Diana Wichtel

It's done quite a bit to change how you watch TV.

For TV critic Diana Wichtel, reality is a natural development in the TV landscape.

And I also think we're evolutionarily wired to watch and observe and see what people do in situations and to either think, ooh, I'd never do that, no, no, no, no, or why doesn't she do that, or oh, my God, look what she just did.

We're scanning the savannah to see how to survive and that's one way we pick up information.

I think those shows that grew out of the place and used more real people seem to me the pioneering sort of ethos that would lead to reality television.

Diana Wichtel, who wrote about TV for decades in The Listener and elsewhere, arrived in New Zealand from Canada in the 1960s as a teenager already obsessed with TV.

What she found on our local screens back then didn't look all that different from the reality telly of today.

I mean, when I came here, there were shows that I would now kind of include just because they were trying to be about real people and, you know, Country Calendar, for instance.