From Ultimate Wedding Planner to Crazy Rich Agents, why is the BBC making such joyless reality TV?

This week, two new BBC shows used an ‘Apprentice’-like template to give us banal competitions between, first, estate agents, and then wedding planners. Jessie Thompson wonders when telly got so uptight and formulaic

Let’s call it off: Raj Somaiya, Sara Davies and Fred Sirieix, who judge the BBC’s ‘Ultimate Wedding Planner’ (BBC/Kieron McCarron)

Who among us hasn’t been there? You’re in a meeting. You’re tired. You need to come up with an idea. Your boss is staring at you. The room is deathly silent. Suddenly a thought pops into your head. Before your brain can stop you, your mouth is shouting words: “Crazy rich agents!” But wait – what does it mean? Maybe it doesn’t matter. It sounds good. Hopefully you can work out the rest from there.

This, surely, is how BBC Two came to commission Crazy Rich Agents, a new show that aired on Monday in which a random assortment of young people attempt to sell plush, pricey properties. “None have tackled the world of multimillion-pound real estate,” a severe voiceover told us. Because, during the fastest house price fall in over a decade, who else would you want selling your very expensive property but a 22-year-old who has never sold one before? Crazy Rich Agents is the latest thing to confirm the fact that there is simply too much TV being made right now.

The problem is, while streamers like Netflix, Apple TV and Prime try to outspend each other to win subscriptions, our traditional broadcasters are facing rounds and rounds of brutal cuts. Earlier this year, Channel 4 execs deferred taking bonuses to help keep the peace after a number of progammes were axed, while local radio is the latest part of the BBC undergoing a huge reduction. Perhaps that’s why we’ve ended up on a joyless roundabout of soul-destroyingly basic, low-budget, competitive reality shows that sound like they came from Alan Partridge’s dictaphone.

On paper, Crazy Rich Agents could have been the perfect bit of fluff to gawp at on a Monday night when you’re a bit tired. Netflix’s Selling Sunset – immersed in a similar milieu, but stateside – proved it’s possible. Who wouldn’t want to see inside the £80m home once owned by Margot Fonteyn, once visited by JFK and Princess Margaret? But Crazy Rich Agents wasn’t interested in that. It wanted to be “The Apprentice – but with big houses”. “I’m so driven, I’m ambitious… you’ve just got to have balls,” one of the pocket square-wearing wannabe Staths told us, with the kind of overzealous energy that suggested he’d corner your gran in Morrisons to give her a business card. Another was on Google Maps trying to find Hampstead – he’d heard a lot of rich people lived there. One of them, listening to her first clients explain that they wanted outdoor space for a car park and for their dog, glazed over with fear.

The characters were uncharismatic, and we hardly got to see any of the cool houses. It was straight out of the flatpack furniture world of telly. So, imagine my surprise when, two days later, BBC Two was airing Ultimate Wedding Planner, which is The Apprentice – but with weddings. Fred from First Dates, Sara from Dragons’ Den, and an allegedly famous hotshot wedding expert named Raj judge teams who were given £10,000 and three days to “supercharge” the weddings of “Britain’s bravest couples”. In the first episode, we met a couple who were 21 and 24 years old, and got engaged after just two months. Hmm, I thought – they probably shouldn’t be getting married this young, this quickly. But then they explained their common interest in aviation and plane spotting, and I changed my mind. If you meet someone who shares your dream of getting married in, essentially, an airport lounge, you should probably never let them go.

Like Crazy Rich Agents, the wannabe wedding planners were competing for an expensive contract. It was even more Apprentice-y than The Apprentice. There was the slightly scary “girl boss” lady who volunteered to be “project manager” first, and then spent quite a lot of time having passive-aggressive meetings and phone calls. There were the talking head interviews where they all slagged each other off behind their backs. There was the celebrity judge frowning while someone made an obvious boo-boo, and the contestant who was finding it all a bit much (“A lot of stress and effort this morning,” he sulked). There were the strained chats about “the budget”, and the classic panicked last-minute phone call trying to acquire goods. “I desperately need an engraver,” one said.

These programmes seem to be a symptom of an inexorable but often terrible genre, which is basically: “Can people do things?” See also: Alone, a new Channel 4 show in which people have to survive in the remote Canadian wilderness. (Can people do things? Not Mike, who left in the first episode after accidentally putting an axe through his own leg.) On the more extreme side of things, there’s the forthcoming real-life version of Squid Game on Netflix, which seems a bit bizarre given the surprise hit Korean drama was actually a critique of capitalism. And, of course, there are the celebrity versions, such as Scared of the Dark (can Gazza sit in a dark room for a week?) and Freeze the Fear with Wim Hof (can Alfie Boe jump in some really cold water?).

Flog it: The stars of the soul-destroyingly basic ‘Crazy Rich Agents’ (BBC/Plum Pictures)

These bonkers, unashamedly basic shows seem to forget one important thing: what viewers are actually interested in. Audiences love characters, moments of unpredictability, drama – be it high stakes or subtle. Why else would one episode of the otherwise formulaic Come Dine with Me (“what a sad little life, Jane”) have passed into TV legend forever? Recent word-of-mouth smash The Traitors became so compulsively watchable because it was incredibly well cast, presented by the very skilled Claudia Winkleman, and had a format that encouraged moments of action without feeling contrived or inauthentic. Don’t Tell the Bride, which Ultimate Wedding Planner seems to be trying to emulate, became a binge-watching rite-of-passage in the late Noughties precisely because its formula allowed for moments of genuine carnage – who could forget the groom who spent the whole wedding budget on a Vegas sesh? (Not the bride – they’re now divorced.) And a show like Gogglebox gets away with a concept that might have sounded ridiculous in a commissioning meeting – we watch people watching TV – because the families who’ve been chosen are so funny and entertaining.

What is required to improve the quality of some of these programmes – more money? Fresh talent? Or… simply a person at the top who is better at saying no to iffy ideas? There’s been a level of brazen audacity in a number of recent so-called entertainment shows – the idea that you can make another Bake Off or Sewing Bee or Interior Design Masters in such a low-energy, uptight, and uninspiring way. Some of them – your Dragons’ Dens, your Apprentices – are tired enough without their formats being recycled elsewhere, in dull, diluted fashion. Yes, there’s never been so much telly – but it’s starting to feel like there’s never been more reason to switch it off.