Paying attention to commissioners can drive you crazy. A friend of mine who’s written a forthcoming feature film and done a few tv scripts was telling me about the things he’d heard from people in the market for sitcoms. Some years ago, received wisdom from the success of The Office was that edgy dark material was what the public wanted, which led to the excellent Nighty Night being commissioned. Now, the same people are all about touching upbeat comedy in the wake of Gavin and Stacey. Similarly, in mainstream drama, everyone’s looking for a family success that will emulate the Dr Who demographic. Like, who wouldn’t want a hugely popular franchise that spawns spin-offs and wins awards?

Is there a lesson to be learned from all this? Probably that it’s best to stick to your guns and write what you’re passionate about. If you’re following a trend, odds are it’ll be over by the time it comes round to commissioning whatever you’re working on, especially if the people who claimed they wanted it are so timid and fickle that they were only ever after a knockoff in the first place. Besides, write something that’s strong and unique, and it’ll never fall out of fashion, and will at least hopefully serve as a good calling card script even if nobody wants to commission the damn thing.

Which isn’t to say that you can’t learn something from what’s already out there. Let’s look at Big Brother. Why look at a reality show at all? Well, it’s come back for yet another series, it helps to define what Channel 4 is about, and it pulls in a substantial audience for a long time, many of them willing to watch spin-offs too.

Viewed as a drama, Big Brother just shouldn’t work. Take fifteen strangers, bring them together in a closed environment, and leave them to interact. Ensure that they’re not exposed to outside influences, and give them arbitrary things to do. Get rid of one person a week by the results of a poll, until there’s just one left: the winner. That’s pretty much it.

What’s interesting from this dramatically speaking is that Big Brother’s makers have confidence in our ability to get to know so many people so quickly. And they don’t expect us to like all of them - they know that audiences prefer to dislike at least some of the people parading for our entertainment. Yet where drama is concerned, writers are often told to create likeable protagonists with big character arcs and a small cast - Big Brother proves that audiences have the capacity to enjoy the tiny details of people interacting, without a plot, and instead relish the infinite gradations between loving and hating someone.

To some extent then, Big Brother is a soap opera. But what other lessons could writers and programme makers learn from its success and incorporate into fictional shows? Emulating reality tv is one direction, and The Office did that to perfection. But take a look at another show, Saxondale, to see the influence taken in a more interesting direction. There’s no pretence that Tommy Saxondale is the subject of a reality show, but the naturalism of Steve Coogan’s performance and the ebb and flow of the storylines are very influenced by the genre.

What would happen if that approach was taken to a drama rather than a comedy? I’d be interested in seeing what would happen if that surface ease was adopted by a show which had the social concerns of say, The Street. Perhaps that verite style of drama has been realised to some extent in a show like The Shield, but there the influence is on the surface: underneath it’s a much more conventional (albeit superbly scripted) drama with high stakes and evolving characters.

Lost is arguably another show influenced by reality television, allowing viewers to get immersed in the lives of strangers interacting in an arbitrary situation where weirdness intrudes. Only, the flashbacks create backgrounds and arcs to make it more of a conventional drama than it first appears.

A lot of writers are sniffy about reality tv, seeing it merely as cheap and nasty programming. But that misses an important point. Big Brother isn’t the enemy: it’s proven that there’s an appetite for a different form of narrative television in audiences worldwide. Canny dramatists and programme makers would do well to learn from that.