TV review: Seven Days

Interactive reality TV show Seven Days was compelling – and a little bit too close to home
seven days malcolm tv review tim dowling
Malcolm ... a property developer with dreadlocks and a very odd house, in Seven Days. Contract Number (Programme)/PR

"What you are about to see," said the opening titles of Seven Days (Channel 4), "happened in the last seven days to people who live and work in Notting Hill, west London." What happened? Well, not much, to start with. Everyone was talking about George Michael getting jailed for driving into Snappy Snaps, a reference which was pointedly very last week. It was like holding a recent newspaper in front of a hostage to prove he's still alive. "He's gonna be queen bee in prison," said John, a hairdresser.

"I don't think he's a bad guy, though, is he?" said Jan, an interior designer.

They weren't talking to each other. As far as I know, John and Jan have never met. Seven Days, the pioneering new reality TV series, treats Notting Hill not as a community, but as a constituency made up of distinct tribes, with a broad range of class and ethnicity, but little or no interaction; proximate lives running in parallel. Which is to say, they get it about right.

The series is, however, interactive in another sense: viewers can visit the website and offer advice to the characters, who may or may not act on it the following week. So really, the whole experiment hadn't even begun by the end of last night's episode. It was just an introduction to some of the characters you'll be manipulating.

Hannah is Jan's daughter and business partner, taking on more responsibility as her father's health worsens. Moktah is a Muslim law student who lives with his mum and works at John Lewis. Laura and Sam, aspiring models, are roommates who make each other cry a lot. Javan is an aspiring musician, Malcolm a property developer with dreadlocks and a very odd house. All their friends, family, colleagues, clients and employees feature (wittingly, it would seem) as supporting cast members.

The term "reality television" is applied to a lot of programming, from The X Factor to Pineapple Dance Studios, but Seven Days represents a return to the genre's roots: it's an old-fashioned docusoap. Its participants are not contestants, which is not to say they don't have an agenda of some sort. They haven't been taken out of their comfort zones; they've been deliberately left in them. If not much happens, at least we don't know where it's heading. You can't say that about The Apprentice.

Interactivity may be its unique selling point, but the big innovation is how quickly transmission follows filming: these people aren't documentary subjects. They are out there right now, living the next week of their lives, allegedly awaiting your input. Seven Days positively revels in the notion of reality TV eating itself: billboards for the programme are part of the scenery; participants openly discuss their, um, participation. It's not even a fixed series, as such. If the experiment is successful, it will just carry on.

None of this would be remotely interesting, however, if the programme didn't work as an hour of television. It does, though. It manages to be intimate without being invasive, funny in some places, charming in others, and bleak on occasion, all in a manner that makes you think someone with a sense of responsibility must be at the helm. It may not be "real", but there's a certain forthright honesty about it.

I found the first outing compelling, if only because of how weirdly at home supposedly ordinary people are in the company of cameras. Maybe the surveillance society has softened us up. Maybe we're all used to broadcasting the minutiae of our lives on social networking sites for the entertainment of others. Perhaps we all now accept that privacy and publicity are but two names for the same commodity. I'd cop to a lot of that, but that doesn't mean I'd take a TV crew on a date with my ex-boyfriend, like Hannah did.

I don't live too far from Notting Hill, as it happens. I wouldn't say it's a stone's throw away, but I could probably hit it with a grenade launcher if I got up on the roof – a safe distance, or so I imagined. As the programme went on, and more characters were introduced, I started to recognise people and places a little close to home. Reality television began to bleed uncomfortably into what I used to call reality. It doesn't really matter where you live, though – eventually this phenomenon will expand to engulf us all. I don't know whether I should go outside or not now. Text me.