The issues of social class position and mobility emerge at several key points in Kavka’s book and mark this genealogy as a useful partner for other work that critically examines the connections between reality TV, aspiration, the dirt and disgust of class politics. 2 While many media scholars have approached turn-of-the-century transformational television as the dramatisation of meritocracy-learn these life lessons and become socially mobile-Kavka situates this reality format as forming a part of the second wave: a generation of programming that she describes as ‘competition’ reality. Where much of this research attends to the cognitive dimensions of ‘reading’ and ‘interpreting’, Skeggs and Wood’s curiosity is in how affect works as a force of social relations, and how, in reacting to reality TV, audiences insert themselves into relays and circuits of moral value.

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