Dawn Berry

Come Dine with me is a programme ostensibly about modern manners and the nation’s eating and entertaining habits, but as with all reality TV, it is unscripted, relies on real people as opposed to actors in order to entertain the public and takes place in people’s homes. The show is enormously popular and has reached the level of cult viewing, largely because it’s researchers pick entertaining characters with forthright views, occasionally boorish tendencies and an eccentric take on what it means to be a host. One of the contestants, Dawn Barry, was voted the best ever contestant of the show because of her erratic behaviour; Dawn killed herself last week aged 38, following a long battle with alcoholism, an addiction that was on display for the world to see on prime time TV. What was it about Dawn that elicited such affection or approval from the audience of Come Dine With Me? When she appeared on the show, she passed out at her own dinner party, went to bed and left the guests to make the food themselves, behaviour that obviously seems to have been entertaining to viewers who were unaware of her illness. Dawn had been desperate to become famous and well known, she had appeared on ITV’s Blind Date and a reality TV show about club reps and appearing on Come Dine With me finally secured recognition in the public eye. What of the production company ITV Studios? They have made over 1,200 editions of the programme and surely are not inexperienced when dealing with the general public and their various needs and problems. The viewing public may not have been aware that Dawn’s erratic behaviour was the result of her drinking, but it would have been virtually impossible for the production company not to have been aware. Was the opportunity to make ‘good TV’ just too alluring? If so then ITV Studios have some soul searching to do. Dawn Barry’s life was not something for bored daytime TV watchers to gawp at, she was a desperately sad and lonely person who had experienced, courtesy of alcohol, drink drive bans and domestic violence. Last week she showed the world that the pain of addiction was too much to bear and she joined the 40,000 people who will die this year from drinking. Most of the time, alcoholics are invisible, they are an either embarrassment or they force the rest of society to confront some awkward questions, and when they aren’t invisible they are either celebrated as folk heroes like George Best or thanked for giving the rest of us a good laugh, like Dawn Barry. Dawn appeared on ‘reality’ TV, but almost no one saw the reality of her life at all, and if there was even a shred of courageous and pioneering TV that focused on addiction in the UK, people who suffer from the illness might become real and understood, not clownish caricatures who’s actual tears are shed away from the camera.