As a producer thinks of putting volunteers in the positions of Nazis and Jews, John Lloyd, brought up on the old BBC, considers the limits of reality TV

Television people think - hope and pray - that they have discovered a new genre. A TV genre is a format for a show which can be filled with infinite permutations of content and presented with infinite varieties of style. Breakfast with Frost is in the same genre as Newsnight with Paxman: both are magazine shows.

Reality TV, the TV people believe, is such a genre. Nothing better illustrates their hopes than the honours they have accorded its creators. John de Mol, the Dutch media entrepreneur whose Endemol studio developed Big Brother, gave the Worldview Address at the Edinburgh International Television Festival two weeks ago. Endemol UK's creative director, Peter Bazalgette, gives the Huw Wheldon Memorial Lecture, which opens the Royal Television Society conference in Cambridge this month.

Huw Wheldon! He created and presented the bi-weekly arts programme Monitor in 1959 - where, sceptical yet questing, he snuffled among Barbara Hepworth sculptures and John Osborne dramas. As managing director of the BBC in the 1970s, he fought bitterly with Aubrey Singer, then controller of BBC2, over co-productions with foreign partners because Wheldon thought they would compromise the editorial integrity of the public service broadcaster. Huw Wheldon Lecture by the producer of Big Brother? Postmodern or what!

De Mol - reports said he had flown over from Amsterdam on a private jet so he could smoke - gave a speech that was, indeed, a world view. He said that Europe was poised to make inroads into the US market, reversing decades of one-way traffic in TV shows. He gave three examples of shows that had broken into the American market - Big Brother; the BBC-developed Weakest Link, fronted (in the US as well as the UK) by Anne Robinson; and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, produced by Paul Smith's company Celador. De Mol lauded Smith as the pioneer, who had taken the new values and style of the old world into the new. Millionaire, in different national formats, now plays in around 70 countries and has made Celador £70m in 2001.

Though de Mol was and Bazalgette will be lionised as the creators of a new genre, that title is disputed. The British producer Charlie Parsons has at least as large a claim. Parsons, in the Network 7 youth show in the late 1980s, developed an item that followed four people - a soap star, a stockbroker, a former criminal and a professional tennis player - round a desert island, filming how they coped. Funded from the US ABC network, the desert island idea was called Survivor and became, he says, "a mixture of soap, fly-on-the-wall documentary and game show. That's what reality TV is, a hybrid."

ABC passed. But Parsons sold the format to the Swedish state broadcaster SVT, where it soared to the top of the Saturday night ratings. He also sold it to Endemol - which, he said "seemed to be doing nothing with it". He and his US partner Mark Burnet then sold the format to CBS in 1999. Another success.

That same year, Endemol produced Big Brother for Dutch TV, to the same wild reception. "People in Holland were hurrying home of an evening to see it," says Liz Warner, the commissioning editor at Channel 4 who has overseen the channel's Big Brother series. Parsons, however, sued Endemol for stealing his intellectual property. Though he lost the first case in the Netherlands last year, he is appealing. The result, however, is that both the Big Brother and Survivor formats are on air and pulling in the audiences - if rather fewer than they did last year.

Like de Mol, I was brought up on public service, state monopoly television. Unlike him, I swallowed its ethic. I remember Wheldon and his statues; remember thinking my mother stupid when she asked "what are these supposed to be?" of the abstract shapes dotted about the studio, resolving that I would not wallow in such low cultural waters, but would lever myself up through art, literature, classical music and clever talk, even as I inwardly screamed the same question. So effective was this ethic, I now automatically consider game shows rubbish and reality TV degrading.

The "hating modern mass media" position is a difficult one, especially if you have children; but it has defenders. One was another Dutchman - not invited to TV conventions - a scholar named Peter Sloterdijk, who achieved some notoriety for a lecture he gave in Frankfurt in 1999 called "Rules for the Human Park". He saw the culture of the book and the school being destroyed - "as the book lost the fight against the theatre in antiquity, so the school could now lose the fight against indirect forms of violence in television, in the cinema and in other disinhibiting media". The demand that one become a voyeur on one's fellow citizens is the construction of a world based on instant emotional empathy or distaste. The book culture, because it encouraged reflection, was civilising. The TV culture, by contrast, gradually unravels civilisation.

Huw Wheldon culture was book culture televised. But every medium is driven to realise its own nature and potential, and thus TV culture has cast adrift from such inhibiting moorings. Reality TV constructs little controlled enclaves of people, watched by cameras 24 hours a day - just as, outside the TV studios, people huddle into controlled enclaves for security ("gated communities"), for amusement (theme parks) or for sport ("golf communities"). Celebration, the town constructed by the Disney Corporation as a perfect community, is an outre extreme, but it gives implicit shelter to a movement.

The BBC - and ITV, in its beginnings - had, in common with the public networks of all rich states, a belief in the manageability and coherence of society. Part of that was a view of high art as something which, though appreciated by the educated and cultured, should be introduced to all through the medium of broadcasting. But TV controllers realised, a little after Marshall McCluhan, that their medium was the message. That realisation has now passed into the bloodstream, and washes away all the earlier forms - theatre, classical music, high art - beaching them in specialist channels such as Artsworld or BBC Discovery, which the BBC wants to make into BBC3 for the chattering classes.

The TV people, including the brightest of them, do not see reality TV this way. Jeremy Gibson, the BBC controller of documentaries, thinks that series like The Iron Age (where viewers volunteered to live an Iron Age life in a hut) and the forthcoming The Trench (where viewers volunteer to lead a First World War life in a trench) are valuable historically. "We are planning The Trench very, very methodically," he said. "It is all about detail; this is not about getting people to cry on television." (Nevertheless, a clip from The Iron Age played at Edinburgh showed a woman sobbing after days being an Iron Age person, saying "I don't feel myself any more" - which, according to Gibson, was the point).

Roy Ackerman, who runs the independent company Diverse Productions and is making a reality TV show about which he can't talk, confesses ambivalence about the genre. Yet he says: "I can imagine trying to do a reality show which tested this thesis: what would you do if you were hiding a Jew from the Nazis, and the Nazis came to your house? Would you betray them? Or try to save them? As a Jew, I think that would be an interesting and valid thing to do. You wouldn't find it out in any other way."

But in what way would you find it out? Ackerman's example illustrates a central point about reality TV. If it is to be a genre, then the "reality" must become more and more real. It already is. The Russians have a show on the state TV channel which induces a volunteer to steal a car, gives him three minutes to get away, then calls the traffic police: it then films the pursuers and pursued. It broke all viewing records. A US company has made a series called Cheaters International, in which one partner who knows or suspects that she/he is being cheated on by the other arranges for the TV crew to follow the cheater - then confronts him/her with the evidence. "It's on the verge of the acceptable," admits Chris Gray of Channel 5, which is on the verge of buying a six-show series.

The frankest exponent of the genre I met was Natalka Znak, who heads reality TV for London Weekend. Znak is doing the British equivalent of Temptation Island - a US show that puts young couples on an island and waits for them to be tempted by each other's partners. "I was offered the show," sniffed Lorraine Heggessey, the BBC1 controller, in Edinburgh. "It made me feel sick, it was so manipulative." "Why manipulative?" asked an indignant Znak, who was sitting beside her. "It's the most honest show I've ever done." Later, Znak, appearing impatient with the public servicery being thrown out by Heggessey and "Iron Age" Gibson, said: "I'll do anything!" When I phoned her some days later at LWT, she said: "I know my role. I'm seen as the one who goes further."

But further is the only place to go.

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