It is easy to forget just how big a deal One Direction once was. Though for my part a vehicle for delicious teenaged disdain, this X-Factor-forged grouping made its way from the brain of Simon Cowell into the dreams and diaries of a generation of teenage girls. So widespread was the contagion that the general phrase “in one direction” could not be uttered in a classroom without at least a couple of girls whooping. These Harry Styles fangirls (for it was always Harry, not Liam, who commanded the most attention) are now professional women hurtling towards their thirties — who still hold a dim candle for the floppy-haired fivesome, and still plan on walking down the aisle to Story of my Life. One school friend, wistfully recalls the O2 gig for their 2013 Take Me Home tour. “In a way, we’ve all grown up with the boys of One Direction,” she tells me, with a reverence last heard when the Queen died.

Zayn Malik’s departure in 2015, followed by the band’s “indefinite hiatus”, prompted a period of mourning compared at the time — to the dismay of most — with John leaving the Beatles in 1969. If Lennon’s assassination had taken place in the age of Musk’s X rather than in fax-tastic 1980, the response may well have been similar to yesterday morning’s World of Payne conspiracy bed-in. For the social-media response to Liam Payne’s death was, to put it simply, a mess. It represents the bottom of the barrel of feverish panic untethered from reality, frenzied feeling untempered by context. Twitter is awash with unverified images of a smashed television, a dirty bathroom scattered with burnt foil, lighters, white powder on a desk and a blackened soda-can lid. A spurious source tells of a drug-addled attempt to jump into a pool from a balcony. Others blame Payne’s ex-girlfriend Maya Henry, whose roman à clef, Looking Forward, said to be based on their fraught relationship, has just come out. In it, the main character, Mallory, starts going out with Oliver, a former member of the winkingly named band 5Forward. Oliver is violent, addicted and constantly threatening suicide.

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The Maya question becomes the touch paper for a savage social-media row about toxic relationships and accountability. Elsewhere, unsubstantiated rumours of forced abortions bubble up; the One Direction fandom, known for ruthlessly hunting down suspected girlfriends when the band was together, seems to have carried on the toxic feminine fixation into grisly finger-pointing in this moment of tragedy — not unlike how Yoko Ono was singled out as the catalyst for Lennon’s departure from the Beatles. And Liam-Lennon comparisons don’t end there. While the latter’s solo career merits considerably more praise than Payne’s — as anyone who’s both seen the questionable choreography for 2017’s “Strip That Down” and listened to the masterwork that is “Plastic Ono Band” knows — both had difficult final years, pockmarked by addiction and abuse allegations. Lennon’s little-remarked-upon Reagan fanboy era is less embarrassing than anything Payne has said, thought or breathed since 2016, but Lennon had the grace of analogue media, so that interview blips vanished into the ether.

Payne, conversely, has suffered many moments of accidental virality since leaving the band: the worst was in the aftermath of Will Smith’s wife-defending bitchslap of Chris Rock at the 2022 Oscars. Caught by a Good Morning Britain reporter on the red carpet, jaw swinging and eyes wide, Payne embarked on a bizarre two-minute, 27-second appraisal of the slap. “There were three losers in one fight,” he drawled, with the dawn-defying certainty of someone standing in a stranger’s kitchen at 6am. “He didn’t know, being Chris Rock. He didn’t wanna do what he had to do, being Will Smith. And she did nothing, being Jada.” He went on to designate Smith “one of the world’s best emoters”, confirming — presumably in a moment of paranoia — “We’re all very human, right?” Another similarly viral moment is a clip from an interview with Logan Paul that same year, in which he recalls a physical fight with a 1D bandmate. Having been thrown up against a wall, Payne rehearses his Liam Neeson-style response: “If you don’t remove those hands, there’s a high likelihood you’ll never use them again.”

Payne’s trajectory is that of the first generation of celebs to become real-time memes; in his lifetime, he was ruthlessly mocked for these moments of cockiness and cringe. The shock, sorrow and speculation on social media rings somewhat hollow given the brutality of those same sites to a man who must have seemed for a time, untouchable — but whose mental health problems were no doubt aggravated by never being truly taken seriously, digitally haunted by his own gaucherie.

To put it in Gen Z terms, “Liam Payne’s fall-off needs to be studied”. His life and death is fascinating because of its trajectory from the waiting rooms of an ITV talent show to the living rooms of millions of Saturday-night viewers, thence to the Twitter feeds of sniggering haters (“have you seen Liam Payne’s filler!”) and now the sombre and legally cautious front pages of the nationals. He leaves behind a seven-year-old son, Bear, fathered with the former X-Factor judge Cheryl Cole, and a murky, desperate legacy. A 14-year-old from Wolverhampton was slingshotted into stratospheric fame on the relentless juggernaut of the X-Factor; too much, too young doesn’t even cut it. The hordes of parasocial teenage fans, the feverish fanfiction imagining homoerotic encounters between 1D bandmates, the ever-available drugs which, if those photos are anything to go by (and they very much may not be) had reached the final, deadly form of freebase cocaine.

It’s a narrative that repeats itself in public breakdowns or tragedies every few years — from Macaulay Culkin to Drew Barrymore, via fellow talent show martyr Darius Campbell Danesh, from the Pop Idol era of celebrity, who died in 2022 after inhaling chloroethane. For Payne and others, the fact of growing up a matinee idol, a teen heart-throb, must cause a fission in identity: you are both the “normal boy” plucked from obscurity and the floppy-fringed one on the bedroom wall. Payne’s latter-day pomposity cannot have been helped by forming this identity in rooms populated only by fans and yes-men; he never had the opportunity to be swerved on the dance floor, to be chastised or nurtured or corrected.

The One Direction boys were subject to a fame so glaring that it burrows into any vulnerability and seeks endless revenge for, as is inevitable, not ending up the person a 12-year-old fan imagined you to be 10 years ago. For Payne, whose struggles with mental health and addiction were well documented, it was a spotlight which he did not survive. Fame and youth produce a strange chemical reaction which freezes its subjects in perpetual teenage heartthrob-dom; while 1D’s fans have got jobs, filed tax returns, even started families, Payne was left to chase the impossible ideal of his 14-year-old self these women once loved him for. For all but the most hysterical of these grown-up Directioners, his death will prompt only a surprised grunt and 10 minutes of disinterested scrolling; those who once wept in arenas as he sang now have Tubes to catch, dogs to walk, lives to get on with. And Liam Payne himself? He’s just another young star to die drugged-up and paranoid, staring into the abyss, when he just needed to be put to bed and told everything is okay.

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.