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This blog has been contributed by Kieran Masterton, who calls me "Yank" on a regular basis.

I don’t watch telly; at least not enough to see any one series on a regular basis.  And while some stuff like 24 and The Shield have caught my eye, it’s the reality shows that have really put me off.  However, it would appear that I am somewhat of a social pariah.  It totally baffles my friends and colleagues that these shows are not top of my priority list.  It appears that while I was busy with other, less wholesome pursuits, the British public have become utterly obsessed with reality TV.

Whether it’s people with sub-par IQs locked in a house together or landed gentry types building their own home and keeping pigs in the Suffolk countryside, us Brits just can’t get enough.  This unquenchable thirst for tabloid-style titillation has spread across all our major TV channels until now it’s pretty much the standard format for British television broadcasting.  Subsequently, and rather irritatingly, it's almost impossible to avoid.

The big daddy of these reality scoundrels is Big Brother, which airs every summer here in the UK for a couple of months on Channel 4.  The show originated in the Netherlands in ’99, but by the millennium had spread all around Europe, the UK and the USA.  To date, it has been most successful show in the Britain. Including regular seasons and special editions, we have produced eighteen, yes, eighteen series of the god-awful show.  While public interest is thankfully starting to wane, satirical broadcaster and journalist Charlie Brooker has taken inspiration from the show and written the wonderfully anarchic and not to mention gory, Dead Set - the story of a zombie apocalypse seen through the lens of Big Brother.  The narrative follows Kelly (Jamie Winstone), a production runner on the show, who has cheated on her boyfriend has become sick to death of her tyrant producer boss, Patrick (Andy Nyman), by the time the outbreak begins.  As the zombie madness ensues she finds herself trapped in the Big Brother house with said producer and many vacuous housemates in toe.

Episodic format aside, the show actually feels more like a feature length film that has been split into five thirty-minute parts.  The Big Brother sequences are shot in DigiBeta to maintain authenticity while, what director Yann Demange calls the "narrative camera," always follows Kelly and only enters the house when she does. As the series is funded by E4, the entertainment wing of Channel 4 that produces Big Brother, the filmmakers had unparalleled access to the stars of the show.  These stars include Davina McCall the popular presenter of Big Brother, who enjoys a rather gruesome death and fantastic couple of scenes as a zombie.

The novelty of seeing these Big Brother stars in a horror flick aside, it is the fantastic script by Charlie Brooker that shines through in this production.  Brooker has devised a brilliant genre mix that blends the visceral shock of horror with the mundanity of reality TV perfectly.  Combine this with some seriously unpleasant (in a good way) dialogue from poisonous producer Patrick, and you’ve got a blinding combination of cutting humour, bloody violence, zombie apocalypse and reality TV.  Likewise, considering the budgets available in British television the standards of cinematography, special effects and production design are extremely high.

But, what of the zombies, you may ask - are they runners or are they shufflers?  Well, in this post-28 Days Later... world, what else can you expect but hordes of running, teeth-barring zombies swarming after your protagonists as they flee for their lives through a television studio car park?  This, combined with a frenetic editing style, gives the whole production an extremely contemporary feel.  Interior lighting is minimal with large areas of the frame in darkness while the exterior scenes are bleached and dazzling, mimicking the blinding fear that comes from the immanent threat of zombie attack.  Ultimately, the series ends with the same feeling of pessimistic fatalism that accompanies all of Brooker’s writing in his Guardian newspaper column.  Dead Set is a fantastic piece of filmmaking that puts Hollywood’s recent sappy horror flicks to shame!

Currently Dead Set is only available on DVD Region 2, but for those of you with multi-region DVD players - buy it!  You won’t be disappointed!

Kieran Masterton is a postgraduate research student who has taught Film and Media at the University of Gloucestershire, UK.  His research interests include screenwriting, neo-noir, genre theory and the slasher genre.

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