Panto Poll: Do you hate Endemol?

They haven't had the best press, let's face it, but how do you feel about the Big Brother/One and Only/Supersize vs Superskinny/Deal or No Deal production company? They've got a new guy at the helm, Tim Hincks, but does he convince you? Here's what he told The Guardian this week:

"We've finally stopped talking the talk and we're starting to walk the walk. Quietly, below the radar, we're doing a project that is as big and important to us as Big Brother. I've called it, slightly pretentiously, user-generated reality. You have to be careful how much hype you put around it but I think it's about to go through a period of really rapid change. You can feel it and smell it."

I'm a bit worried that you can smell it. According to the same article, Endemol is also making an online, interactive reality show for Bebo. Pretty sure I can smell that one already.

Supersize vs Superskinny: the end of an era

So farewell then, bizarro Channel 4 diet show, back-handed Gillian McKeith vehicle and world's introduction to the lovely Dr Christian Jessen. They were the best of times, the worst of times, the fat times and the lean times. Mostly they were the meal times.

Oh SvS, I loved you, but what a weird mixed platter of a show you were. Patronising health advice sat smugly on the plate alongside acidic cuts from McKeith's shrieking misogyny and great unstomachable chunks of hammy Anna Richardson. This last calls herself a "journalist" (ahem, I've seen her stuff in the Mail), was ostensibly "trying out" different extreme diets and weight loss methods in the vein of all those worthy-but-creepy "Make Me A Size 0" shows, but like the women on those shows, was quite transparently desperate to lose weight. And then of course there was the diet-swap aspect...

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