Dead Famous - Definition and Overview

Dead Famous (2001, Bantam Press) is a whodunit novel by Ben Elton in which ratings for a Big Brother-like reality television programme rocket when a housemate dies.

Peeping Tom productions invent the perfect TV programme: House Arrest. Its slogan is: "One house. Ten contestants. Thirty cameras. Forty microphones. One survivor." It is a sophomoric satire of the TV hit Big Brother, and its vain, ambitious contestants with their "tattoos and their nipple rings, their mutual interest in star signs, their endless hugging and touching, and above all their complete lack of genuine intellectual curiosity about one single thing on this planet that was not directly connected with themselves."