London’s Notting Hill Becomes Home To Reality TV Soap

On MTV’s The Real World, seven (or eight) strangers are picked to shame their mamas on national television. UK broadcaster Channel 4 is enacting a similar experiment, except they’re following the lives of 18 strangers who all live in the London neighborhood of Notting Hill. The show’s called Seven Days, and it premieres tonight across the pond. The Guardian explains its concept: “Unlike previous docu-soaps which broadcast weeks or months after filming, Seven Days will feature action from the previous week with viewers encouraged to interact with the show’s participants online, offering advice and guidance.” So basically you can go on the Web and encourage the cast members to act a fool and shame their mamas. Cool.

Actually one of Seven Days‘ “stars” is accompanied on the show by his own mother. The series’ requisite heartthrob, Ben, is a “half-Greek, lady loving, estate agent,” and his mother Susanne sounds like someone right out of AbFab: “a former model, actress, and DJ.” And Susanne is apparently quite the enabler of her son’s chauvinism: “He’s not a womanizer, women are Beninizers,” she tells AOL UK. “Ben doesn’t need to chase women.”

The ads for Seven Days are kinda freaky: set to The xx‘s “Intro,” they feature edited-together facial mosaics of different Notting Hill residents introducing themselves as “types.”