The Hughes family have so little to hide that they let Channel 4 film their every move for four months. But what will a nation used to the freaks and fracas of reality TV think of a family that has no problems? Paul Kendall reports. Photography by Laura Hynd
Click. Whirr. The remote-control camera spins round and re-focuses. In front of an enormous plasma television, two teenage girls are dancing to the latest hits on MTV. As they jump and slide across the floor, their younger brother slumps on a sofa, smiling while they execute mock pirouettes and comedy kicks. Moments later, their parents - both in their forties, both still attractive - return from a night out, dash into the room and join in the silliness. The film fades out, then in again. With music still booming from the television, the children kiss their parents goodnight and trot obediently to bed. Left alone, the couple turn down the volume, drape their arms around each other and smooch to the Bob Marley song Could You Be Loved. Harmony reigns.
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This, believe it or not, is the future of reality TV. In an astonishing about-turn, Channel 4, the station that brought us the relentless outrages of Big Brother, is about to broadcast an observational documentary series about a family that loves each other and doesn't really have any problems. Entitled simply The Family, it will chronicle the day-to-day lives of the Hugheses from Canterbury in Kent. Chosen from thousands for their down-to-earth domesticity, Simon and Jane Hughes and their children Jessica, Emily, Charlotte and Tom were filmed around the clock for almost four months.
Twenty-one remote-control cameras and 16 microphones were installed in their home, a three-bedroom, semi-detached cottage, earlier this year, and the house next door was converted into a production gallery, where the film-makers monitored their movements day and night on a bank of screens resembling a CCTV control centre. It was horribly intrusive, but the Hugheses didn't care. They simply had nothing to hide.
Of course, there were the normal arguments that all families with three teenage children have (Jessica, the eldest daughter, is 22 and lives a mile-and-a-half away with her husband, Patrick, and their 10-month-old daughter, Ruby). Emily - 19, monosyllabic and rude - wanted to go out every night to party with friends in the town's bars and clubs. Tom, 14, got his ear pierced, listened to death metal, spent hours playing on his Nintendo Wii and had trouble concentrating at school. And Simon and Jane sometimes argued about the best way to handle these problems.
But that's as bad as it got. Despite the widely held belief that there is a crisis among Britain's youth - escalating rates of crime, underage sex, teenage pregnancies, obesity, binge drinking, drugs, bullying and depression - Channel 4 has chosen a bunch of well-adjusted grammar school children who look like they're all going to turn out just fine. They don't even swear very much.
'We're a very normal family,' says Jane when I meet her and the rest of her clan at home on a damp August afternoon. 'We have our ups and downs. We have problems that probably millions of families have, but we really love each other and we're there for each other. That's why we wanted to do the programme; to show the love that binds the whole thing together.' Simon, sitting next to her on their living-room sofa, concurs. He can't think of one thing he did, bar a suggestive aside to the camera about the effect he hoped a Barry White song would have on his wife, that will embarrass him when the series is aired. 'Thousands of families across the country are going to relate to all sorts of things we did and said in the programme,' he says with feeling. 'Such as teenagers that want their independence, or don't want to go to work, or won't get up in the morning.'
Most of the rows in the Hughes family take place between Simon and Emily. During part of the filming Emily was working in a clothes store, but regularly calling in sick after being out all night drinking. She eventually lost her job, and her less-than-dynamic approach to finding another one started to annoy Simon. A typical argument ran like this:
Simon: 'How's the job-hunting going?'
Emily: 'Fine'
Simon: 'Did you get a copy of the Kentish Gazette?'
Emily: 'No'
Simon: 'With all the latest jobs in?'
Emily: 'I just said "No"!'
Thousands of similar conversations (if you can call them that) take place in households across Britain every day. An exchange between Simon and Tom will also ring a lot of bells. Staring at his son slumped across the dinner table, Simon yells: 'Please get your head off the table, Tom. Have some table manners!' To which Tom replies: 'It's on my ARM!'
But for all their stroppiness, Emily and Tom are not bad children. They pose dutifully - along with Charlotte and Jessica - for The Sunday Telegraph's photographer while I speak to their parents, and once they've been dismissed, both fuss over Jessica's daughter Ruby with obvious affection. In fact, I feel sorry for Tom, forced to grow up in a house full of girls. When I ask him how he copes, he just buries his head in his hands. Who is he most close to, I ask? 'Jess and Emily,' he says. 'So I'm your least favourite?' asks Charlotte immediately, sounding genuinely hurt. 'You don't speak to me!' replies Tom, and then, turning to me: 'She doesn't speak to me at all.'
Charlotte certainly seems the quietest of the siblings and the most academic, studying philosophy, English, social anthropology, Italian, maths and biology for the Baccalaureate, which she is sitting instead of A-levels next summer. On the day of my visit, she has just returned from two weeks in Grand Canaria, where she has managed to cultivate the most extraordinary tan. It is good timing: the family are in the middle of final preparations for Jess's wedding, which is due to be filmed for the series, and all the girls are anxious to look their best. Jess and Jane have also got tans, but I suspect theirs have come from the chemist.
Tom, meanwhile, is decked out in surf shorts, a Rip Curl black T-shirt and black socks and looks like he has just got up. 'What have you done with your hair?' asks Emily, attempting to pat it down with her hand. 'I don't know; it's just what it's doing today,' he mumbles, pushing her away.
It's only alluded to in the series, but both Simon and Jane are Christians and go to church every Sunday. Simon also runs Alpha courses, the 10-week introductions to Christianity, while Jane works full-time at a church-funded shelter for pregnant, homeless teenagers. On their shelves are videos with titles such as Gaining New Perspectives, The Anointed Leader and Prayer Minister Training and books called Surrender to the Voice of God. But they're far from fanatical Bible-bashers. 'We weren't Christians for most of our parenting years,' says Simon, laying his arm along the back of the sofa. 'And we think that the graceful approach is to allow the kids to know who we are and what we believe and where we stand without insisting that they follow us every Sunday to church.' The couple seem eminently sensible, but it's hard not to be suspicious. What is Channel 4, the station that specialises in portraying society's dysfunctional misfits, up to? For the answer, you probably have to look back at another series, also called The Family, which was the inspiration for this new show.
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Made by Paul Watson in 1974, it was the first fly-on-the-wall documentary that captured the public's imagination and made celebrities out of ordinary people. The Wilkinses, a working class family living in a flat above a greengrocer's in Reading, were shown indulging in extramarital sex, using bad language and drinking until they were paralytic. The matriarch, Margaret (who died earlier this month), caused a storm when she admitted that her husband, Terry, was not the father of her youngest son. And their 15-year-old daughter Heather stirred up controversy when she revealed she was in a relationship with a boy of mixed-race parentage.
These are all quite commonplace issues today, but at the time they provoked the ire of politicians, newspaper editors and thousands of members of the public. 'I cannot see the necessity of prying into the private lives of any family,' wrote one newspaperman, 'but if it is to be done, then why not choose a family with high ideals, intellectual pursuits, aesthetic appreciation and moral stamina?' Ten million people knew why, and tuned in regularly to watch the 'real-life soap'. When the eldest daughter Marian married her boyfriend Tom in front of the cameras, 20,000 people thronged the streets outside the church and the family were mobbed by paparazzi. Britain had seen nothing like it since the marriage of Princess Margaret and Antony Armstrong-Jones.
And so began a new chapter in television history. Since The Family, Mark One, every dark and dismal corner of our lives has been poked by a camera lens and prodded by a microphone. Human beings, as John Humphrys put it a few years ago, 'have been turned into freaks for us to gawp at.' Accepting an award at the Bafta television awards this year, even Paul Watson, who has been called the father of reality TV, took the opportunity to distance himself from the 'sneering, bullying' nature of much modern broadcasting. 'I'm certainly not the father of such bastards,' he declared.
The Family, mark two, is Channel 4's response to all this. Despite the ground-breaking way in which it was filmed, the series is almost wilfully old-fashioned. Compared with a programme like Wife Swap - in which two wives go to live with each other's families for 10 days - it moves extremely slowly. An entire 50-minute episode is devoted to the issue of Tom's bedtime (should it be moved from 9.30 to 10pm?); there are long, lingering shots of a light switch on the landing, or a flight of stairs. In fact, the cameras never stray out of the family home, save for the occasional shot of the outside of the house. And, unlike the majority of reality shows that tell the viewer what to think, The Family features hardly any narration.
'We wanted to produce an honest portrait of family life in the 21st century,' says the director, Jonathan Smith. 'A format like Wife Swap is entertaining, but it does not necessarily represent real life.' Smith also wanted to focus on a family 'that worked.' In the last scene of the final episode of the 1970s series, Margaret was asked what she thought life would be like once the cameras had left. 'Our life carries on,' she replied. 'I hope nobody does get anything out of this because that way none of us will change. And I think there can be a lot of pitfalls if somebody became an actor, an actress or a model out of something like this. I think it could be disastrous because it takes you away from your family.'
None of the family did become actors or models (without wishing to be cruel, the latter was especially unlikely), but their lives did change enormously. Margaret's 23-year marriage to Terry ended after a year and they divorced in 1978. And Marian's marriage to Tom lasted seven years. Altogether, the four Wilkins children have had five failed marriages and 14 children between them. Gary, the Wilkins's eldest son, severed relations with Margaret, and his brother, Christopher, who was nine at the time of filming, was said to be angry with his mother for revealing that he had been born as a result of an affair. He went on to experiment with drugs and served a lengthy prison sentence for crimes the family have refused to discuss.
Despite this, Margaret remained proud of her status as television's first reality star and, although there were things she wished she'd never said on the show, she never regretted taking part. Speaking in 2003, she said: 'When you see your life through other people's eyes, it does change things. The only advice I would give to anyone tempted to take part in a reality show is to think twice. The film-makers are going to exploit you - they are not your friends. It's hard, though, because you relax when the cameras are with you 24 hours a day.'
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Simon and Jane had never seen the original series when they were approached to star in 2008's The Family, but since the end of filming they have seen one episode and been told how the lives of the Wilkins family turned out. Simon remains sanguine. 'It's very different today,' he says. 'There are hundreds of reality shows on TV. There will be people who will recognise us for a short amount of time and then there will be another programme. Our lives will change for a little while and then be back to normal.'
It took a year for the production company, Firefly, to find its stars. Researchers visited schools, gave out flyers at shopping centres and sent thousands of letters to families who met their criteria. And, before meeting the Hugheses, Smith and his team settled on another family in another part of Britain. Smith won't tell me who they were, but he admits he went as far as installing all the cameras in their house - a process that took 10 days - before the parents said they'd changed their mind.
He must have been furious, but betrays none of that anger now, saying simply: 'I think it was probably the right decision for them.'
How did the Hugheses feel about the cameras following their every move? Perhaps it says something about today's surveillance society and our changing sense of privacy that none of them thought it particularly strange. 'I got used to them very quickly,' says Jane. 'We all just got on with our lives.'
Channel 4 is billing the series as a 'compelling and distinctive new observational documentary'. It is a courageous move by the broadcaster. But with none of the cruelty or manipulation that we've come to expect, one has to wonder: will anyone be watching?
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