Will someone sensible pull the plug on reality TV and have mercy on our tortured souls – preferably by lunchtime today? Two Married At First Sight UK brides claim they were raped by their instant ‘husbands’.

I am not surprised. When camera crews knock off what practical protection can possibly be offered by a notional ‘duty of care’? Vetting is sketchy at best. Individuals desperate for exposure are recruited from Instagram. Women are asked, are you looking for love? Men are asked, are you looking for fun?

The genre wasn’t always this sordid. When the revolutionary idea of real people, doing real things, in real time on the telly struck Great Britain in 2000 with Big Brother, we went wild for it. Even our biggest brainboxes stated convincingly on BBC Two’s Late Review that voyeurism, as part of ‘a broadcasting experiment’, would do us all the world of good. I wrote enthusiastically: ‘If Chaucer were alive today, he’d join the queue to be a reality TV contestant. It’s the modern equivalent of The Canterbury Tales.’

We were sick of slick. We’d had it with polished plays, directed documentaries and Michael Parkinson pretending to be astonished when primped and powdered celebrities told carefully rehearsed anecdotes about breakfast bagels with Barbra Streisand. We were hungry for nittier and grittier.

We wanted ‘ordinary’ people scratching their armpits, pairing socks, quarrelling, vying, lying, picking their toenails and getting their rocks off. We were refreshed and intrigued. We were glued to the 24-hour Big Brother feed, even when the inmates were sound asleep. To post-millennium viewers, reality TV was a blessed relief with a bingo bonus – it could turn shelf-stackers into stars.

Am I qualified to discuss this stuff? Well, here’s a rip-roaring romp through my reality TV pedigree. I was the first person on the planet to tell Big Brother to ‘F*** off!’

I am the proud pioneer of the now-obligatory celebrity reality TV snot-soaked, weeping, wailing sob-a-thon. I am the person who wrote: IMMOLATED, IMMURED, ISOLATED, DEFENESTRATED on the BB table with a stick of chalk I refused to hand back, clad in a leopard-print dressing gown and black shades while Anthea Turner, Chris Eubank, Jack Dee, Claire Sweeney and Keith Duffy looked on, horrified.

I am the reason that to this very day Big Brother Diary Room chairs no longer revolve. Struggling in the first-ever Celebrity Big Brother in 2001, I begged to go home. I missed my children and knew as I was up against beloved comic Jack Dee for eviction, I’d be out in 36 hours. I couldn’t stomach the wait.

If makers Endemol had checked, they’d have seen I was in a fragile state. I’d just lost my mum to cancer and been through a gut-wrenching divorce. I was nowhere near robust enough to survive losing a hideously public popularity contest.

Of course, they didn’t check. Twenty-five years ago, mental health hadn’t been invented. There were no counsellors. No one – me included – realised reality TV posed any risk to participants. When I said I’d had enough and please could I pack my case and go – we weren’t being paid, we were doing it free for Comic Relief – Big Brother replied: ‘If you leave, Vanessa, you’ll be the most hated woman in Britain.’

I swivelled the revolving chair around to hide my shame. Viewers heard me crying piteously but saw only a cheap black plastic seat-back. The show didn’t release me early. Evicted, I shook uncontrollably, disorientated, trembling until I was finally able to cuddle my daughters and remember how it felt to be myself.

A quarter of a century later people still ask, what the beep happened? I tell them, when you are on a reality TV show it isn’t a game. Temporarily, it’s your real life. No one can possibly imagine how having a camera – well, more like 50 cameras – permanently rammed in your face will affect them.

You might think you’d flourish with millions of people staring as you roll on deodorant. When it happens, you might end up curling into a ball, sucking your thumb and crying for your mummy. As Keith Duffy from Boyzone says whenever we cross on a red carpet: ‘Vanessa, they’ll never know what we went through. Never!’

And yet just a few months later – lured by cash, a false feeling of familiarity with the process and seductively persuasive BBC producers – I moved into a semi with total strangers on Celebrity Sleepover. Luckily, they were a delightful, engaged couple keen on netball and karaoke. All was sweetness and light. Less fortunate fellow participant boxing champion Frank Bruno didn’t gel with his hosts. Frank’s mental health battle is well-documented. His episode – another therapist-free zone – was dark and distressing. 

Then, in 2004, I spent 24 hours locked in a flat with footballer Stan Collymore in The Celebrity Penthouse. Producers hoped we’d loathe each other and Stan would land a punch on me, giving me a black eye to match the one he’d inflicted on Ulrika Jonsson in a bar in Paris.

In fact, we clicked instantly and frustrated sensation seekers by going to bed separately and sleeping soundly for a solid ten hours, leaving the camera crew nothing to film but our snores.

Celebrity Fit (popularly known as ‘Fat’) Club came later the same year and was gladiatorial. Alison Hammond, the late Freddie Starr and a posse of plump personalities were weighed weekly by Dale Winton for the nation’s delectation. Terrifying US sergeant major Harvey forced us to perform humiliating physical jerks, screaming abuse so loudly his spittle cascaded down our faces, mingling with our sweat.

I was so scared to let my team down I stopped all food and water on Friday mornings. After the weigh-in on Saturday afternoons, we were all shaky and faint with hunger. We’d drink a glass of water, eat a couple of Ryvita crackers, nip back on the scales and find we’d already gained back the weight Dale had just announced we’d lost. We were behind before we began. It was hell.

Contestant Lowri Turner, who wasn’t fat in the first place, resorted to colonic irrigation. By the end of the series, most of us were colonic-dependent.

How charmingly innocent those god-awful early shows now seem compared with today’s gut-churning offerings: Married At First Sight, Ex On The Beach, Milf Manor, Virgin Island, Temptation Island, Ibiza Uncovered, Love Island All Stars. What a grubby yuck-fest! Naturally, the quest for ‘ordinary people’ was first to go.

Instead, producers cast exhibitionists too clinically narcissistic to twig that if they cavorted, copulated and soaked their sheets with urine, then their lives, when the programme ended, would be nuked forever.

Content mirroring real life evaporated. Bye-bye feeding chickens and buttering toast. Hello condoms supplied by the production company. The soggy slew of current shows bristle with identikit wannabes trotting out scripted tripe – ‘Can I pull you for a chat?’ – in the hope that banging a stranger on telly will win them a Molly-Mae Hague-esque fast-fashion contract.

These days we are too knowing. We see through posturing, fame-famished contestants. We are wise to programme makers’ manipulation and the relentless recycling of knackered formats.

Observing boxer David Haye reducing soap-star Adam Thomas to a blubbering pulp on the latest I’m A Celebrity… South Africa in April, and affable Ant and Dec sinking under a tidal wave of hostility, should have been the final nail in reality TV’s coffin.

We mourned the loss of Jade Goody – who died of cervical cancer in 2009 after becoming the breakout star of Big Brother in 2002. We lamented as Caroline Flack, ‘Muggy’ Mike Thalassitis, former Miss Great Britain Sophie Gradon, Towie’s Mick Norcross and The Jeremy Kyle Show’s Steve Dymond took their own lives.

Brutally, ruthlessly, reality TV chews people up, spits them out and leaves them damaged. Sinitta, a reality veteran, appearing on my Channel 5 show Vanessa on June 1, told me she was so viciously trolled after I’m A Celebrity… South Africa she needed therapy.

Enough is enough. T.S. Eliot wrote: ‘Humankind cannot bear very much reality.’ He was right. We’ve overdosed. Please make it stop.