very true star of reality TV has a celebrated one liner. Nikki Grahame’s “Who is she?”, Gemma Collins’s “You ain’t ever gonna get this candy”, Lucy Watson’s “Why is everyone getting up in my grill?”. In Make Me Famous – the first TV show written by the presenter and documentarian Reggie Yates – Billy, played by Tom Brittney, knows that he has one chance to join that pantheon. When the producers of Love or Lust, the fictional reality show within the show, ask why they should pick him, a silent stare-off ensues. After an agonising pause, Brittney delivers the line – “I didn’t do anything for the last 10 seconds and you kept staring” – with such shameless, eye-rolling bravado that I slammed the pause button to purge my brain of the secondhand embarrassment. Call it a success. Yates, whom I spoke to a few weeks later, is a busy man. He has spent all day watching footage of Pirates, his writing and directing debut feature. They were nine days short of wrapping before everything shut down because of the pandemic. “It’s a bit of a weird position to be in,” he chuckles. “It’s only in the last few years that projects I’ve created and written have started to get greenlit, which is very exciting.” The BBC Three drama centres around Billy, a former reality TV contestant on the joyless public appearance circuit, promoting protein powder and scrambling for an audience as the next series’ cast is trotted out. After a tabloid kiss-and-tell goes nuclear, we witness his life unravel in real time and on social media. Billy is anchored by the only two people he is vulnerable with: his doting, fame-averse mum (Amanda Abbington) and his fellow contestant/former flame (Emma Rigby), who has carved out a success by being real and relatable. It’s a blunt comment on the impact reality TV can have on contestants and families. Yates agreed to write the series because of his “weird and unique relationship with the genre”. He spent his early 20s hosting Top of the Pops and a slew of child-friendly reality shows, one of which he co-hosted with the late Caroline Flack. Still, he was front row to our burgeoning, wide-eyed obsession with seeing strangers being tormented on TV. “From shows like The Real World, right the way through to series one of Big Brother, all of these shows came to fruition when I was in my formative years,” he says. So he used his position to create a character “that could speak to all of the pressures that would exist to somebody in [that] world”. It’s an intense watch. Yates’s commitment to covering every base – money issues, relationships, mental health, grief, suicide, fans, fame, influencers, drug use, agents, masculinity – makes for an aptly claustrophobic watch, topped with the incessant notifications, which “ding!” at every level of Billy’s descent. It will exhaust you into checking your own misconceptions. Conversations around the suicides of two Love Island contestants – and Flack, the show’s presenter, in February – tend to attribute some responsibility to the show’s producers and social-media bullying. However, Yates doesn’t think it’s that simple. As in his documentaries, he is keen not to lay blame at any one door. “Pointing the finger is irresponsible,” he says. By choosing not attribute blame, Yates believes that Make Me Famous “does something healthy. It helps you understand that the pressures on the central character aren’t from any one place.” When I speak to Brittney, by phone, he’s funny, sincere and just the right amount of self-deprecating. Lockdown has him sussing out yoga and making “corona cooking” tutorials to entertain himself. His usual gig is playing Grantchester’s motorbike-riding, crime-busting hot vicar on ITV, with previous stints on time-bending Outlander and the dating-show satire UnREAL. This summer, he will star alongside Tom Hanks in the war epic Greyhound. But long before he was gleaning wisdom from Hollywood A-listers, he was taking tips from his first drama teacher – his mum. “It was a terrible, embarrassing thing having to call your own mum Mrs Brittney,” he says. “She made sure I didn’t get special treatment.” Clearly, it worked. Brittney won a place at the prestigious Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, in north London, but swiftly concluded his aims were a little commercial for the college’s tastes. “The RSC [Royal Shakespeare Company] was a great thing to go into, or the National, [but] I was like, I’d love to do a show on Channel 4 or ITV or BBC.” But reality TV can be pretty Shakespearean in its storylines – there’s conflict, heartbreak and things often aren’t as they appear. This role should make his alma mater proud. Some of the most complex scenes are flashbacks to auditions with the show’s producers, played by Line of Duty’s Aiysha Hart and Killing Eve’s Nina Sosanya. They attempt due diligence, trying to probe Billy’s personal life. We never get to see the show at the centre of Make Me Famous, so we’re left to make assumptions about how it all played out. Did Billy embrace the role he was put in or was he manipulated into it? It’s murky. Hart, who plays the ambitious producer Kelly, admits she admires her character’s drive. “She genuinely believes the show could make him a success story,” she says. “At the same time, she considers him ‘producible’.” To get the scoop from both sides of the reality set, Yates and his team conducted confidential interviews. Comparisons are bound to be drawn with real contestants, particularly with Mike Thalassitis, who killed himself in 2018. But Yates is keen to stress his story was not a reference point. “There needs to be a level of respect, particularly when you’re talking about people who have taken their lives.” Although his role was not based on Thalassitis, Brittney couldn’t ignore him. “[Thalassitis] was portrayed a certain way in the show and wasn’t at all that character,” he says. “And there’s things that are hidden that people don’t ever get to see until something like their death, suicide or something happens.” While reality TV can hold a magnifying glass to our behaviour and has prompted important discussions on racism, gaslighting and body dysmorphia, we have all read the exposés on how the shows are made, how the “talent” is manipulated. It’s easy to forget that one hour of “reality” exists alongside 23 hours that we don’t see. Billy’s story aims to pull back the curtain. Hart is hoping that doing so can spark compassion for the “vulnerability of human beings” and help us “remember that we all have fears, families and issues”. Brittney, who has experienced a few unsavoury experiences as his fame has increased, agrees. “When I got Grantchester, it was the first time I really had people send messages, hateful things, because they were big James Norton fans [the previous star of the show].” Brittney insists that he enjoys talking to fans and “99.9% of it” is positive, but he has seen “how ugly it can go”. At 36, and 28 years into his career, Yates feels like the wise uncle. Where does he see the current reality frenzy going? “I don’t think we’ll know for maybe another five or 10 years how much this is affecting, not just the people that are going through the experience, but the audience. Lots of young and impressionable people watch these types of shows. There has to be an effect.” • BBC Three’s Make Me Famous will be available to stream on BBC iPlayer from Wednesday 17 June