Changing rooms, biggest losers and backyard blitzes: A history of makeover television in the United Kingdom, United States and Australia

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Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank Frances Bonner for her critical feedback on this essay.

Notes

 1. Reality TV has become a catch-all phrase used to classify a range of popular factual forms. However, as Corner (2004) points out, the term first emerged in the US context where it was initially associated with low-budget, actuality-based television of the COPS variety. While the term had a certain strategic edge in the US context – where it came out of the pressures of a highly competitive deregulated industry – as he notes it would have been unlikely for the term to have emerged from the UK or Europe where there was already a long tradition of ‘real’ modes of television in the form of social observational-style documentaries. British and European television production companies have nevertheless been highly successful at producing, marketing and selling formats internationally under the reality TV banner, with the Dutch company Endemol producing the urtext of reality shows Big Brother.

 2. Changing Rooms was the brain child of British lifestyle television guru Peter Bazalgette, who also created groundbreaking lifestyle formats such as Ready Steady Cook and Ground Force. Bazalgette's television production company eventually became part of Endemol UK, and as chairman of the company he introduced Big Brother to British television audiences.

 3. Again, the central role of Peter Bazalgette's production company Bazal in producing many of these formats should be noted, with Bazalgette often described in the British press as the man behind the 1990s lifestyle television ‘revolution’.

 4. My thanks to Frances Bonner for this point.

 5. In the 1980s there was also some attempt on cable television to introduce the advice culture and transformative ethos of women's service magazines more broadly onto television via ‘video magazines’. Cosmopolitan, Woman's Day and Good Housekeeping all produced home and lifestyle-oriented advice shows. By and large, though, these ‘video magazines’ were not successful as cable audiences at that time were not large enough to cover the expense of producing these shows (McCracken 1993, 293–6).

 6. Indeed, Bignell (2005, 39) contends that there has been somewhat of a ‘reverse colonization of US television by British programmes and producers in the Reality TV arena’.

 7. Bonner (2000) notes there were a number of earlier precedents in lifestyle television, with Burke's Backyard (1987), a show whose focus on living in the backyard sought to bring the romantic mythology of the Australian outback to suburbia, often cited as a breakthrough lifestyle show.

 8. The recent return of Burke's Backyard to primetime television indicates the ongoing popularity of the home and garden magazine format in the Australian market.

 9. For a more in-depth examination of these issues see the chapter on the making of the Australian version of the BBC lifestyle makeover format Honey We're Killing the Kids in my book Smart Living: Lifestyle Media and Popular Expertise (Lewis 2008).

10. For instance, it is now reasonably common on Australian television for channels to purchase the format rights along with the original version of a show and to air that original version as a way of prepping audiences for the subsequent local production, as in the case of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, What Not to Wear and The Biggest Loser.

11. For instance, while many popular factual and lifestyle formats travel readily across cultural borders, as Bignell (2005, 59) notes, cases like the relative disinterest in Big Brother in the US and Survivor's relatively poor ratings in Britain indicate that one should be cautious in over-generalizing the universal appeal of such formats.