I seldom like books written by male writers. They are usually emotionally distant, and this book was no exception. Just the opposite, it’s so distant that there was no protagonist. I didn’t care for anyone in this book. It’s supposed to be a murder mystery, but by page 69, when I stopped reading, I still didn’t know who was murdered. Why should I care?
The story follows two plotlines. The first plotline is a filming of an imaginary reality TV show House Arrest. Ten people are trapped in one small house for several weeks, and the cameras and microphones cover every square inch of the house, following the housemates everywhere 24 hours a day, even to the shower and toilet.
The second plotline is the murder investigation. One of the housemates has been murdered on the day 27 of the filming. The detective crew watches the footage of the show, trying to find some clues, but no tape recorded the murder. How is it possible? Who is the murderer?
Strangely, while I didn’t care for anyone in the novel, I fell in love with the writer. He is a clever, sarcastic guy, and his opinion of reality TV and people in general, biting and disdainful of the blown-up celebrities, is expressed by the lead detective on the case, Chief Inspector Coleridge. The novel is immensely quotable, and I couldn’t resist quoting some of it here.

n  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~
He was old fashioned because he was interested in things other than astrology and celebrity. … The fact that it had fallen to Coleridge to watch the entire available footage of House Arrest, to sit and watch a group of pointless twenty-something living in a house together and subjected to constant video surveillance, was a cruel joke indeed. It was safe to say that under normal circumstances there was no other show in the history of television that Coleridge would have been less inclined to watch than House Arrest.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Coleridge wondered if he was the only person in the world who felt so completely culturally disenfranchised. Or were there others like him? Living secret lives, skulking in the shadows, scared to open their mouths for fear of exposure. People who no longer understood the adverts, let alone the programs.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
[Coleridge:] ‘Why do these people feel the need to define themselves by their preferences in bed?’
‘Well, if they didn’t talk about it, sir, you wouldn’t know, would you?’
‘But why do I need to know?’
‘Because otherwise you would presume they were straight.’
‘If by that you mean heterosexual, I wouldn’t presume any such thing, constable. I wouldn’t think about it at all.’
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
[Coleridge:] ‘Not much more than two generations ago the entire population of this country stood in the shadow of imminent brutal occupation by a crowd of murdering Nazis! A generation before that we lost a million boys in the trenches. A million innocent lads. Now we have “therapists” studying the “trauma” of getting thrown of a television game show. Sometimes I despair, I really do, you know. I despair.’
‘Yes, but sir,’ Trisha said, ‘in the war and stuff people had something to stand up for, something to believe in. These days there isn’t anything for us to believe in very much. Does that make our anxieties and pain any less relevant?’
‘Yes, it does!’ Coleridge stopped himself before he could say any more.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
‘House Arrest is basically fiction,’ said Fogarty [the show editor]… ‘Like all TV and film. It’s built in the edit.’
‘You manipulate the housemates’ images?’
‘Well, obviously. … People are basically dull. We have to make them interesting, turn them into heroes and villains.’
‘I thought you were supposed to be observers, that the whole thing was an experiment in social interaction?’
‘Look, constable,’ Fogarty explained patiently, ‘in order to create a nightly half-hour of broadcasting we have at our disposal the accumulated images of thirty television cameras running for twenty four hours. That’s seven hundred and twenty hours of footage to make one half-hour of television. We couldn’t avoid making subjective decisions even if we wanted to. The thing that amazes us is that the nation believes what we show them. They actually accept that what they are watching is real.’
~~~~~~~~~~~~~ n

The writer feels contemptuous of the stupid and the banal, and I happen to agree with his point of view; I never watch reality TV for this very reason. It selects dunces as its protagonists and targets dunces as its audience. But even our common opinion wasn’t enough for me to care about anyone in this book. Hence, DNF and no rating.

It was an interesting mystery novel set in a big brother type reality shows. It shows how far can some people go for fame (i.e. murder).

Ten contestants are put in a "big brother" style house, participants in a TV program called "House Arrest". After a while one of the candidates gets murdered. We know this from the first page, but who gets killed isn't revealed until half-way through. Despite the cameras it's not obvious who the killer is.

The characters are vivid and realistic. The house mates all have strategy to win the half million pound money prize for various reasons. They all want fame and to advance their careers in TV or as actors. The question is who would go as far as murder? The exploitation of them is obvious, but they are willing players.

I thoroughly enjoyed this!

The trouble with writing a Big Brother parody and trying to illuminate how boring and vacuous reality TV can be is that the book becomes boring and vacuous. I fell asleep listening to the audiobook version of this at least 5 times, luckily i was in bed not driving at the time.
This is also trying to be a whodunnit style thriller but the ending is ridiculous and the extreme language I found unrealistic and unfunny if that was why Ben wrote it.
This is my 2nd Ben Elton book and I reckon i've given him the benefit of the doubt as didnt really rate his other book "Time and Time Again" so this will probably be my last.

A satirical take on fame and people's obsessions with becoming famous. 10 people are thrust into a televised house, watched 24 hours a day for 63 days, as they vote each other off weekly until there’s only one left, thus winning the £500,000 prize pot. On day 27 a murder takes place, and due to circumstances, the killer has managed to remain anonymous. This reality television show becomes all too real for those left under “House Arrest”, but the show must go on. With all-time high viewing figures, who’d want to end the show there, milking every last penny Peeping Tom Productions turns this Big Brother spinoff house into a murder mystery, as the remaining contestants and police try and figure out who committed the crime.

So yes, this book is essential Big Brother on steroids, they have everything the tv show had, so we can see where the author got his idea from. With Big Brother, the main attraction of the show was the vast array of characters, and this book try’s to follow suit. With 10 contestants all with their own unique USP the author does try really hard to make them as stereotypical as possible to an almost annoying degree. I feel the over-the-top nature of the 10 “inmates” was probably a large dig and generalisation of the type of people who might want to be on the show as all 10 crave fame like a drug. This to me just came off a little bit condescending at times, with the author almost aiming jokes at the type of person rather than the character themself, creating a disconnect between the character and the story. The book feels like an excuse for the author to just write about sexism and casual racism and just brush it off as a character's personality, this felt overdone and definitely unnecessary at times.

On to the story, the premise is great, reading the blurb I was right behind it, but after reading the book I feel let down. There were two main avenues for the plot, the one of the contestants and producers and the one of the police. Constantly changing from time to time, with the indication being what day of the show we were on, it jumped back and forth and changes perspective far too often that it makes it hard to follow. I’ll start with the police, to put it bluntly, they were boring. All we did was read about them watching the show. Now the house and all surrounding it, the characters added some element of entertainment because of how over the top they were. Onto the activities and this is where the book really lost me at times, creating weird scenarios and situations just to write about a sex orgy? All this led to the murder for the payoff to be the most unbelievable pile of shite yet.

The writing style felt slow. Maybe this was down to the contents, but every time we go to the police's perspective it was like I was running in space.

Overall, the book creates great intrigue keeping you reading on and on to find out what happened, and in the end, the payoff Is just not worth it.

Brilliantly written, fabulous twist

I've always like Ben Elton and this book is no exception. A fascinating thriller, featuring reality show characters you love to loathe, keeping you guessing all along with a clever twist at the end. Loved it.

I found this to be very dated.

A modern take on the "impossible murder in a locked room" style. Because I've read several in the past I was thinking along the same lines as the detective by the midway point but it was still a great yarn. With attention to sharp observation, Elton creates characters we all recognise. I've read several of Elton's books, some funny, some serious. This is probably my favourite.

Eltons other book dealing with modern TV phenomena (Chart throb) left me a bit uninterested, since I felt he tried in some way to "reveal" the truth behind this kind of programs, and I just could not be bothered. In this one the action takes place in a "Big Brother" type setting and as such even more uninteresting to me. However, this time he focuses successfully on the story and people in it. Aside from the somewhat hard to believe twists in the end, it is a great book!

The cover says: "One house. Ten contestants. Thirty cameras. Forty microphones. One survivor."
You think: Big Brother? You're right. Here it's called "House Arrest", produced by "Peeping Tom Productions".

You know from the beginning that one of the inmates will be killed on day 27. But you have to wait until page 200 to find out who will it be and how. Normally you would think that a murder in a house full of cameras is easy to solve - cause the whole thing must be on video. But it is possible, which makes work for the police detective quite complicated, especially after he finds out that several ppl would have had a good motive.

The end is very surprising, I wouldn't have bet on this killer. And the book is also a good book about manipulation IN as well as THROUGH television.

Satisfying, smirk-out-loud whodunnit set in the Reality-TV cradle of the ‘Peeping Tom’ house, a direct and pointed send-up of ‘Big Brother’. A contestant is murdered under the watchful eye of thirty cameras, millions of viewers, and nine of the victim’s competitors, and still escapes undetected. Enter the mildly (ranging to wildly) disgusted detective Coleridge whose weary pedantry lifts him and his investigation nicely above the ‘parody’ label, so that the reader can enjoy the mystery element as much as the author’s social commentary.

I’ve never read anything by Ben Elton before, not out of any real antipathy, just thinking he might be a bit blokey and/or too mainstream-British-culture for me (I tend to read more contemporary American fiction and British classic or historical fiction, perhaps because I’m immersed in mainstream British culture everywhere else and read to escape it!). It was, instead, incredibly accessible, supremely readable, a gem of observational brilliance and amusing without having to be harshly contemptuous.

Elton’s satire is somehow cutting and affectionate at the same time, recognising the madness, the cynical manipulation involved in having humans isolated and simultaneously on show, but also the basic humanity in such compulsive curiosity. And while the author is gleefully panning the ‘phenomenon’, he’s entertaining us with a tightly wound murder mystery. I was able to beat the gloomy detective Coleridge’s dénouement by about fifty pages – and might have got there sooner if I hadn’t been distracted by all the sex – but while not difficult to figure out, it was still quite satisfying to have done so. It was, in fact, not unlike guessing who would be voted off the next episode of the real thing.

Dead Famous has an extremely promising premise. You have a Big Brother-like reality show with a bunch of contestants who are locked in a house and being filmed around the clock. One of the contestants gets murdered on live television. Considering the circumstances, this should be a very easy case to solve. Turns out, solving this case is far from easy.
Unfortunately I found the execution of the story to be quite flawed. It's not quite a bad book, but it could have been so much more.

My first problem becomes apparent from the start. The book spends a disproportionate amount of time mocking the concept of "locked in a house" reality television, the people who make it, and the people who watch it. This isn't something that I would necessarily mind, except it happens so much that it just becomes monotonous. The book also falls into the very trap it is mocking. One moment it questions the sanity and intelligence of people who sit around watching a television programme consisting of people having mundane conversations. The next moment it presents an example of one of these lengthy mundane conversations. Sure, this is done with all the irony in the world, but that doesn't make it less dull. It also goes far in criticising television producers and viewers for their love of gratuitous nudity, scandal, and general sex-sells tv. Again, this is fine, except the fact that the book itself becomes more than a little gratuitous on several occasions. I have no problem with social commentary on the topic of reality television (and largely agree with the author), but the sheer amount of righteous moral-highground judging becomes dull, the point becomes laboured, and the tendency of the book to exploit the methods it is criticising makes it all seem shallow.

That said, this could easily be forgiven if the story were as thrilling and interesting as it had the potential to be. But it isn't. On the whole the characters aren't that bad, but the main character, the detective in charge of the case, becomes an unintentional parody of himself by the end of the book. This becomes problematic due to my final problem with this book, the plot. The plot turns into something which needs a strong, relatable character to hold it together and convince you it isn't as silly as it actually is. You don't get that character. And unfortunately the plot just becomes increasingly unbelievable as the story goes on. What could have been a very clever, intricate story comes to an almost laughably contrived conclusion. It also didn't help that I had a good idea who committed the crime long before it suited the book, which made the not-so-subtle hints that followed seem awkward.

However, I actually liked the book. At least a little.
I've complained in the past about good stories that aren't told very well, but I found this to be a bad story that is actually told quite well. There is enough humour and warmth throughout to make the book quite entertaining. It's a pity that it never became more than that, because I feel like it should have and so easily could have, but hey. At least it was quite entertaining.