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Recently, I doused a Connecticut beauty queen with icy water, before blowing dry leaves and fake snow into her face. She was struggling to read the weather into the television camera. It was a joke, an elaborate trick for a reality show I was producing that played on her desire to be a weather girl.
After we revealed the prank, she signed a release form that allowed us to use the footage in any way we liked. When I called her a week after the shoot, she told me that it had been 'the best experience of my life'.
TS Eliot warned that 'Humankind cannot stand very much reality,' but as an eighth group of Big Brother contestants open their lives to us this Wednesday, I'm not so sure. Certainly, Ofcom's attack on the show last week suggests the regulator struggles with too much reality.
I call myself a documentary film-maker. It sounds better than 'reality TV producer'. 'Reality TV' has become a dirty phrase denoting exploitation, deceit and stupidity. It has become a sport to denigrate it: artist Mona Hatoun derided it by inserting a fibre- optic camera up her bottom and broadcasting her innards 24/7 on the internet. Broadcaster John Humphrys, in his withering MacTaggart lecture three years ago, slammed it as 'damaging, meretricious, seedy and cynical', and claimed it 'turns human beings into freaks for us to gawp at'.
The criticism keeps coming. In Cannes last week I saw the premiere of the movie Live!, a satire of reality game shows. Tanned, sexy Eva Mendes plays a ruth less TV executive crusading to produce a reality version of Russian roulette - an irresistible Deer Hunter - meets- Pop Idol format. She uses her First Amendment right to free speech to defeat the watchdog and persuades advertisers that the projected 60 per cent audience share is too good to miss. She has no problem finding contestants: 'You only get one shot,' she tells them, 'take it.' Five winners come away with $1m, and one is eliminated - permanently.
The film peddles the accepted vision of reality TV as the dangerous opiate of the masses, our collective highway to hell. We producers are greedy vultures of human anguish and the participants are lens-lusty loons.