That doesn’t mean I don’t adore reality TV. I’ve loved it in all its forms; the talent shows (The X Factor), the boss shows (The Apprentice), the scripted soap shows (TOWIE) and even the awful squalid ones about hoarding which seem to be the mainstay of Channel 5. I’ve never had a sex dream about an actor or pop star, but at the height of his Kitchen Nightmares I had one about Gordon Ramsay which lasted three consecutive nights. I’m hazy on the details, but it was immensely enjoyable and there was a lot of swearing.

But Britain’s talent shows ran out of talent a while ago: Simon Cowell cancelled The X Factor last year, after 17 seasons; The X Factor: Celebrity (2019) attracted fewer than 3 million viewers during its first live show — its lowest ratings ever. Compare that with the Will Young/Gareth Gates Pop Idol final, which was watched 20 years ago this month by 15 million people; I remember voting ten times for Gates before my husband hid the phone from me.

It’s never hurt that the sort of people I loathe — pretentious, pompous, right-on Lady Mucks — hate reality TV. See Annie Lennox, sneering that The X Factor is “a factory, owned and stitched up by puppet masters”. Lord forbid that people should want to watch something which amuses rather than lectures them.

Though the stories about My Gran Dying And I’m Doing This For Her got a bit much in the end, there were many beautiful moments backstage at the talent shows when a contestant’s working-class family could be seen embracing and praying, giving lie to all the snideness that the masses generally provoke from commentators.

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The kids were refreshingly down-to-earth, too; 20 years ago, reality TV was just a gap year for fit proletarian youngsters. As Saskia Howard-Clarke, from season six of Big Brother in 2005, told me while I was making a documentary called Reality TV Is Good For You: “I knew when I came out of the house there wouldn’t be a limo waiting to whisk me off to Hollywood. I got some nice clothes, a couple of nice holidays. I’ve already got a nice boyfriend out of it. And soon I’m going to get back to work.”

But with the rise of social media, things have changed. Love Island is a springboard for smart, sexy young women (and men to a lesser degree) to monetise their youth and beauty the way a sportsman utilises his skill for that mayfly moment before wear and tear takes over. The suicides of Michael Thalassitis and Sophie Gradon were a field day for loathers of reality TV, but the idea that it was the uniquely empty and narcissistic milieu which caused these young people to take their lives doesn’t explain why, say, farmers — as far from reality stars as one can imagine — have such a high rate of suicide.

There was a great deal of self-righteous crowing when, in 2018, it was claimed that there were more applicants for Love Island — around 150,000 — than there were for Oxford and Cambridge combined. “What is happening to us?” wailed BBC Breakfast’s Dan Walker from his cushy billet. But in an age where social mobility is moving backwards, and in a country where the dull spawn of the famous pick up the few enjoyable and well-paid jobs once open to bright working-class kids — actor, pop star, model, journalist — should we be surprised? There’s also hypocrisy to all the shrieking: it’s fun and easy to be paid to be yourself — that’s what we columnists do.

So when the academic Danielle J. Lindeman, in her new book True Story, damns reality TV with faint praise as “a pop-cultural touchstone that… can help us to make sense of complex social forces”, you can’t help but feel her point is decades out-of-date. Today, reality TV has informed all parts of our culture and democratised it, adding greatly to the confusion and gaiety of nations.

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We live in a world where Margot Robbie obsesses over Love Island; where Kim Kardashian retires from her show to become a lawyer and hold meetings with The Apprentice’s President Donald Trump. Then there’s Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, who have become their very own reality TV spectacle: they are of interest only because they have us on the edge of our seats wondering who the heck they’re going to turn on next. The same is true of Boris Johnson — policy has become less important than whether Carrie Made Him Do It and his ongoing feud with Dominic Cummings.

Faced with these fantasies, both the Left and Right join in condemnation of reality TV’s hold over the youth of the nation, who should be stuck away in their bedrooms studying for Oxbridge rather than having a laugh in swimwear. But as in so many issues, politics has been left behind and the Great and Good can no more hold back the tide of populism than a Love Islander can walk past a beauty salon offering 50% off spray tans.

A recent survey found that those aged 18 to 24 are more likely (42%) than their elders (9%) to believe that “income level is the greatest indicator of someone’s class” and that a major decider of whether one is “upper class” is “going on luxury hotel holidays” and “multiple overseas holidays per year”. The mass exodus of Love Island alumni to Dubai during the first Covid lockdown so they could carry on their “work” as “influencers” personified this dream of being posh.

And in a way, it’s not as foolish as Victoria Beckham being called ‘Posh’ — chasing the sun is what the idle rich specialised in before they had to make it look like they were working. Faced with this new reality TV class, it’s interesting to see how many of the privileged, privately educated youngsters of Made In Chelsea made a reverse journey, choosing to enter the world of commerce rather than cruise on their trust funds.

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More striking, though, was how it was one of the best and brightest reality stars who brought the Dubai influences down to earth. Olivia Attwood — of Love Island, TOWIE and Olivia Meets Her Match fame — was scathing in her mockery:

“So basically being an influencer is actually really hard and I can’t create content for you guys here at home, so I am going to have to go on holiday…. People literally can’t feed their children, and are being given these sad little bags of food from the government… Your ‘hard day’ is creating content that might get nasty comments and someone else’s hard day is a 12-hour shift and zipping up body bags at the end of it.”

It proved that, at a time when real stars of screen and music increasingly scold from the same hymn sheet behind the high walls of their privately-policed gated enclosures  — capitalism is evil; transwomen are women; Palestine is real — the reality stars, unschooled in hypocrisy, can still be a breath of fresh air.

Let other critics sneer at the dreams of ordinary people reflected in reality TV — I’ll take a talent show over a Quality Drama showing the working-class being happy with their place below stairs any day.

The newsman prophet begged viewers to turn off the TV and save their souls. Thrilled by their cruelty and new agency — Beale was their broken toy — they didn’t, and Beale was murdered live on air. There could be no other ending. Network’s writer, Paddy Chayefsky, knew where we were heading. He didn’t live long enough to see the X-Factor, Pop Idol and Britain’s Got Talent but he would have recognised them.

Cowell didn’t sell music. He sold souls. Serious musicians, who hated his work,  knowing that it deprived them of attention, autonomy and the space to develop, said so. “You wouldn’t find a Joni Mitchell on X Factor,” said Annie Lennox. “It’s a factory, you know, and it’s owned and stitched-up by puppet masters”.

He collected the vulnerable and the credulous — those longing for an affirmation previously denied them — and subjected them to a public audition process he called authentic, but which was nothing of the kind. For those who tempted him, he invented the thrilling and awful concept of the personal journey, to be consumed week by week by his audience: drama, but with real people, and higher emotional stakes.

Cowell called himself honest, as much a victim as anyone of the swelling genre, but he denied his own agency in this: his own skill. I think he was devoured by greed. I met him in his pomp, and he was charming. It was business. If people would buy it, he sold it. I wondered if he was a kind man trying to escape his own creation of himself; he does a lot for charity. There are rumours, too, that he inspired a sub-genre of porn in which middle-aged men shout at people while nude, which I believe. For those seeking more “family-friendly” entertainment he offered a dog called Pudsey that walked on two legs.

There were multiple acts and softer judges than Cowell — usually doll-women, scenery that could flirt — but he was the big event, a demon in high-waisted trousers. He was the one seeking the vulnerable to raise up and cast aside according to his whim, though the audience was allowed the fantasy of control.  He was his greatest product and his greatest success; his personal journey was the most successful in the entire genre and watching the promise of fame afflict his contestants was, entirely, the game. What would they hand over for our attention? Their dignity? Their privacy? Their sanity? Could Susan Boyle hack it? That was the question.

I have been to a Reality TV open audition. It does not attract the healthy and the emotionally whole. Reality TV producers seek conflict and misery, and, 20 years on, they have both the corpses to prove it, and their own mirrored reality in cinema, which tells more stories about Reality TV, though not as well as Chayefsky. But satire can’t touch Cowell. He is surrounded by mirrors.

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He and his acolytes — he employed Piers Morgan on America’s Got Talent where he insinuated to child acts that their parents didn’t love them, for instance — abused contestants while preening. “That was just everything I hated”, Cowell would say; or “it’s just rubbish”; or “just get out, just leave”.

If he was disgusted by people who sought fame, as he did — and Morgan is the same — he used this self-knowledge cynically, for harm. He talked as people do on Twitter before Twitter. If that website has an authorial voice — a voice of god — it is his.

He does have a legacy, even as the public has lost interest in his particular form of sadism, for on social media it is even more immediate and thrilling. I credit Cowell with the consuming fashion for public cruelty, the erosion of privacy with our own consent, and the invention of the personal journey as popular entertainment. That is his legacy, in our narcissistic language and the way we demand a bogus personal narrative from everyone we can name, which feels like — and amounts to — theft.

So much public rhetoric is a collection of personal journeys, all vying to transmit. They are meaningless because they are confected for television, squeezed down to three minutes: a show-reel, not a life. Alongside this hunger for personal narrative runs a desensitisation to the very emotions we are being asked to observe.

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TV emotion is fake, because it demands nothing of you; you are imagining kinship with a mirage, or a ghost, and where that leaves your real relationships, I cannot say. Cowell’s genre was the opening act of an awful trend that has bloomed everywhere: for the charismatic; the know-nothing; the tinny sentimentalist; the preening; the cruel.

It is fitting that he leaves now, with his half a billion pounds of profit, because he is more successful than he could have imagined when he brought us Teletubbies Say Eh-Oh! He founded an entire culture. Seek his monument and it is all around you, on Twitter and Facebook and Tiktok and Instagram; in every one of the millions of pieces of dehumanisation we sink to daily. He is, in the end, a very important man, just not to music. I posit the hash tag #WeAreAllSimonCowellNow. He has earned it.