What will people do for Reality TV?

Having recently watched some of I'm a (washed up) celebrity get me out of here, I think we can safely put ritual torture on the list. I can't help but wonder how people can subject themselves to embarrassment and near torture for the sake of a reality TV show. But they do, take for example Robert Kilroy-Silk, okay.. so he's supposed to be mad, but isn't he playing his character a little too convincingly? After all he spent a good 10 minutes humiliating himself on national television yesterday evening. (If you haven't watched the show, think spiders, eels, snakes, maggots, cockroaches, green gunk and any combination of the aforementioned...)

So they get paid, alot, and they also get back on (if they ever were on) the front pages of various newspapers, but is that really a price worth paying? I know we're in the middle of a credit crunch and all that, but I'm pretty sure I'd rather starve, dunno maybe that's just me?

A better title might well have been, "What won't people do for a reality TV show?", The responding list would probably be much, much shorter. Let's be honest, providing you've got a video camera and a pre-standing agreement with a major TV channel, you can do things to people that would, in any other context, come with a fairly hefty prison sentence.

As you might guess, I don't really watch much TV anymore, except of course Worlds Worst, Terribly Awful, Frightfully Unfortunate, criminals gone mad/pets gone bad/pursuits/robberies/riots. (Delete as Appropriate)
Which is of course totally different to I'm a Celebrity, honest, because the people who appear in these kind of programs don't know any better and are locked up straight after their 'performance'. Something that should be considered for their celebrity counterparts?

But even then, that's not the worst thing, everyone knows Kilroy-Silk is mad, has been, will be. The thing is, people - millions of people - tune in to watch this stuff every night, that's not one crazy person, that's millions of crazy people. And that is a problem, after all you can lock up 1 crazy person, hell, apparently you can lock up 505 'crazy' people and save money by cutting down on all the unnecessary things, y'know lawyers, trials, that kind of thing... But you just can't lock up millions of people, unless you're first name happens to be Adolf, Joseph or Saloth that is. Particularly, if for some whimsical reason, you intend to do it legally (It costs roughly £40,000 to incarcerate someone in the UK for 1 year.) I can't really count past 10, but I'm pretty sure £40,000 multiplied by say... 8.7 million (number of people that tuned into I'm a Celebrity on Monday) is going to be a fairly big number.

So with that option defenestrated, are there any other suggestions?

P.S Kilroy-Silk in action in: I'm (was) a Celebrity