Geraldine Bell's description of ‘ordinary’ people in The Guardian indicates how responses to ‘ordinary’ people on television are often couched within discourses of (class) taste. The references to ‘elasticated waists’ (read unfashionable, cheap clothes) and ‘fish fingers for tea’ (read unfashionable, cheap food) are far from neutral. But Bell is also pointing to what she sees as the disappearance of the ‘ordinary’ on television. Reality TV has developed an appetite for the type of ‘ordinary’ people that can guarantee something close to a semi-professional performance. As press critic Ian Parker puts it, ‘the real person who cannot rustle up a heightened TV persona is asked to step aside’ (cited in Piper 2004: 282). But the fact that television's portrayal of ‘ordinariness’ may differ across genres, or that it appears to be changing over time, usefully foregrounds its status as a cultural construction – something which is brought into being by television. It is this process of constructing the ‘ordinary’ which is the focus of this chapter.