I'm to blame for some of the worst things on reality TV... but this is the show that was so mind-blowingly tasteless that even I turned it down

By SAMANTHA BRICK, FEATURE WRITER Sitting in front of a stony-faced, middle-aged woman watching a rough cut of my documentary, I was perplexed when she hit pause. The scene showed a young British couple disappearing behind a bush outside a nightclub in Ibiza. Moments later the bloke emerged to cheers and fist pumps from his mates. When the girl stumbled out after him, clearly the worse for wear, another drunken reveller shouted ‘slag’ in her direction. The woman beside me was the broadcaster’s compliance officer. She calmly informed me the scene couldn’t be broadcast. My executive producer tore strips off her and made sure the footage stayed in. At the time, I thought the compliance officer was the problem. Now, 30 years later, I realise she was the only adult in the cutting room. Samantha Brick commissioned Temptation Island, which tested relationships to destruction Shona Manderson has made allegations about her Married At First Sight husband Brad Skelly Would I make the same decision today? Not a chance. I’d put down the camera and find the friends of the woman who stumbled out from the bush. The problem is that doesn’t make compelling television. Filming ordinary people at their most vulnerable – in this instance when they’ve just had sex – does. Following the news earlier this week that Ofcom is finally stepping in to investigate allegations surrounding Married At First Sight, my first reaction wasn’t surprise. It was: what took the watchdog so long? The regulator is reportedly preparing to question Channel 4 about the programme following claims over participant welfare, including rape allegations raised by former contestants. These allegations, made in a recent Panorama investigation, feel like the inevitable consequence of a television trend I’ve watched unfold for almost three decades. Because long before reality television became a billion-pound industry, I was one of the young producers helping to build it. For 20 years, I worked in TV as a producer, director, executive producer and commissioner. I sat in the meetings, heard the pitches, made the programmes and was there when reality television exploded. What we’re witnessing now is the horrible fallout. Back in the late 1990s, reality television was still finding its feet. Digital channels were proliferating and broadcasters suddenly needed huge amounts of content to fill their schedules. Drama took too long to film, was scripted by self-indulgent luvvies and the actors were notoriously expensive. Reality TV was none of those things. Young producers – like me – were trained to use cameras and microphones and sent off to make television quickly and cheaply. The first reality series I produced was actually my own idea. A friend and I pitched an alternative to traditional travel programmes such as Wish You Were Here and Whicker’s World: instead of showing picture-postcard holidays, we would document what young British tourists really got up to abroad. Samantha's first show followed Britons behaving badly in Spain, through Ibiza Uncovered The result was a Sky One series, Ibiza Uncovered, featuring drunken holidaymakers, topless sunbathers, people throwing up in Spanish A&E departments and, of course, sex. Lots of sex. My father was incandescent when he saw how his university-educated daughter’s prestigious career in TV was going. The ratings, however, were phenomenal. The talk at the time was that television was being democratised. Ordinary people would become the stars rather than trained actors. What nobody said out loud was that ‘ordinary people’ were also a lot cheaper. We delivered big audiences at a fraction of the cost of those other, glossier, better resourced kinds of programming. My wages were certainly not those of a drama director and neither were those of my peers. But reality TV was booming and if you could deliver ratings, you were never short of work. The language used in production offices would make a nun blush. Whiteboards listed the types of contributors casting teams wanted: attractive, outspoken, confident, sexually adventurous, likely to flirt, likely to argue. ‘Bikini bodies’ wasn’t an unusual phrase to see scribbled on a board. One producer rejected a potential contributor because her Glaswegian accent was supposedly too difficult for viewers to understand before quickly adding that it was a shame because, ‘she’s got a great rack’. Looking back, it’s extraordinary how openly people were discussed as ingredients rather than human beings. The irony is that the contributors weren’t the only ones being exploited. Television ran on young people willing to work ridiculous hours because they wanted a credit at the end of the programme. Researchers, runners and assistant producers worked evenings, weekends and holidays because everybody was desperate for the next contract. I distinctly remember occupational health departments warning senior management about the number of stressed and exhausted twenty-something employees they were seeing. Management could also be laughably naive. I sat in on one lengthy production meeting devoted almost entirely to ensuring contributors were wearing jelly sandals when filming near the sea. Physical safety mattered. Sexual wellbeing? No chance. What strikes me now is how young we all were. Many of the people responsible for getting contributors to sign a ‘release form’ – which essentially allowed the broadcaster to do what it liked with the footage – were in their 20s and early 30s. I wouldn’t trust my 25-year-old self with understanding and explaining such legal documents, never mind some of the safeguarding responsibilities now expected of production teams. I became good at developing and making these kinds of shows, good enough that I eventually moved into commissioning them. Sky One even hired me as Head of Entertainment. That gave me an insider’s view of how broadcasters thought. I sat through countless pitches where the question wasn’t whether a programme idea could be made responsibly, but whether it would generate headlines and ratings. That’s where we started to ‘manage’ our ‘punters’ more heavily in shows like The Villa, where Brits on holiday were manipulated – there is no other word for it – into behaving badly. In my job at Sky, I was witness to some truly awful propositions: bosses desperately trying to make a talk show called ‘Hot Sex’ work as daytime television, for example. I was pitched a format built around wealthy men going on big-game hunts in Africa. The catch? They were hunting naked women. While at Sky, my bosses told me to commission Temptation Island, where the entire premise depended on testing relationships to destruction. The casting wasn’t accidental. My production team found couples who seemed vulnerable to temptation, in relationships already showing cracks, because the chances of betrayal, heartbreak and emotional fallout made for better television. Of course, one young bloke slept with another woman on the first night away from his fiancee. At the time his willingness to succumb to such rampant infidelity – not to mention his fiancee’s tearful breakdown – gave us a powerful episode one and we all rather smugly patted one another on the back for such smart casting. The format was practically designed to produce exactly that outcome. But looking back, it raises uncomfortable questions about what exactly we were trying to achieve. In my early 30s, I rejoined the production world. By now even ITV was keen to get in on the reality revolution. At one commissioning meeting we were told drama with its actors was too expensive. The strategy was clear: use ordinary people instead. At Channel 4, I encountered commissioners all too ready to open their chequebooks for formats featuring explicit sexual content, to be scheduled before the watershed under the laughable banner of education. The line between public service broadcasting and sensationalism became increasingly blurred. One documentary, Perfect Breasts, following young women undergoing breast enlargement surgery, generated enormous ratings. For a year, that piece of documentary television became the touchstone for producers to follow. Nobody sat around a table saying: ‘Let’s corrupt television.’ Reality television didn’t become problematic overnight – the shift was gradual. At first, we observed behaviour, then we started structuring situations around people, then we started nudging those situations, then we started engineering them. And when Big Brother started, we went from reality TV not just recording behaviour, but openly manipulating it. As shows became increasingly intimate, increasingly confrontational, increasingly sexual, I often wondered whether anyone was truly equipped to assess the long-term impact on contributors. While some people who emerge from shows like Love Island or The Apprentice do get rich, the majority end up not having earned a penny. And we now know the impact on their mental health can be catastrophic. Yet broadcasters, advertisers and production companies all profited off the backs of individuals seduced into taking part in content where, too often, the outcome had already been decided. Today, broadcasters quite rightly talk about duty of care. Apparently, entire departments now exist to support contributors before, during and after filming. If that’s true, then it’s progress. But I still find myself wondering whether anybody can truly protect participants from the consequences of having the most intimate moments of their lives broadcast to millions of people and dissected online. Once filming finishes, the producers move on – but the contributors don’t. They have to live with whatever happened. And trust me: the edit is everything. Give the same day’s footage to two different producers and you can end up with entirely different stories. One person sees a vulnerable woman who needs protecting; another sees the scene that will make the trailer. The fact is, we pushed ordinary people into humiliating themselves and called it entertainment. For 30 years, television kept asking how far reality TV could go. As viewers, contributors and regulators question the human cost, perhaps it is time to ask why we allowed it to go this far at all. No comments have so far been submitted. Why not be the first to send us your thoughts, or debate this issue live on our message boards. By posting your comment you agree to our house rules. Do you want to automatically post your MailOnline comments to your Facebook Timeline? Your comment will be posted to MailOnline as usual. Do you want to automatically post your MailOnline comments to your Facebook Timeline? Your comment will be posted to MailOnline as usual We will automatically post your comment and a link to the news story to your Facebook timeline at the same time it is posted on MailOnline. To do this we will link your MailOnline account with your Facebook account. We’ll ask you to confirm this for your first post to Facebook. You can choose on each post whether you would like it to be posted to Facebook. 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