Celebrity vs Celebrity Special

[DeMarkay]

I’ve always wondered why some British shows are titled Celebrity [Insert Name Here] vs [Insert Name Here] Celebrity Special.

Can anyone explain why?

[Keith]

At a guess the suffix is more likely to be used for individual episodes rather than entire series.

There was a time I think around early 2000s when there were lots of "Celebrity xxx" programmes in the UK. I wonder if that might be why some opted to put "Celebrity" at the end instead, or substituting the word (eg. "All Star").

[Neil Jones]

Best programme name ever has to be "Pointless Celebrities". Doesn't work at all when it's "Celebrity Pointless" IMO

Of course back in the day celebrity specials of shows tended to be limited to Christmas and telethons and anything else was just tooted as a normal episode with special guest, so you'd have, I dunno, a gardening programme that just happened to have an episode at some celebrity's house, and the rest of the series was just at various civilian houses.

These days celeb specials of anything and everything are on all year (and in some cases dispel the entire civilian aspect entirely).

[XIII]

I've always wondered why MasterChef The Professionals and Bake Off The Professionals aren't just called Professional MasterChef and Professional Bake Off.

[Ben]

I'd imagine that's to do with keeping the main programme title at the beginning. Not that it's essential to do that.

[wonkey_monkey]

I'd imagine that's to do with keeping the main programme title at the beginning. Not that it's essential to do that.

Makes it more intuitive for searches (if it was a dumb search you'd have to type all of "Professional" and more before you even got close to the right result), and keeps the related programmes together in search results too.

[sjhoward]

Back in the mid-2000s, ITV took against the word “celebrity” in programme titles after a series of high profile flops and audience research suggesting that celebrity programmes were seen as downmarket.

This led to some hasty renaming of planned shows (some of which had already been announced):

• Celebrities on Thin Ice became Dancing on Ice

• Celebrity X Factor became X Factor: Battle of the Stars

• Celebrity Family Fortunes became All-Star Family Fortunes

• All of the WWTBAM celebrity specials were renamed, either for an event (“Valentine’s Day Special”) or a charity (“Prince’s Trust Special”)

• Most notoriously at the time, the second series of Celebrity Love Island became simply Love Island, with the predictable associated press commentary about the questionable celebrity status of the contestants.

I’m sure others will be able to recall other examples too: it was fairly big news at the time. “I’m a Celebrity…” must have been deemed too big a property to mess with, I suppose.

[Neil Jones]

Back in the mid-2000s, ITV took against the word “celebrity” in programme titles after a series of high profile flops and audience research suggesting that celebrity programmes were seen as downmarket.

...


I’m sure others will be able to recall other examples too: it was fairly big news at the time. “I’m a Celebrity…” must have been deemed too big a property to mess with, I suppose.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kqa2viBaUyQ

[Brekkie]

Celebrity Big Brother in the US was a strange one in this regard. All it's on screen branding was as Celebrity Big Brother and generally that is how it was referred to on screen, but CBS billed it as "Big Brother: Celebrity Edition", and referred to it that way in any press releases etc.

[JasonB]

Best programme name ever has to be "Pointless Celebrities". Doesn't work at all when it's "Celebrity Pointless" IMO

To be fair though a lot of “celebrities” that appear on these so called specials these days are pointless though