Notes on ethical scenarios of self on British reality TV

What follows are notes on a range of reality television programmes which foreground “extraordinary subjectivity” (John Dovey 2000). Despite the increasing diffusion of a proliferating range of reality TV formats, they are uniform in their interrogations of self under the pressures of particular conditions. We locate this obsession with selfhood within contemporary sociological arguments concerned with the individualisation thesis and suggest that the televising of such scenarios offers spaces where ethical choices are rehearsed and played out, staging the drama and spectacle through traditional narratives of gender and class.