IT HAD TO HAPPEN. DESPERATE TO EXTRACT the last tortured breath of profit from the cadaver of an idea killed by overwork, some second-class mind in a third-rate production company was bound to come up with it. The glamour and drama of diving + the fascination of people-watching = sub-aqua reality TV show.
It's a classic case of the whole being less than the sum of its parts.
The first of the genre, of course, was Whitley Bay Watch. A section of North Sea floor was cordoned off and subjected to the relentless scrutiny of the cameras, 24 hours a day, for a fortnight. During that time, absolutely nothing happened. Not a single representative of marine life, benthic, pelagic or planktonic, strayed into frame.
They might as well have broadcast a still photograph. Real, it most certainly was.
Yoko Ono once pointed a cine camera at the Empire State Building for eight hours. That the resulting avant garde movie won a clutch of industry awards doesn't surprise me in the least. Compared to Whitley Bay Watch, it was a gripping, edge-of-the-seat drama, containing scenes of strong violence that might prove disturbing to those of a nervous disposition.
Undeterred, the editorial teams soldiered on in the quest for a reality diving show. The Big Brother Wreck was a small freighter, deliberately sunk in shallow water off Eastbourne. It was inhabited by a group of divers, carefully selected by the programme-makers to provide interesting possibilities for social interaction.
They included the celebrity TV presenters Chav and Bling, a trio of Channel 5 weathergirls with a combined bust size of 138in and the Bishop of Bath & Wells.
The surprise hit of the show was the Bishop, who hurled himself into a score of degrading and humiliating activities with impressive enthusiasm. The episode in which he attempted to remove eels from the girls' wetsuits with his teeth prompted record viewing figures.
However, popular interest soon waned when the News Of The World revealed that he wasn't the Bishop of Bath & Wells after all, but a shameless impostor. He was actually the Bishop of Worcester.
In the final episode, Chav married Bling in the world's first underwater same-sex wedding, while the girls competed in a topless silt wrestling contest in the rope locker.
In diving terminology, the programme had descended to 20m without incident and surfaced safely - when the viewers wanted a reckless 60m plummet into the bilges of bad taste with no computer and a dodgy DV, a couple of neural bends and a hilarious bout of narcosis thrown in for good measure. They didn't have to wait long.
I'm A Catastrophe, Get Me Out Of Here took six ordinary people, kitted them up in diving equipment and with no training, and just five minutes' verbal instruction, dumped them out of an inflatable into the English channel in February.
The cameras recorded their antics as they tried to fin against a three-knot tidal race off Swanage while clearing their masks. The attempts at in-water rescue were especially side-splitting.
In the final show, when the two surviving contestants had to blow the phosphor-bronze prop off the wreck "using only three kilos of gelignite and their common sense", the ratings exceeded those of Desperate Housewives.
As is the way with popular programme formats, Catastrophe has since been successfully imitated around the world - mostly, it has to be said, by diving schools.