Dead Famous (Ben Elton)*****

It was bound to happen sooner or later. Fourteen people enter a house so small that a family of four would probably be crowded. They are stirred up to the point where they have trouble controlling themselves, yet still they try to control those around them. Sooner or later, someone was going to get murdered.

Dead Famous opens with a detective at work, trawling through the hundreds of hours of footage of Peeping Tom, a fictional Big Brother. He watches the housemates and despises the housemates, and tries to work out who is the murderer.

As for the readers, we’re probably more concerned about who is the victim. You’re going to be a very long way into the book before you find out!

But this book isn’t slow. There’s so much going on, the murder can wait. Ben Elton has created a group of characters who could easily be interesting members of a real Big Brother household. It doesn’t have the a-laugh-a-paragraph quality of Elton’s X Factor satire, Chart Throb, but the much smaller cast of characters does allow Elton to go into a bit more depth with their personalities. The Big Brother phenomenon was fairly new when the book was published, but Elton has an instinctive understanding of what sort of people might be put into the house.

Dead Famous is a comedy, and a very good one, but the scenes with the detective are much more serious, and not unlike a detective in a more typical crime novel. As I love the comedy genre but am less keen on serious crime fiction, I was more interested in the Big Brother side than in the detective side, and that could be a problem for a lot of readers who are interested in the comedy side. And, while it is certainly an ingenious idea for a murder mystery, there is probably too much Big Brother-style inanity going on to keep a typical crime fan interested. But Elton nevertheless does an excellent job of merging the two genres – it would be difficult to imagine how it could be done better.

Although the earlier series of Big Brother did not have a particular predilection for unusual names and nicknames (well, apart from Bubble), Elton has provided us with plenty – Woggle, Dervla, Moon and Hamish are among the inmates I think the only names that have also been used by a real-life Big Brother housemate are David, who made a very brief appearance during Big Brother 8, and Jason from Big Brother 5, although is the fictional Jason is known as Jazz. (He’s nothing like Jazz in How to Kill Your Husband. He is a much nicer person, although I suppose that’s not much of a compliment.) Then we have Gazzer the Geezer – could he be the inspiration for the real-life Sezer the Geezer? They both say some adorably stupid things, although in Gazzer’s case this is because he actually is stupid - Sezer’s got a faulty connection between his brain and his mouth, but his brain is in there somewhere.

One thing that really bothered me was the way the housemates are viewed by the public. Elton only acknowledges the housemates in the first two series of Big Brother, and series 1 and 2 were quite different from the more recent shows. So Elton can’t really be blamed for not knowing the current trends But, in order for the book to work, you do have to accept that it is possible for thick, tarty Kelly to be not the subject of ‘get her out’ chants but the second favourite to win. You have to believe that isolated older gay female Sally could escape nomination for several weeks in a house where everyone gets on well for the most part. Even if friendly Layla’s controlling streak was recognised as early as Week One (I thought she was lovely), you’d be more likely to go for the older and quieter people. Peeping Tom is technically not Big Brother, so there’s no reason why things shouldn’t be a little bit different, and the producers can probably turn the housemates into anything they want to with a bit of ingenuity in the editing. But it wasn’t always easy to put aside my expectations.