Growing up in the back of beyond, you'd think I'd have been accustomed to the dark and to country roads, but a recurring and waking nightmare of mine would always occur in this precise scenario. There was another one, about a pirate, a ship, and some rope, but let's not…
It would be when we were driving home from having visited friends of the family, with my sister and me tucked up in the back seat. She always fell asleep, and I was always left with my imagination. The long and short of it was that I used to imagine
that my parents weren't my parents at all.
There were times, as there are in any child's life, when I wished this were true. Mostly because they hadn't allowed me that third chocolate biscuit, or a sip of my dad's Sweetheart Stout as a means to pass the evening in adult company.
Recently I had a similar pang for adoptive parents, in the form of Channel 4's The Family. The liberal values of Jane and Simon Hughes as they went about their daily lives was as thrilling a work of reality TV as I've ever seen, yet its thrill was in the charm of the everyday. Channel 4's experiment was simply to film a regular family for four months. No one had to re-enact Michael Jackson's 'Thriller' video (Big Brother), and no one had to deride or degrade the spouse of a stranger in order to come out on top (Wife Swap). This was no competition, and there was no prize. This was reality TV finally showing off its potential in its very definition: it filmed real life and put it on the telly.
Of course, there was some serious editing of events, and the music used for the soundtrack was so delicately chosen that you'd be forgiven for fearing you were falling under the spell of an orchestrated drama. The joy of this drama is in its utter lack of, well, drama, however. There was one wedding, an ear piercing and a succession of boyfriends to contend with for the parents, as they got their kids out of bed and back into it safely. That was it. Not quite the inactivity of a sleeping Big Brother house, but not miles away either.
As 50,000 people signed a petition last week complaining that X-Factor is rigged and that there should be an Ofcom enquiry, there's clearly a continuing appetite for our obsession with delving into people's private tragedies as justification for public glory and 'the prize'. Bring on the dancing monkeys! I have a problem with that and hope that it is ultimately untenable.
But there is some hope in the fact that quietly, genuinely, and possibly while very few were watching, a family opened the door to their lives without razzmatazz, and for that, in my opinion, became the most interesting TV stars of the year.
Our writers' weekFIONA LEITHARTS EDITOR
From Mali to Manhattan, I've overdosed on musical pleasure this week. The sexy, funky, African rhythms and blues of Amadou & Mariam are back on my play list thanks to their new album, Welcome To Mali. Damon Albarn has produced the first single, and while it may bring them deserved mainstream success, they are one of the few discoveries I hope don't suffer by associated exposure. Later in the week, West Side Story rolled into Glasgow. Breathtakingly sharp choreography wasn't quite matched by vocal dexterity, but it was a tough call.
STUART KELLYLITERARY WRITER
Little Dorrit is just at the point I love in Dickens – all the pieces falling into place, all the plots knitting together – and Tom Courtenay and Russell Tovey are delivering stonking performances. I've also fallen in love with the YouTube trend of creating new trailers, recut from the original movie, but in the wrong genre: The Shining as a romantic comedy or Mary Poppins as a slasher flick. Shamefully, visiting the massive new Leith Asda almost counted as culture, especially as I bumped into a radio producer, a novelist and an academic all treating it like a Museum of the Trans-Mundane.
CHITRA RAMASWAMYARTS WRITER
Is anyone else thinking the sleb calibre on I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here is suspiciously high this year? I prefer my reality TV stars to be a bit more Phil Tufnell – who won a couple of years back – than Martina Navratilova. If the bona fide ones start eating rats and doing assault courses with spiders, who are we going to put on a pedestal? This year we have Brian Paddick, Robert Kilroy-Silk and Esther Rantzen pitching their tents in the jungle. Why not stick Obama, Judi Dench and maybe some ex-RBS employees in there as well and see how they cope with the tropical heat?
