Global appeal of MTV's young and the reckless: Geordie Shore Setting the tone: The cast of Geordie Shore. It crashed up against our screens on a wave of booze, vomit and other bodily fluids, but MTV's strange tide of reality shows about young Brits behaving badly has become as much of a sensation in Australia as it has been in the UK. The tone was set in the very first episode of Geordie Shore, even before that show's cast of hard-drinking, highly sexed youngsters had got a chance to hit the nightclubs of Newcastle upon Tyne. Fifteen minutes in, the camera was focused on the back end of drunken housemate Sophie, who had quite clearly wet herself and who was crawling to the toilet to vomit. That was just the beginning. The uninhibited behaviour of the Geordie Shore housemates gave MTV the biggest ratings it had ever had in Britain. Not altogether surprisingly, that success inspired MTV to make two more very similar reality series. Wet pet: Sophie of Geordie Shore. The first was The Valleys, in which a bunch of young Welsh people seemingly sought to be even more outrageous - the first episode of that show was particularly memorable for the drunken group-shower scene - then there was Beauty School Cop Outs, which drew together a cast of young, thirsty exhibitionists from across Britain and Ireland, ostensibly to help them get careers in the beauty industry. But Kerry Taylor, the executive in charge of all MTV's non-music programming outside the US, says the inebriated exhibitionism of the cast members is only a small part of the shows' appeal. "It is about the strength of the characters; it's about humour," she says. They're some of the funniest shows that you'll see on television - great soundbites, a really witty cast that can really, really make you laugh. And then you've got all the drama and emotion of the relationships. It's about finding characters that are larger than life but also have real hearts and are really likeable. The cast members can certainly be very funny - and not just in a train-wreck sort of way. Likeability, though, is largely the preserve of the female housemates. The male housemates tend to be preening, sexually competitive peacocks who routinely talk about women as pieces of meat. One recent example is the episode of Beauty School Cop Outs in which housemate Scarlett stood topless for a spray tan while two of the men made insulting comments. Taylor says the women in Beauty School Cop Outs "give as good as they get" and she is not concerned by the attitudes of the men. They have their opinions and we don't feel that that's crossing a line in any way for us. We're very happy and proud of the show," she says. Across the shows there's a real family unit at the heart of it. The guys and the girls may fall out and say things to each other but they always come back together. Taylor says while the "Geordie Shore effect" has had a "huge impact" on the way young Britons talk and dress, she doesn't think it has had any effect on their drinking or sexual behaviour, or on their attitudes to women. When it comes to those things, she says, the shows are merely reflecting youth culture, , not influencing it.Which would be nice to believe, especially given the global reach of the phenomenon. Geordie Shore was based on the format of Jersey Shore, but MTV's English translation and its subsequent spinoffs quickly took on a life of their own. "You'd never quite imagine that a story about young people from the Welsh valleys would be a massive hit in Sweden or Hungary or Mexico, but that's what we're seeing," Taylor says. MTV has already launched similar series in Spain (Gandia Shore) and Poland (Warsaw Shore, never mind that Warsaw is 260 kilometres from the sea), and other countries could soon be getting their own versions. Australia won't be getting one for the forseeable future, but MTV could be bringing us British and Mexican versions of Catfish (in which people discover whether their online sweethearts really are who they say they are), and two new American shows: one following young people meeting their sperm donors, for the first time, and another following young adults who have their boyfriends and girlfriends move in to their parents' homes. As always, it will be interesting viewing.