Where will you be when the zombie apocalypse happens? Well, if you're a superficial celebrity wannabe, or a hapless television production assistant, you just might be on the set of the nation's most popular reality show, Big Brother.
That's the premise of Dead Set, a zombie mini-series running this week on the UK cable channel, E4. I've just finished watching the first episode, and it's surprisingly good so far. The zombies are runners, but that's necessary given the show's premise and the speed with which things would have to escalate for that scenario to occur.
Amazingly, the reality show in the series is actually Big Brother and not Big Sister or Orwell House or whatever lame name the writers would have been forced to adopt if the show had been made in the US. Even though Big Brother is a production of E4's parent network, Channel 4, this still astounds me, because the behind-the-scenes crew of BB is not painted in a very flattering light. That would have been enough to derail a Hollywood version of Dead Set, despite the fact that the characters are clearly fictional. But the makers of Dead Set were able to shoot on the real Big Brother locations, cast the real host and real former contestants as themselves, and film the real crowds that gather outside the BB house while the show airs*. Ironically, the heightened sense of reality (pun intended) this all brings is mostly lost on American viewers, who wouldn't know Davina McCall from Noel Edmonds.
The whole shebang is the brainchild of Charlie Brooker, a writer and comedian best known for his scathing satires of British television. But while the Dead Set hasn't exactly been kind in its portrayal of the industry and the people who work in it, the show has been played straight so far. It hasn't shied away from the grisly images associated with the genre and it hasn't skimped on the scares so far, either; it had me jumping a couple of times.
Dead Set runs all this week through Halloween night, and gets a UK DVD release on November 3rd. If the next couple of episodes are as good as the first, I'll be placing an order this weekend. Hooray for the crashing pound!
* I think the public frenzy surrounding this program frightened me more than the zombies did.
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