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.
