Brendan Cole is to star in a new reality show which teaches celebrities to become crime writers.(Hat tip to Karen Meek’s Euro Crime Blog.)
The Strictly Come Dancing regular will join former Sun editor Kelvin McKenzie and four other stars in BBC Two’s Murder Most Famous.
The group will be given writing tasks while being taught how to solve crimes with help from psychologists and police.
Best-selling author Minette Walters has signed up to be a mentor on the show and will have the power to oust a celebrity at the end of each day.
The winner will pen their own crime novel to be published by PanMacmillan on next year’s World Book Day.
Cole also appeared on ITV1’s Love Island in 2006.
Murder Most Famous will air on BBC Two over five afternoons in March.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
The Ideas Just Keep Getting Dumber
Part of the reason why the crime-fiction genre, like any other literary field, is inconsistent in its quality these days is that everybody thinks he or she can write a novel. That dubious notion is now being taken to its illogical extreme in a British TV series called Murder Most Famous, which will feature one of the dancing professionals from the UK’s Strictly Come Dancing (a precursor to America’s Dancing with the Stars). As Digital Spy reports:
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4 comments:
This sounds truly awful - I'd rather listen to Mike Stotter sing Dick Van Dyke melodies all night long than watch one minute of this tripe - First Joan Rivers, now z-list 'celebrities' looking at being Crime Fiction Writers......pass the Knob Creek fast
Ali
Car-crash TV, to be sure, but here's the positives ... 1, it will be mediated by Minette Walters; 2, the celebs will raise the profile of crime fiction in general and individual writers they cite in particular; and 3, from the press release: "Pan Macmillan publishing director Maria Rejt, who will edit the winning celebrity's book, said it would be "a really big, fat challenge". "Writing crime is really difficult, and they've got to do a really good job," she
added."
Reasons to be optimistic? Plus, Kelvin MacKenzie's take on crime, as an ex-tabloid editor, should be interesting ...
What next Celebrity Brain Surgeon?
I would pity Minette Walters and Maria Rejt, but I presume the "celebs" are going to be people who have a modicum of intelligence, and not Big Brother types.
Uriah, a warning. My brother is a brain surgeon. He leaves the writing to me and I the surgery to him. I figure he'd be as good at writing as I would be at cutting gray matter.
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