‘Beverley Skeggs, a professor of sociology at Goldsmith’s, University of London who has conducted studies into the representation of class and gender on reality television, believes it is, at root, a question of human connection. “I think the community feeling is part of the appeal of this kind of show,” she says. “It’s expressing a form of social value – people connect to other people who have the same values, who behave in the same way. We do get swept up in it, wanting to be behind somebody, wanting them to do well. That’s why producers will milk the hard-luck story – those little snippets of someone working in Tesco – because all that intertextual stuff enables us to feel we have this sort of connection.”