In the Guide’s weekly Solved! column, we look into a crucial pop-culture question you’ve been burning to know the answer to – and settle it, once and for all When I told a friend I was writing about the first reality TV show, they WhatsApped back: “Surely the news is the first reality show?” Ooh, deep! But also: absolutely not. The news is well-researched reporting and facts about important, life-changing events. Reality TV is the opposite. An important point: don’t get confused between reality TV and “structured reality”, which came along in 2004 with Laguna Beach, then snowballed into The Hills, Jersey Shore, Towie, Keeping Up With the Kardashians and the 800 Real Housewives spin-offs. Structured reality is set-up situations where casts row until someone chucks a drink. Reality TV is ordinary people in real-life situations, whether those situations are playing out in a house, a jungle or on an island. So you are probably thinking Big Brother was the first reality TV show. First aired in 1999 in the Netherlands, the format came to the UK in 2000 and we all played along with the idea it was a social experiment until Craig caught Nasty Nick passing notes and it all kicked off – possibly the moment that show bosses realised that its 4 million viewers weren’t tuning in to see the housemates make pottery or read books; they wanted drama. But even as Big Brother veered towards structured reality with tasks designed to cause conflict, viewers clung on to the smaller, more “real” moments: Helen and Paul’s forbidden romance; Jade and PJ’s undercover fumble; drunk Alex dancing behind the door in series three. When Channel 4 tried to pull it back to a psychological study in 2003, it was branded “the most boring series ever”. Of course, the US was way ahead of the UK with MTV’s The Real World, which started in 1992 and was about what happens when strangers who live together “stop being polite and start being real”. However, the first reality show was actually 1973’s An American Family. The cameras moved in ostensibly to document the everyday life of, er, an American family, but ended up breaking it up – with 10 million people watching as mum Pat complained about husband Bill’s cheating, moaned about their sex life and then, midway through filming, asked him for a divorce on camera. And although it sounds bleak, it did have a semi-happy ending: son Lance became an LGBT activist and Pat and Bill eventually moved back in together as “roommates” but never remarried. The cameras, strangely, weren’t invited. One year later, we got a British spin-off, The Family. In the first episode, the Wilkins family from Reading were warned: “It’ll be a huge invasion of your privacy … we can film you any time, anywhere.” Horrified viewers saw mum Margaret and dad Terry fighting over their children, cheating and money – and although 8 million people tuned in to see oldest daughter Marion marry fiance Tom, the show was later parodied on Monty Python as “The Most Awful Family in Britain 1974”. Everyone on the show is now divorced, dead or desperately trying to forget their reality show past. At the time, Margaret said the family agreed to do it not for the money but so viewers had the chance to “see ordinary people on telly”. Margaret: this is all your fault.