Showing results by author "Jacques Peretti" in All Categories

In July 1997, the first contestant voted off the first episode of the first ever reality TV elimination show took his own life. Expedition Robinson was the first show of its kind anywhere, and it was going to be remembered not for breaking the mold of television, but for a death, the first of at least 40 suicides linked globally to a reality TV show.

What if the way we understand our world is wrong? What if it isn't politicians and events that shape our lives but secret deals made by people you've never heard of? This book tells the story of the secret deals that are changing the world and revolutionising everything we do, including money, the food we eat, what we buy and the drugs we take to stay well. These deals never make the news: they are made high up in boardrooms, on golf courses and in luxury cars, each sealed by world-changing handshakes.

As a reporter, Jacques Peretti has spent his life investigating important stories. But there was one story, heard in scattered fragments throughout his childhood, that he never thought to investigate. The story of how his mother survived Auschwitz. In the few last months of the Second World War, 13-year-old Alina Peretti, along with her mother and sister, was one of 13,000 non-Jewish Poles sent to Auschwitz. Her experiences there cast a shadow over the rest of her life. Now 90, Alina has been diagnosed with dementia.

Reality TV's influence is seismic: twenty-five years ago, the concept didn't exist. Yet today, it is one of the most powerful cultural forces on earth; a multi-billion-dollar machine. Despite that, it is often derided as "trash"; a cultural McDonalds not worthy of examination. The truth is that reality TV offers a profound insight into who we are as human beings, questioning the very nature of what we deem to be entertaining. Writer, broadcaster and reality TV-obsessive Jacques Peretti goes behind the scenes of a world that has entranced and consumed him for two decades.