What is the purpose of reality television? Does it provide information and education to the audience, or are the program makers simply exploiting real people's lives for the purposes of entertainment? Can we rely on documentaries to follow the ethics of programme making in terms of truth and accuracy?
Real TV offers a wide-ranging, international, contemporary investigation into the field of factual entertainment, combining historical, theoretical, economic, aesthetic and empirical approaches. The book also provides a sustained investigation into ethical issues and public interest in order to show that such concepts are integral to an understanding of the development of factual entertainment.
The current growth rate for "real" TV in factual and fictional television programs, film and websites on both sides of the Atlantic, has given rise to international debate about the function and influence of factual entertainment on audiences and mass media. Real TV presents a timely reflection on the development of factual entertainment and audience attraction to increasingly problematic hybrid forms of factual TV.