On the Vh1 reality show “The Surreal Life: Fame Games,” ten celebrities of stagnant popularity believe that their careers can be jump started and their wallets fattened if they can survive the physical and mental challenges thrown at them. It's no surprise that the man refereeing the whole project is celebrity expert Robin Leach. Leach spoke with TCS Friday, February 23, 2007 from his home in Las Vegas to talk about "The Surreal Life" and the premise behind it.

Ok, I’m all yours.

Awesome. Where are you at today, Robin?

I’m in Vegas. Which is where we filmed “Fame Games.”

Right. First off, tell me, how did you get approached to do the “Surreal Life: Fame Games”?

Um. It’s a long, complicated story. I’m not being rude. It has zero interest in your story. (laughs). It’s the technicalities of television.

I’ll take that.

The producers of “Surreal Life” and myself are friends and what we wanted to do was merge a little bit of their success with my success, is the easy way to describe it. We wanted to bring an element of the fame of Hollywood into the success of the “Surreal Life” and I’m very pleased with the volatile mix that we created in the kitchen. Highly combustible and highly entertaining (laughs).

I’m sure it was a no brainer for you living in Vegas. This is right in your backyard.

It was part of the agreement was that we would film it here.

Is there a part of you that was somewhat happy in sending people to the “B-List” room or sending them home? You seem kind of excited about that?

No. First of all, let’s be honest, this is entertainment. That’s all it is. This has nothing to do with personalities or personal friendships or whatever. We set out to create a highly successful piece of television entertainment. Unique enough and different enough to build off of the success of something that was already successful and tweaking it and adding to it. I got no personal satisfaction out of destroying anybody or sending them down. We were doing a show. And by remaining disjointed from it and being professional about it, I think we really got what I always strive to do, which is “talked about TV.” I know that every Monday morning at water coolers all over the country, people are talking about, quote, the show. No doubt about it.

What was your highlight from being on the show?

The highlight. Obviously the satisfaction when we reach the winner. Have you been watching the show?

Yes.

Ok. So, you’re really seeing the good and the bad and the ugly and the beautiful of people. You’re seeing people that are fighting for their survival. You’re seeing people that are fighting for the $100,000. You’re seeing people that are helping their friends or trying to help their friends or perceive to help their friends, then turn on them the minute it doesn’t pay to be friendly. You’re seeing a great swing of personality traits and characteristics. That goes on in life. It goes on more in show business than any other business. I don’t think insurance executives in Hartford, or car manufacturers in Detroit behave like this, but the sense of competition and rivalry still exists in those industries as well. It’s just that in our business, it’s done with people.

It’s interesting because it seems like some of the celebrities on the show are setting themselves up for ridicule. I’m sure there are a few average Joe’s out there who can see really how spoiled some of these people are. It’s like ‘oh no, you have to grate cheese.’ Or ‘Oh, no, no one will open your van door for you.’ To me that’s the appeal of the show. Seeing how different these people are to myself or people I know.

Um. In our show, the A-listers, if they do well, are rewarded. If you’re not on the A-list, then you live like everybody else does. That simple.

Right. Some of the contestants act like this is the be-all and end-all of their careers, while others treat it like what it is, which is a contest.

I kept on reminding all of them that this is only television and this is only entertainment.

Yeah (laughs). Not all of them got that from what I’ve seen so far.

(laughs). All I can tell you is, the worst is yet to come. (laughs). You’ve seen nothing yet (laughs). And I say that with glee, rubbing my hands together.

I think a lot of viewers would agree that the idea of eating hot wings and hot dogs and drinking beer sounds pretty good. Are celebrities that far removed from normal society that everything has to be elegant to be considered acceptable and normal?

You have to remember that as we talk now, you’re watching this week in real life, total train wrecks with Brittany Spears and the circus with Anna Nicole Smith. Television, again television, reports this as quote, “entertainment news.” What we were doing seven weeks ago when we started the airing of “Fame Games” was taking the entertainment approach to these real life situations and turning it into a television show ahead of it actually happening. Yes, stars are pampered. Yes, stars are wrapped in a bubble. Yes, stars are sometimes very unaware of what goes on in the real world. No different than the Royal family of England where I come from. I always used to try to explain to people, the best way to explain why people act dysfunctional and not normal, to use the Royal family in Britain is to tell you that they have never, ever seen a red traffic light. You may think that Leach has lost his mind, but think of that. The light has always been green. There’s never been a traffic jam. When they get to the store to go shopping, nobody’s inside it except people to serve them. So, how can you have any reality when you don’t know what the rush hour is? For instance. How can you have any reality if when you walk into a restaurant, your table is always waiting, there is no wait? What happens is, you get used to it and it becomes sort of semi-expected like a pair of comfortable slippers. When you have to face hardship, is when you start to become dysfunctional or you start to throw temper tantrums. Does that explain it for you?

Definitely. That’s a good analogy. Did you have anything to do with coming up with some of the stunts these guys have to go through?

We developed those jointly. They were created by the “51 Minds” people as concept ideas and then if we liked them we went ahead with them and developed them further and if we didn’t like them, we’d toss them out and then they’d come up with more.

Robin, I think you seem to be tailor-made to host your own game show. Are there any talks for you actually do that?

(laughs). I believe that some conversations have started about turning “Back To Reality” into it’s own game show. Which is very nice to receive the pat on the back, but I don’t know if I could live th rest of my years with the ugly, blue, tuxedo shirt. Which, I selected because I thought it fit in so tackily with the show.

C’mon, man, that’s sharp. (laughs).

No it isn’t (laughs). It’s disgraceful. It’s hard to believe that’s how people went to proms in the 70s. What’s worse is, game show people actually … do you remember Gene Rayburn?

No. What show was he on?

Boy, I can’t remember what show Gene Rayburn was on, but he wore a suit like that and he had a very, very long 2-inch stick microphone. We tried everywhere to find the 2-inch, er, 2-foot long, thin, slim microphone. ‘Cause it was the height of tack. But we failed.

It think Barker still uses one on “The Price is Right.”

Similar. Similar. Gene’s was actually longer and thinner.

You’ve been around celebrities your entire career. What is it about people in general that makes us want to follow the lives of people that live on the other side of our television?

I think two things being serious about pop culture. One is we’re always fascinated by those that live lives that we perceive to be larger than our own. Because it’s an escapism. There is a trait within our brain system that loves to see if the milkman goes into Mrs. Jones’ house three doors up. We are nosy by nature. We are inquisitive by nature. We gossip by nature. That’s built into absolutely everybody’s personality traits. It used to be in the old days when you went to somebody’s house for dinner, or a cocktail party, when you’ve gone to their bathroom, I can tell you this from studies, nine out of ten people peek inside the medicine cabinet. It’s human nature. In the old days of movie stars, in the Clark Gable days and the Humphrey Bogart days, we didn’t have the media to know about these stars. So, they were kept as magical figures of deity. Your reference to them was that they were 25-feet tall on the movie screen. So, because America had no royalty, you looked up to those that came from the celluloid screen in Hollywood as some form of a hero, as some form of a leader, as some form of a guide or role model for you to dream, escape into fantasy and think that you could someday be as successful as they were. Then television came along and humanized them all so they became your best friends. So that when Jaclyn Smith and Farrah Fawcett from “Charlie’s Angels” were in your living room, they were your angels. Then what happened if you remember when I helped start “Entertainment Tonight,” which was the first day-in-date television program reporting the news of showbusiness. Then, we created “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” which was, ‘alright, so you know these stars for their work, now we’re gonna really show you what they live like.’ By adding rich people into the mix of famous people, we created this extraordinary landscape of what success and wealth and fame and fortune were all about. I look at what we’re now doing, if you think about it, when we got that close up to people and you compare how close you are now with people in the public eye, e.g. Brittany, e.g. Anna Nicole, we were very tame (laughs) when we did our thing. Yet that was the beginning of that particular breakthrough in entertainment with personalities.

I’ve got one more for you and it’s kind of going off of what you were just talking about. You asked on the show ‘why does anyone seek fame?’ and with this microscope that’s on celebrity, why would anyone want that?

I asked the same question rhetorically, ‘why would anyone want to be the President of the United States of America?’ You can’t win. Fortunately there are people. We cannot all be … what a boring world it would be if there was no entertainment. What a rotten world we’d live in if there weren’t people that wanted to be our political leaders. So, again, inherent in every individual is a desire to strive for something different than our next door neighbor. You remember that Jim Carrey movie where everybody lived in the same house and left at the same time and wore the same clothes and went to the same workplace.

Yeah, “The Truman Show.”

“The Truman Show.” If that proved to you that if we were all the same, what a boring world we’d live in, thank goodness we have people who are willing to put their lives on the line for politics and showbusiness. As we’re talking about those two things. In both of those, you have to be really prepared to be under the public microscope and your life is going to be magnified because of the intensity and the intimacy of television more than any other professions. Television is not really interested in the man who puts a door handle on a car every four seconds of his life, but television is very interested in a pop star princess who is in and out of rehab three times in one week and shaves her head off. The real life of stars as I have chronicled on television for the past 25 years far exceeds anything that I could sit down and write as a script for television because people wouldn’t believe it. If you sent in a script this week to a network saying ‘I have this idea of a pop star who undergoes a major breakdown in public and shaves her head off,’ the guy would pick up the phone and ask his security to have you thrown out because he wouldn’t believe it if it was a script. That was what we did with “Lifestyles,” we showed wealth and the homes that people would never believe if you’d wrote it. We were bigger than “Dynasty” and “Dallas.” Now, “Fame Games” is exactly the same scenario. If you wrote that down as a drama, people would say, ‘that’s so totally exaggerated. Nobody would behave like that.’ Well, we show you it for real, as it happens. It’s not created, it’s not manufactured, it’s reported as it happened. Yes it’s edited, but it actually happens. That’s what makes it talked about TV.

And probably why reality TV is so hot right now.

But, not all reality TV works. Contrived reality television doesn’t work. The audience spots it. When it’s real, reality, like “Fame Games” that’s why they flock to it in huge numbers. ‘Cause it’s real.

Alright, Robin. I appreciate you taking a few minutes to talk to me.

I hope you found that of interest.

Definitely.

(laughs).

Enjoying the show.

Continue enjoying it and remember Monday morning water cooler and you’ll say ‘you know, I just talked with Robin about that. Now I understand what it means.’

Alright, I’ll do that.

(laughs). You have a great day.

You too.