called paying for a divorce. Now I’ve paid, that’s it. Actually, I had another reason for going on Big Brother.

“I used to be a kid in a children’s home with 25 others who never knew who they were, so I thought it would be funny to see eight celebrities who all completely know who they are talk about how they don’t know who the f**k they are at all. I wanted to upset the apple cart.”

He added: “But learning to conduct was phenomenal. It’s an amazing thing to do, and it taught me so much about how I make electronic music.

“And off the back of that, I’m doing this piece for the Proms. It’s something my mother would really admire me doing.”

ITV bosses have scrapped the public vote for this years series of Hell’s Kitchen.

In a bid to make the show more like Gordon Ramsay’s successful US version of the show bosses have decided that Marco Pierre White will now choose who gets sent home each evening.

A show source told The Sun: “Marco is rubbing his hands with glee, he can’t wait to get to grips with his new crew.

“He loves being in control and this is perfect for him. He won’t flinch at telling precious celebrities what he thinks of them.

“This is the first year they won’t be able to rely on their celebrity status to save them. Expect blood, sweat and tears as they try their hardest to stay in.”

I hope this works for the channel, as it is well recognised that the American version of this reality TV show is much more engaging and popular despite the fact that the concept originated on ITV.

Clicking on this image will take you to the touching Daily Mail article about Jade & Jack's engagement

The image above from the Daily Mail is without doubt the most touching, truthful and painfully sad depictions of Jack and Jade’s love that I’ve ever seen. The picture captures the desperately sad fact that despite their love for each other, they know they don’t have a long future, and it makes me weep every time I look at it simply because of the immense honesty of the picture.

And Jade Goody is, among many other things, honest; often painfully so. At one time, I would have said that honesty was born from the lack of sufficient intelligence to lie or carry out a deceit because as I’ve mentioned in my articles about Jade on this site before, when she first shot to fame on Big Brother in 2002, I couldn’t stand her.

I thought she typified the ‘chav’ type of young woman; loud-mouthed, inarticulate, crass, vulgar… in fact, I thought she was exactly what she portrayed herself to be – the ill educated product of a broken, dysfunctional family who lived on state benefits on a rough council estate. The fact that she seemed to be proud of – or at least not embarrassed by – “being thick” embodied for me many of the things that I felt were wrong with young people in this country today…

Here’s a collection of clips of Jade during her appearance on Big Brother 3…

Jade’s childishness and childlike persona on BB irritated the hell out of me and for a while, I thought it was all an act; her ‘thing’ was being thick and silly and vulgar, just as the lovely Brian Dowling’s ‘thing’ was to be funny and revolting Aisleyne Horgan-Wallace’s ‘thing’ was to be a repellent dog.

What I didn’t know initially is that her childlike behaviour on BB was probably simply because she didn’t have one at a time when that kind of behaviour would have been appropriate to have. While other children attended and/or dodged school, Jade would be doing housework or rolling joints for her drug-addicted mother, Jackiey. The police were frequent visitors to their home and Jade spent a great deal of time in and out of social services care.

Jade’s father was also a drug addict who, it’s alleged, used to “stash guns” beneath his daughter’s cot. He died from a heroin overdose in a KFC restaurant bathroom. “One of the classiest exits in history” remarked Jade of her father’s demise.

Now Jade is herself facing her ‘exit’ and is doing so unashamedly publically. As she told many media outlets, “I’ve lived in front of the cameras. And maybe I’ll die in front of them.”

Her decision to allow the end of her life to be filmed is not for the same reason that she joined the ranks of Big Brother housemates. She’s no longer a fame hungry wannabe but is now simply utilising the benefits that her original hunger for fame brought her.

However, whereas many ex-BB housemates have now faded into obscurity, their fifteen minutes of fame well and truly over, Jade, through good management, hard work and a dedication to capitalise on the opportunities that Big Brother afforded her has remained in the public eye.

Of course, that eye has often been a very critical one, and never more so than over the ‘race’ debacle when Jade and Jack Tweed appeared in the Celebrity version of Big Brother alongside Shilpa Shetty.

She wasn’t the only person involved in alleged racist comments of course; Danielle Lloyd and Jo O’Meara said just as many things that could have been – and were – construed as racist, however, the difference between those two and Jade is that Jade didn’t just crawl under the nearest stone, hoping it would all go away. She had the balls to apologise on camera… here’s a clip from just one of her many TV apologies.

And in fact, it was an attempt to build bridges over that event that prompted Jade to appear on India’s version of Big Brother, ‘Big Boss’, where as we know she received the news that she had cancer and that it needed treatment immediately. Here’s a clip from her reaction to that news on the show…

Since then, which was just six months ago, she – and we, through her reality TV series on Living – found out that she had advanced cervical cancer which had been ‘missed’ by doctors and her local hospital for three years and was, as we now know, at a point of no return.

OK, so all that is Jade’s potted televisual history which I’ve gone into such detail about not as some form of mini-biography, but simply because it provides the backdrop to the point of this article, which is to ask you if you believe it’s now time for Jade to step out of the public eye?

Should she live out the rest of her tragically short time in private, or, is she right to carry on doing what she’s been doing since 2002; that is, allowing her life to be filmed, scrutinised, commented upon and judged, albeit that it’s now for very different reasons?

As I mentioned earlier, she’s no longer simply fame hungry, she’s now a woman maximising her potential earnings to leave behind for her children.

Jade and her immediate circle of advisors and friends have all plainly and readily stated that the reason she intends to continue to be filmed right to the end is simply to make money; as much money as she possibly can in order that her boys can have a start in life that is infinitely better and world’s away from the one she herself had. Here’s what Max Clifford and Piers Morgan have had to say about this decision…

Jade wants her boys to have a private education and despite the fact that she believes many people will be critical of that decision, including the boys’ father Jeff Brazier, which decent mother doesn’t want the very best of everything for her children?

The very fact that she IS an excellent mother is something of a minor miracle, given the example she was set by her own mother. Through her fly-on-the-wall Living shows we’ve seen how devoted she is to her children and how she lavishes love upon them without turning them into ‘celeb brats’. In one of those shows, Jade said the main reason she was so determined to “beat the cancer” was because of her heartfelt belief that, “I’m the only person good enough to look after the boys” Sadly now, that’s no longer an option.

We’ve seen in the Living shows too how she’s forgiven her mum Jackiey for being a worse than useless mother to her in the past and equally, we’ve seen how Jackiey has been trying desperately hard to make up for all those past child-rearing misdemeanors by doing everything she can for her daughter now, when arguably, she needs her the most.

On Sunday, Jade will marry Jack Tweed and she wants Bobby and Freddy to be christened so they’ll be able to understand that there is a Heaven and will therefore believe their Mummy is looking down on them and watching over them.

I have nothing but respect for her decision to accumulate as much money for her boys as she possibly can. I just wish someone would give her the money she would have earned in return for nothing and allow her to enjoy her big day – and what are sure to be subsequent horrendous days – in privacy and peace… but dying sells. A celebrity dying sells even better, and how many of us, hand on heart, can say that we won’t watch or read anything about her last weeks? I know I can’t.

That said, Jade’s horrendous and very public plight has meant that literally thousands of women have now gone for smear tests which, without having heard about and watched her devastating story, they probably would not. As Max Clifford pointed out in the above clip, there’s been a 20% increase in young women demanding cervical smears, so she’s undoubtedly saved lives.

A sad footnote to her being under constant scrutiny is that she is very much conscious of what people might think of her. At one time, following the racism debacle, she couldn’t open her mouth without someone feeling the need to jump into it and right down her throat, which I commented on in a recent article.

In the latest of her fly-on-the-wall Living shows, Jade said of her bald head and generally changed appearance due to her cancer, “There might be people out there that think I look horrible, but I don’t think I look horrible, so I’ve still got a little bit of confidence. I’m fighting for my feminine, feminivity, feminivity, femma, femma, whatever – fighting for that.”

On the subject of the arrangements for their wedding this Sunday, Jack said, “She’s done it all from a little laptop. Booked the place, got all the catering, got a helicopter for herself.

“I helped her pick the food earlier. Well, I didn’t, I listened to her pick the food earlier.”

Here’s a clip from the latest Living show which also has footage of a frail looking Jade leaving the Royal Marsden…

On her big day, Jade will be wearing a £3,500 cream and ivory silk gown which was given to her as a gift by Harrods owner Mohammed Al Fayed. The dress will need to be ‘customised’ to allow the concealed containment of Jade’s pain relief medications. We heard last night too how Jade wept when she tried her dream wedding dress on while she was in hospital.

Pictures of Jack going down on one knee were offered for £10,000 and the wedding itself will earn Jade more than £1million from OK! magazine and LivingTV, a subject which was hotly debated earlier this week on Radio 4’s Today programme vis-à-vis the ‘taste’ – or lack thereof – of this paid coverage.

Much to his credit in my book, following the airing of that debate, the Prime Minister then felt behooved to speak out and he said of Jade, “Her determination to help her family is something that we’ve got to applaud” and he expressed his sympathies to Jade and her family on behalf of the nation.

So, we’d appreciate your views on this issue; is Jade right to capitalise on her fame – and her terribly tragic prognosis – for the sake of amassing money to leave to her children or should she live out her now regrettably short life in private? Let us know by leaving your comments below.

Former boyband singer, Andy Scott-Lee has warned aspiring reality TV stars that taking part in a show could ruin your marriage.

“Don’t do a reality TV show – it’s the death of any marriage,” he told New!.

“It all looks great and yet while the money is good, it’s not just a TV show, is it? It’s your life and you do get swept away with all the ideas of specials and future episodes.”

Scott-Lee and Celebrity Big Brother housemate Michelle Heaton starred in MT”Don’t do a reality TV show – it’s the death of any marriage,” he told New!.

“It all looks great and yet while the money is good, it’s not just a TV show, is it? It’s your life and you do get swept away with all the ideas of specials and future episodes.”

Scott-Lee and former partner Michelle Heaton appeared on MTV’s Totally Scott-Lee in 2005 and then their own reality TV show ‘Michelle and Andy’s Big Day’ on ITV2 in 2006.

“The final straw was when it was suggested we try for a baby,” he said. “I figured it was time to get out and not just of reality TV.” reality TV show titled ‘Totally Scott-Lee in 2005′ and ITV2’s Michelle and Andy’s Big Day in 2006.

“The final straw was when it was suggested we try for a baby,” he said. “I figured it was time to get out and not just of reality TV.”

Sir Paul McCartney has blasted reality TV shows such as The X Factor and I’m A Celebrity because he reckons they humiliate people and take over TV scheduling.

The veteran singer told The Sunday Times that reality TV shows are “crowding out more creative programmes.”

“You can’t turn on the telly without somebody being judged by four people, whether they are on ice, or on the stage or in the jungle” he said.

“It’s compulsive viewing, but so is a traffic accident.”

Sir Paul, 66, also revealed how happy he is to be in a new relationship with Nancy Shevell, 47.

“I just like being in love” he told the paper.

I guess we won’t be seeing a show called At Home With Paul anytime soon then…

I kid you not! The word is that one of the music business’s most famous families, The Jacksons, are to star in a new reality TV show set in Devon.

The show will centre around Tito Jackson who will be based in a mansion near Barnstaple on the north Devon coast, and will also feature Jermaine, Janet, parents Joe and Katherine and possibly even Michael as make their flying visits.

It all sounds a bit surreal to me!

There’s never been a worse time for reality TV flagship shows than right now. Ask the producers of American Idol, X Factor and Big Brother. Talent is seemingly thin on the ground, the formats themselves seem strained and audiences are in decline.

The American entertainment websites will tell you that American Idol is onto a surefire winner this year – they’ve basically got a captive audience due to the Hollywood writer’s strike. But that’s no reason to become complacent, and the Idol production team know it.

Season six of American Idol featured some of the weakest talent the competition has known to date. Backed up by the fact that neither the winner – Jordin Sparks – or the runner-up Blake Lewis managed to score a number one with their respective debut singles.

Is it a coincidence that the two top talent shows of 2007 were a complete washout? I already passed my judgement on 2007’s X Factor, but Lisa and I really expected so much more from American Idol. After all, surely larger population = larger chance of talented individuals getting through? Apparently not.

Short-lived Careers?

You’re going to hear a lot about how many Idol alumni have been dropped from their record labels due to poor sales. But you’ll also hear a lot about how artists like Kelly Clarkson, Chris Daughtry, Jennifer Hudson and America Fererra have gone on to stellar careers in music, film and television.

The problem is the public. When you allow the public to vote, you run the risk of true talent being dropped from the show in favour of ‘personalities’ who have minimal musical ability. Like Sanjaya. Or Chico. Nigel Lythgoe recently said “Just because a granny in Omaha falls in love with Taylor Hicks, it doesn’t mean she will go out and buy his record, even though she will pick up the phone and vote for him.”

The problem is the selection process. Perhaps to have some consistency with the ‘freakshow’ auditions, the producers feel some responsibility to put a couple of halfwits through to the live rounds. They do so at the expense of talent. If the producers and judges made certain to select talented and charismatic individuals, then it would be a dogfight among the best emerging artists in the industry.

Last year’s competition was amateur hour compared with what we should be seeing on a nationwide talent show like American Idol.

Improving American Idol

As I said earlier, the producers cannot afford to be complacent with American Idol this year. There’s always a risk that the viewing audience will abandon TV completely and go out and get lives or something. Idolator has a good round-up of how the programme’s makers are planning to spice things up in Season Seven.

• New set and new opening sequence: I was wondering when they were going to refresh the brand. After six seasons, it’s long overdue!
• Allowing contestants to play instruments: possibly the most significant development and one that I hope brings a better class of auditionee.
• Reality TV rejects in the Hollywood Round: not sure what this means, but it sounds dodgy…
• More backstories: I like the idea of this, as long as they can stay away from X Factor style sob stories.
• “Where Are They Now” for former contestants: A good idea, but with a declining base of ’stars’ to choose from. How many burger flippers can we see?
• Less celebrity mentors: Praise Jebus! The celebrity cash-in – exclusive mentoring in exchange for a plug of your latest single or album is a thing of the past. No longer will these hungry wannabes have to lick the boots of megastars and pretend to respect their ‘art’.
• Three farewell songs instead of one: Er, who cares?
• Fox promises not to saturate the network with American Idol programming: A bit of savvy brand management here. Just because there’s going to be nothing good on US TV for a while doesn’t mean you should overplay your hand.

Despite the hype, I’ll be remaining mildly cynical. The X Factor producers promised last year that there’d be less schmaltz and less editorial agenda. However, they delivered a series that depended far too heavily on sob stories from a group of contestants who I could beat with my in-shower singing voice.

As with all reality television, the success – in my opinion – depends on the contestants. And all I want is for them to be talented and charismatic. I want to have finalists so good that I find it difficult to choose between them. Not so bad that I don’t care who wins.

Do you think you can handle that, American Idol producers? Then let the season begin.

Dina Lohan, mother of wildchild Lindsey, is due to start filming a new reality TV show about her life in the Lohan family.

Dina said of the TV series: “There are so many misconceptions about me and my family. I’m setting the record straight.

“It won’t just be following my family around like other shows. It’ll show me cultivating careers, going to soccer practice. I’m a big supporter of domestic violence charities, so they’ll show that.

“Then they’ll show (son) Cody at soccer practice. Ali going to school and in the studio. It’ll encompass everything. You’ll see me having five business meetings in the city. We want it just to be real. It’s okay if it’s not as crazy as the tabloids make it.”