Are you looking at me?

Stare for ever and it will not change: rocks, sea, sand, heron. This is a place where the manifestation of a small seal might provoke the ringing of the church bells and a day off work. Then, suddenly, as the toilet flushes again and I wonder if the pub is open yet, something truly weird takes place. On the beach, a figure hovers into view, a man of late middle years clumping across the sand with great if inexplicable purpose. A figure that is somehow familiar, although not, I think, in a good way.

Huge jug ears. Bald head. Dressed as if for the 19th hole at an Essex golf club. I stare harder. A vague memory stirs inside my semi-comatose brain; downstairs the lavatory flushes yet again. And then I realise - gawd, stone the bleedin' crows, it's that Frank Butcher bloke out of EastEnders! Whatsisname, the comedian, always saying "Allo, princess" and the like… Mike Reid. That's him! Now, what is he doing here? It can't be for a good reason, can it? It can't be for anything beneficial to the world. It must be for something really, really stupid.

The Baron is the latest in a long line of terribly familiar reality-TV shows, due to hit your screens later this month, courtesy of ITV. Its utterly pointless premise was conjured into existence by a convocation of brain-damaged executives whose opinion of you, the viewer, and by extension themselves, could not be lower.

The plot is this: three people - celebrities, if you stretch the word so far that it snaps right back and really hurts your finger - will compete to win the title Baron of Gardenstown, which the TV company has purchased on the open market. To do this they must charm the local villagers, produce a manifesto of what they might do for the village, and face an election at the end of the shoot.

They have their template list, the TV people, and every programme has to have its roster of useless celebrity types: hot piece of ass, retired sitcom actor, difficult maverick, likable effnic person, sad old tosser whose career has nose-dived, deluded and rancid game-show monkey, gregarious and kindly homosexual. This time, the celebrities in question are the aforementioned Mike Reid; your obligatory, er, hot piece of ass, Suzanne Shaw, who used to sing with one of those manufactured girl'n'boy bands and now wants to be an actress "in, you know, musical theatre, stuff like that". And your obligatory difficult maverick, Malcolm McLaren, a man who achieved a certain notoriety by managing the Sex Pistols 31 years ago and has done sort of nothing whatsoever ever since, unless you count the lamentable pop group Bow Wow Wow.

The village, Gardenstown, is on the rugged north coast of Aberdeenshire, a quaint agglomeration of former fishermen's cottages on the seafront with a grim-looking grey township inhabited by those former fishermen perched on top of the cliffs. The nice cottages are, these days, all owned by English people. Gary, the PR man, tries to enthuse about the programme and tell me it isn't really reality TV, more a sort of documentary, you know? He's a lovely bloke, Gary, but I fear that his protracted bout of IBS has made him confuse two crucial parts of his body. Yes, he's talking crap too.

Because this is that old thang reality TV, and The Baron is de jour, where we are with reality TV right now - in the relentlessly cannibalistic world of television where ideas are swallowed whole, digested and the remains eaten again and again and again, each time losing something in the digestive process, ending up a sort of textureless, flavourless, colourless mush.

Our fascination with reality TV began, if you remember, with the first Big Brother, which came here via Endemol from Holland back at the tail end of 1999. And a clever idea it was too - the sort of experiment you might imagine being carried out in the psychology labs at Stanford University back in the 1950s: ordinary people forced to interact with each other, let's watch them for a bit and see what they do. And indeed they were, at first, fairly ordinary people - until the show's massive success ensured that the inevitable future incarnations were staffed with love-starved, attention-seeking, educationally subnormal chavs, exhibitionists with nothing to exhibit but their own forlorn ambition to be, like, famous - in other words, until the "reality" element was removed.

People were no longer part of an experiment, they were instead part of a witless and degrading audition that might usefully have been subtitled Britain's Got Cretins. It then occurred to the executives that if they could get the dregs of the nation to humiliate themselves nightly on TV, they might just be able to persuade the dregs of celebrityville to do likewise. How right they were. And so next we got the plethora of pseudo-celeb reality shows: Celebrity Big Brother, Celebrity Love Island, I'm a Celebrity… Get Me out of Here!, and so on and so forth, until almost everybody who had so much as grazed the skin of public recognition was offered sacks of moolah to make arses of themselves and, God, who knows, maybe boost their devastatingly hopeless careers. Yes, even me.

My agent, Jane, called me up one morning and said: "Hey, how would you like to do a programme called Underdog?" Oh, sounds good, I said, enthused. What happens - I pick someone I consider to be an underdog and maybe do a bio doc of them, arguing their case? "No, you mug," said Jane, "it's a reality show. You get filmed training a dog for a few weeks to see if you can do it, against other celebrities, who also have to train dogs."

I didn't reply for a bit because I didn't understand it. Why would I want to train a dog? Why would anyone want to watch me train a dog? "Money. Exposure. Boredom."

By now the other thing that distinguished the first Big Brother - the formless, risky, let's-just-see-what-they-do-and-show-it-anyway - had given way to an effectively scripted format, or at the least preordained scenarios of an easily predictable nature. So, where once it was ordinary people allowed to behave almost naturally, now it's TV people doing exactly what they've spent their careers doing - that is, doing what TV producers tell them to do.

But then, the producers have been forced to scrape ever lower into the barrel, now that the viewing audience has decided that reality - regardless or not if it is that very special kind of "reality" bestowed upon us by TV celebrities - has become rather boring. The audience figures have softened quite dramatically for Big Brother, for example; they are capable of being whipped up into peaks of above 8m when the execs manage to confect some sort of outrage and get questions asked in the House of Commons - the Jade Goody and Shilpa Shetty racism affair, for example. But more usually, the show is watched by a modest 4m people.

Overall, the genre is in merciful slow decline - a victim of public ennui as ever more facile formats are introduced to spice things up. Celebrity Love Island, where a dozen or so of the worst people in the world were invited to have sex or argue with one another, lost 2m viewers after the first show and was beaten by the lowly CSI on Five. Big Brother was recently matched by BBC's Springwatch and ITV faced a loss of some £70m in advertising revenue after a slump in viewing figures for its flagship reality show, I'm a Celebrity… Get Me out of Here!

There's also been a nasty knock to those other revenue streams: the telephone voting. Channel 4 was recently forced (by public outrage, as much as anything) to halve the cost of its phone-line votes for Big Brother, thus more than halving its income. And the companies have realised that there is no great appetite among the public for DVD reissues of reality shows, nor money to be made from syndication. This is a wounded and tired genre, limping haplessly towards the TV crematorium. Still, though, there are attempts to provide it with the occasional burst of electro-shock therapy: that's what they've tried to do with The Baron.

But Gary's right, in a way - this stuff has nothing to do with reality.

Here's an example of the reality you're likely to see, later this month. I'm on a beach in the northeast of Scotland and the film crew want to shoot Malcolm McLaren helping a man paint his boat for 40 seconds. McLaren drags himself up the steps to the harbour front. "This is sssssooo f***ing boring," he says in that effete drawl of an accent peculiar to rock-biz types, half estuarial, half Duchess of Devonshire. He says it to nobody, to himself, to everyone. It is indeed a scene of quite exquisite pointlessness, Malcolm crouched uncomfortably alongside some equally uncomfortable Scottish man, painting a boat for 40 seconds. Is that what barons are meant to do: help people paint boats? What does it tell you about anything? What sort of enjoyment could we draw from watching it? What do the villagers learn about Malcolm as a result? But, resignedly, contract compliance in mind, Malcolm picks up a brush and does it anyway.

As it happens, almost all of the villagers hate Malcolm anyway, and hate him with a real, tangible, seething loathing. He is on his way to getting almost no votes. Actually - and we'll come to this in more detail a little later - he's on his way to getting his head kicked in and pushed in the sea by one or two of the angrier villagers. They truly hate Malcolm; the other two celebrities they seem to merely despise.

"We're not very happy with the… how can I put it, calibre of contestants they managed to get," one old local matron reveals over a supper of Cullen skink in the excellent harbour restaurant. "No," says her husband. "We expected someone like that chap who does all those history programmes." What, I say incredulously, Simon Schama? "That's the chap." "You're kidding, aren't you?" They both look crestfallen. "Well, Bill Oddie then, at least," the matron says sadly.

Someone from the TV who is respectable and middle class is what they mean, I suppose. Funnily enough, later, outside the pub, I bump into the lady whose husband actually flogged the baronial title to ITV and she brings up Bill Oddie too. "We're not at all happy with what they've done. Nobody in the town is. We expected someone like Bill Oddie, what with all the birds…" She gestured in the direction of the sea. "But instead we get these people who most of the town has never heard of. We're not happy." "Ah well," I tell her. "There was a tapping on your windowpane heralding a creature of the night holding a very large sack of cash. And you opened the window and let it in. And swiftly trousered the dosh on offer. Bit late in the day and a tad hypocritical to be moaning, isn't it?"

"Yes," she says, "I suppose it is. But it's not what we were told would happen. We thought it might help the village."

Help the village, indeed. Maybe "put the village on the map". TV can do that, of course. The lovely North Yorkshire village of Goathland, for example, is no longer Goathland. It is now Heartbeat country. And a few miles west, as you speed away in despair, you hit Herriot country. Doesn't always work, mind. Remember The Farm, another reality-celeb programme set in southwest Wiltshire, during which the serial nonentity Rebecca Loos interfered with a pig? Who remembers that, apart from the poor pig?

But perhaps they want Gardenstown to be known as McLaren country. It's a thought. Get touched by television in the right places and the money sometimes starts to flow, people swarm along to buy stuff and gawp. Can you imagine the sort of people who'd travel all the way to Gardenstown because Mike Reid, Suzanne Shaw and Malcolm McLaren did a TV programme there? Can you imagine what they'd be like? Can you imagine trying to talk to them?

Inside the pub I settle down for a drink with Suzanne and Mike - who are both, of course, quite the most charming people and make not the slightest pretence as to why they are there. Mike is amiable, generous and relaxed, a man enjoying his golf-soaked retirement, tempted out of his happy rest by an extremely lucrative contract. Hard to blame him. He talks about how proud his old dad would be if he knew his son might be a baron. Suzanne, meanwhile, needs a jolt to her career, a form of leverage to lift her over the heads of the many, many other pretty and determined babes who were in some manufactured pop band that has since split up, its constituent members turned loose upon a weary world. I like her; she flirts and lads it up with the locals and doesn't try to pretend she's Wittgenstein or Diana Ross. I ask her what she'll do if she wins the title: will she move here, to Gardenstown? She suddenly looks at me as if I'm mad - and then regains a little composure.

"I'd definitely come back to visit occasionally," she says. Mike'n'Suze get on well with each other, two troupers doing their stuff. Neither of them can abide Malcolm.

Down on the beach the next day I bump into him as he prepares to do another fatuous and irrelevant sequence for the programme, his camera crew and producers with clipboards and time sheets milling around impatiently.

Why are you here, Malc, I ask. He thinks about this question for a few moments.

"Because I wanted to see Scotland. I've never been. This was a way of getting me here," he says. Um, couldn't you have just got on a train? At King's Cross? That's how normal people get to Scotland.

"I'd never have done it," he replies, decisively.

And what do you think of Scotland, now you're here? He shakes his head. "It's a f***ing awful place. Never, ever, come to Scotland."

Everyone seems to hate you here, I tell him. "Yes, so it would seem. I'm aiming for no votes at all."

Gary, the nice PR man, keeps telling me that The Baron is going to be a softer, gentler programme than your usual celebrity reality stuff; there'll be no manufactured conflict, that's not what they're looking for. I don't know who told him that, or how they could expect anyone to believe it. That's why Malc, the difficult maverick, is there - to cause trouble and conflict. I'll wager a ton that they alighted upon McLaren after seeing his old nemesis John Lydon, aka Rotten, doing his honest-John-outsider shtick with a bunch of useless celebs in the jungle.

And here's the catch-22 for Malcolm: the job of the difficult maverick on a programme like this is to be, uh, difficult - to antagonise the locals, to rebel against the format, to gripe and moan, to deliver himself of contentious and even offensive opinions. And, of course, this is what Malcolm does, on cue, every time the camera is rolling (and indeed, when it is not). If subverting the process is precisely what the TV people want you to do, then it's not really subversive at all, is it? It is, instead, quintessentially conformist. To paraphrase John Lydon, "Ever get the feeling you've been conned?"

Mind you, the locals are also happy enough to subvert the process. First morning, the crew are filming high up on the cliffs overlooking the bay, and after a while come across a large bearded local man with a dog walking along the clifftop path. Now, here's an early chance for a bit of interaction with the villagers, they think, and swing the camera in his direction.

"Point that f***ing thing at me and I'll chuck it, and you, into the sea," he says, and stamps off in the other direction. This rather neatly encapsulates the mood of the English inhabitants of the village towards the TV people, or at least the 20 or 30 of them that I speak to over the course of three days. The Scottish people, who live up top, are slightly more antagonistic, as we shall see.

But first you ought to know a little more about Gardenstown, because it is a truly interesting place. It is a divided community. Some years ago, the fishing industry upped sticks and moved to Fraserborough and Banff, leaving the locals high and dry. They flogged their sweet cottages on the seafront to English (and Glaswegian) incomers, and moved into the less agreeable local-authority township on top of the cliff, pocketing a large profit in the process. They kept their rigorous, authoritarian religions - Presbyterian Wee Free, Primitive Methodist, Plymouth Brethren and so on. The top of the town is festooned with grim little churches, each of which preaches, in progressively dying cadences, a sermon about the mortal perils of licentiousness, be it sexual or alcoholic.

Down at the bottom of the village, meanwhile, the incomers shag and drink themselves stupid. They do not mix very easily, these two sets of people with diametrically opposed outlooks upon life, the middle-class arrivistes and the horny-handed former fisherfolk. You won't hear a Scottish accent down by the harbour, unless it's some toothless old codger doing an odd job for the incoming middle class, and you won't hear an English accent at the top of the cliff. On polling day, the Scots march down the hill and vote, en masse, for the blue-nose Protestant SNP. And the English amble along and put their crosses beside absolutely anyone else.

It's a fascinating dichotomy. Tales - perhaps apocryphal - abound, among the English, of homosexuals being run out of town. None of this, one imagines, will be explored in The Baron, except for Malcolm getting thumped for being inanely sacrilegious.

You could make a whole bunch of films about Gardenstown, about the social, economic and religious divide between these two sets of people, about the politics and demographics of the place. Or you could point your camera at the cliffs and the sea, at the peregrines and gannets, the eider duck and the otters.

All of this would be much, much more interesting than Malcolm McLaren painting a boat for 40 seconds and leaving the rest of us to watch it dry. Or cheerful, bouncy Suzanne Shaw cooking chilli con carne for the local butcher's family, the interaction necessarily confected and empty for the cameras. The TV people have taken an interesting place, about which most of us know little or nothing, and through a lack of imagination and a predilection for the staggeringly banal, made it very dull. It is, when you think about it, a remarkable achievement.

Back in London, I speak to McLaren on the phone as he speeds towards Heathrow en route to one of his bolt holes in Paris or Los Angeles. He is full of entertaining bile about Scotland and the Scottish. "You never saw more deformed, dreadful-looking creatures. It is an absolutely sorrowful nation, an awful place. Why would anyone willingly go there?"

He seethes at the ecumenically imposed misery and narrow-mindedness. And he explains what happened at the end of the shoot - exactly what the TV people wanted to happen and expected to happen, I suspect. The three contestants each had to build a sort of tent (no, me neither) and expound their manifestoes for the town. According to the locals, Malcolm's speech was rambling and antagonistic, and culminated in him delivering the following statement to the assembled villagers: "God is a sausage!"

At which point one of the Scots could contain himself no longer and thumped Malcolm. Reportedly, a camera was smashed and Malcolm's tent torn down. Things were thrown into the sea. Malcolm skedaddled out of Gardenstown, never to return. Good job Richard Dawkins wasn't one of the contestants, I suppose.

But that little slice of reality, I assume, was the entertainment they wanted all along, some thuggish thicko taking a swipe at a man who said something childish. And I hope that in giving away the ending I haven't ruined your early-evening enjoyment.

The Baron will be shown on ITV1 later this month