A personal admission: for the first 24 minutes of Prime Video’s new documentary series, The Greatest Show Never Made (from Wednesday 11 October), I thought it was a made-up script. Everyone here at Joel Golby HQ is sad to admit this, but I think I misread a press release, or skimmed the wrong page on the wrong website, and – long story short – I thought we’d crossed a new frontier in mockumentary that would change television for ever. From my notes: “I genuinely don’t know how they’ve done the throwback production on this, the de-ageing is better than The Irishman.” Or: “The TV presenter reel from the early 00s is eerie in its accuracy.” Listen: we got it wrong.
But perhaps that is a testament to the story at the heart of The Greatest Show Never Made, which is both mind-bendingly outrageous but also very, very – almost painfully – of “The Year 2002”, in such a way that is serves as a textural time machine for that moment in history. Let me take you back: Kate had just won Big Brother, it was front-page news if David Beckham got a haircut, modems still made that noise. This was a time of hope and technology and an inversion of the 80s philosophy that anyone could strike it rich overnight (anyone could get famous for anything!). And, in all that, 30 people got duped into participating in a reality show that didn’t actually exist.
Put it like that, and The Greatest Show is a ghoulish story about a scam, how one svengali-type figure tricked 30 people into giving up their lives (people quit their jobs, let the leases expire on their flats!) to participate in a reality TV format that was only vaguely defined and definitely wasn’t sold, for reasons unknown: greed? Perversion? A power fantasy? A grift? The villain of the piece is “Nikita Russian” (from my notes: “They’ve done so well to nail that particular smug-smart tone TV presenters had back then, and they’ve styled him so perfectly in a too-big leather jacket”). The victims are seven of the 30 participants (split into teams, the second tranche of contestants figured out it wasn’t real about 45 minutes into filming, and honestly I would have liked to have heard more from them).
It would be easy to tell this story in big, affirmative good and bad binaries – Nikita Russian is bad, all the contestants are good, duping people is wrong, this is an outrage and justice must be served – but The Greatest Show is more interesting and nuanced than that. And it helps that the source story is fascinating.
It really was a moment in time: just a little bit pre-internet paranoia (anyone these days receiving a flimsy uncontract from an unspecified production company would just Google them and see it was fake), when a lot of people were shown the hope of the new millennium and felt a bit disaffected by it all (almost everyone who took part did so because, due to the jobs or situations they were in, “every day felt the same”), and, realistically, a lot of reality TV formats were making their contestants famous. What’s heartbreaking about The Greatest Show is, before the wheels started to fall off the whole thing, they were probably only about three phone calls and a meeting away from actually making it happen. We’d be rightfully talking about Tim, a clown and camera operator from Dalston, as the most famous and beloved person in the UK right now.
Instead, we have this documentary (definitely a documentary) and, as all good documentaries do, it tells the story carefully and from as many angles as possible. We meet Nik’s childhood best friend, and the director who dropped out when he realised the format hadn’t been sold but not before he’d composed a really hopeful theme tune, and we see raw footage of the auditions. We hear the reasons why everyone took part – every top-level documentary, I find, has a dashed-off sentence that is accidentally heart-rendingly profound; in this one it’s Tim saying: “There was part of me that was unhappy. It was a good life, but there was still something missing” – and we see how they’re doing now. You would expect seething anger but they all have fairly calm, lucid hindsight about the whole thing.
What a time it was, back then, to wear an unbadged England shirt and listen to Liberty X and dream about meeting Davina. The only really surprising part is this didn’t happen more.
