Spoofing elimination television ... I Can't Sing. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
Entertainment has existed for so long that it's rare to find entirely new material. Such subjects as money, love, sex and power have informed stories since the beginnings of theatre, fiction and TV. But, in this century, writers have been gifted an inspiration that was unavailable to Shakespeare, Keats or Jane Austen – reality and talent TV. Since Big Brother and first Pop Idol and then The X Factor became fixtures in the British schedules at the start of the last decade, authors have found comedy, horror, thriller and romance plots in the spectacle of the fame-hungry young competing for swift but often brief celebrity live on TV.
The latest example is I Can't Sing! by Harry Hill and Steve Brown, which spoofs The X Factor. Its premiere comes a week after the release on DVD of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, the latest of the movie versions of the novels by the American writer Suzanne Collins, set in a futuristic dictatorship where teenagers compete literally to the d eath in globally televised blood sports.
The popularity of elimination television as a contemporary plot is partly economic. If this is the sort of stuff that the largest audiences are watching on TV, then it makes sense to channel the genre into other cultural products for which they might show an equal appetite. The Hunger Games is a perfect example of this phenomenon: the teenagers who are the main target audience for Collins' savage satire of Cowellesque television are also the primary consumers of talent and reality shows in their original form.
Dramatising celebrity wannabes, though, doesn't just make marketing sense. Series such as The X Factor, Big Brother and (in America) Survivor have exposed a brutality and cruelty that was not previously part of television and was not as explicitly present in human nature. So the rise of these violently divisive entertainments is a genuine cultural phenomenon.
Unsurprisingly, three novelists who pride themselves on capt uring the zeitgeist have all turned these forms of broadcasting into novels. Chuck Palahniuk's Haunted (2005) sent up house-share shows by confining 17 writers in a residence where they competed to produce the perfect novel in three months. (Satire is always risky: last year, Italian TV transmitted Masterpiece, in which aspiring authors compete for a publishing contract.) Palahniuk's main rival for the post of the 21st century's writer-in-residence, the Canadian Douglas Coupland, has just published Worst.Person.Ever (2013), in which the repulsive protagonist is a cameraman working on a reality show called Survival. And Ben Elton imagined the murder of a contestant on a Big Brother-type show in Dead Famous (2001) and mocked a small-screen contest for singers in Chart Throb (2006).
It is Elton's X Factor-inspired novel that seems to have most in common with Hill and Brown's I Can't Sing! In Elton's book, Simon Cowell appears under the thinnest of disguises as Calvin Simms, while judges Cheryl Cole and Sharon Osbourne are rolled together into a musical mentor called Beryl Blenheim and Louis Walsh becomes producer Rodney Root. In I Can't Sing!, Cowell, Cole and Walsh are caricatured under their own names, with the added complication (and, audiences will fear, dilution of satire) that Cowell is also one of the producers of the musical. The mogul does similar double duty as character and backer in two other fictional projects inspired by his TV franchises: the movie One Chance – about opera singer Paul Potts, discovered on Britain's Got Talent – and a biopic about another BGT find, the singer Susan Boyle, that Cowell currently has in pre-production.
Apart from Cowell's possible conflict of depiction in I Can't Sing!, another worrying omen for the show is that it is the second West End musical inspired by The X Factor and the previous one – Viva Forever!, built around the Spice Girls' back catalogue – was a notorious flop. In that case, the bigges t problem was that the producer and director never seemed to have decided if Jennifer Saunders, who wrote the script, was sending up talent TV or writing a heartwarming story about an overnight star. In the end, she did a bit of both and the show lacked focus.
Although the genre of culture inspired by contest telly has only recently become crowded, it stretches back to a time when Simon Cowell was unknown. In 1978, Victoria Wood wrote a play called Talent, which premiered in Sheffield, transferred to London and was filmed by Granada TV. Although it is remembered mainly for having been the first collaboration between Wood and Julie Walters, the writer had presciently seen the dramatic possibilities of people competing for quick fame. Wood was drawing on her own experience as a competitor on New Faces, the 1970s ITV show which, with Opportunity Knocks, was part of Britain's first wave of amateur-transforming programmes.
Shortly after Wood's play, there were also two prophe tic works about the way that television was heading. In 1982, Stephen King's The Running Man (first published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman) depicted a TV show in which the prize was to avoid being killed and Martin Scorsese's The King of Comedy imagined a situation in which a would-be celebrity uses live television to achieve notoriety. The most prescient piece on the subject, though, had appeared as long ago as 1968: Nigel Kneale's TV play, The Year of the Sex Olympics, in which a tyrannical regime has the idea of stranding people on a remote island and televising them as entertainment.
In the recent wave of reality and talent projects, the sinister implications of the format informed Charlie Brooker's series Dead Set, in which Big Brother is ambushed by zombies, and Fifteen Million Merits, in Brooker's strand Black Mirror, set in a future in which humans must produce their energy and earn their money by appearing on a TV entertainment show.
Aside from Brooker's twin strikes, the most concerted treatment of the topic by the medium that created it was Peter Kay's 2008 Channel 4 project Britain's Got the Pop Factor … and Possibly a New Celebrity Jesus Christ Soapstar Superstar Strictly on Ice, which, as its title indicates, took shots at most examples of the talent genre. Kay's show combined fiction – he played a Boyle-like wannabe called Geraldine McQueen – with a mock-factual infrastructure of live heats and a subsequent documentary about the winner.
But, because most talent and reality TV is targeted at younger viewers, it's perhaps inevitable that teenage and children's literature is the area of culture that has most frequently taken unsung wannabes or housemates as a subject. Apart from the print and screen phenomena of The Hunger Games, the American author Heather Thurmeier has written an entire series of romances based around talent and reality shows, utilising such scanarios as a heart-broken girl who goes on a dating show and finds her hated ex among the competitors. Annabel Pitcher's award-winning My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece (2011) daringly combines the show-off genres of TV with another terrifying modern trend – terrorism. Joanna Nadin's The Money, Stan, Big Lauren and Me (2012) and Catherine Bruton's Pop! (2012) both focus on the possibilities such series offer of escaping class or poverty, with Bruton in particular satirising the advantage to contestants of having a miserable or uplifting back-story.
The producers and creators of I Can't Sing! will hope that, in choosing this subject matter, they have hit on another Hunger Games; but will fear that they may have another Viva Forever!
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