Welcome to the future

ARRIVING in a freezing cold George Square, amid a sea of youths with gel-filled hair, skinny jeans and Ugg boots, I'm feeling my age. It's sunny but there's a biting wind, though if you glanced around you'd never be able to tell, given that everyone seems to have forgotten to put on their coats.

I'm crotchety and age-conscious because I've spent the morning on Bebo, the social networking site of the same ilk as Facebook and MySpace. Aimed at 16 to 24-year-olds (I'm not a member, obviously) I've been on there for research purposes only, checking out the online drama KateModern, which features Royle Family and Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps star Ralf Little and has been taking the internet by storm.

A sister show to LonelyGirl 15, the original online drama from the US, KateModern began last July and ran for 155 "webisodes", lasting one to four minutes each. The first series clocked up an astonishing 35 million views. When series two started last month, nine million views were recorded in its first week. It's television but not as we – anyone over 25, that is – know it. Focused on young Londoner Kate (Alexandra Weaver), a girl with a dark past, the show is a supernatural drama – think Buffy meets Skins. There's a secret organisation known as The Order, as well as the usual teen/twentysomething angst about boyfriends and girlfriends and who's going to do the washing up.

The first series was dominated by Kate's attempts to solve the mystery of her past, helped by her Australian roommate Charlie (Tara Rushton), computer geek Gavin (Ralf Little), her ex Tariq (Jai Rajani) and sinister Steve (Giles Alderson). But things took a serious turn for the worst – certainly for Kate – when she was bumped off right at the start of series two. The show's now become a whodunnit where everyone is a suspect, and viewers can play the sleuth as much as the characters.

In windy George Square, I'm on the lookout for the cast and crew who are filming an episode in Edinburgh and, given that the only team member I have the vaguest chance of recognising is Ralf Little, I'm really just looking for him.

When I spot him he's looking casual and cold and studying the wrapper of his egg sandwich. As I make my way towards him, someone grabs hold of my arm and tells me to put my hand on the roof of the badly parked car I'm standing next to. This may sound odd, but since there are already another few studenty types doing it, I decide to oblige.

And that's how it happens – I'm now in KateModern. Spotting a man with a camera – just bigger than the one you might take on your holidays – I ask the boy standing next to me who he is and he tells me he's the director. So it's official. "All you have to say is 'Are you one of the organisers?' " the man with the camera tells me. "And sound angry."

This is the brave new world of online shows and it has TV executives quaking in their Gucci shoes. It is low-budget – hand-held cameras and a cast of relative unknowns ensure that – but it's all about interactivity.

An episode of KateModern is posted on Bebo every day. Once it's up there, viewers can comment on it, have a conversation with each other about it in a forum, post messages to the characters and make suggestions about what should happen next.

If that all sounds tediously new-fangled for you, just pause for a moment and think about how many conversations you have about what's happening in your favourite soap. Other than the weather, television is one of our main topics for chat. The only difference with the KateModern generation is that they do it immediately – sometimes even while they're watching. It's entertainment for the multi-tasker.

Filming over, it's time to get out of the cold. Getting into the van with the tinted windows parked on the square, it's a relief to be out of the wind. The van is the tour bus, production base and, by the looks of things, playground for the KateModern team. There are duvets and cushions all over the place, as well as bags and clothes on the floor. Ralf Little has just finishing writing a text message and he's eating a Werther's Original.

Little stands out because he's the only one of the cast who is already established as an actor. "I've been here right from the start, which I'm quite pleased about," he says after spitting his sweetie into a wrapper. "I was out in LA this time last year and I was introduced to the guys who set up LonelyGirl 15. They said they wanted to set up a show in England called Kate Modern, so I told them I was quite well known in Britain and they were like, 'oh right'," he says, raising his eyebrows.

"The thing is, everything in LA is based on bulls**t so I wouldn't have been in the slightest bit surprised if they were thinking 'yeah, big back home eh? That old chestnut'. But they gave me a ring when they came over, I introduced them to a few people and now here we are."

Most of the other cast members – Tara Rushton (Charlie), Sam Donovan (Lee) and Lucinda Rhodes-Flaherty (Julia) – are either recently out of drama school or making the transition from modelling to acting. But for Little, surely getting involved in an experimental online project was quite a risk?

"It was a bit of a gamble because you've always got to work out how things look and it could've looked like I wasn't getting any 'proper' work," he says. "But when I heard about it I just thought, that sounds like the future."

KateModern – like its precursor LG15 and even films such as The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield – blurs the line between fiction and reality and that's what the audience seems to love about it. When the New York Times exposed LG15 as fictional, the brainchild of three young Americans – Miles Beckett, Ramesh Flinders and Greg Goodfried – rather than the video blog of a real 15-year-old girl, viewing figures went up, not down. The online audience has no problem, it seems, with buying into the drama and the characters' lives, while knowing that it's all just made up.

There have been a series of "live events" worked into the plot of KateModern since it began. These happen when one of the show's characters plays straight to camera and asks for anyone who's watching to be at a certain place at a given time to help with some aspect of the plot. And what's amazing is that people turn up. The show even has one fan who travels from Manchester to London for the events, a level of dedication that, when the titular Kate was killed, won him an invitation to her memorial service. "We turn up in character, play out the scene and leave in character," says Little. "And that's the only way we can do it. It has to be real and that in itself is exciting. You never know if someone's going to lean out of their car and shout, 'Alright Ralf'. Once someone shouted, 'Two pints of lager and a packet of crisps' and I just had to turn around and deal with it in character.

"I love that – who wouldn't want a job where you're constantly on your toes?"

For Tara Rushton who plays Charlie, in her first acting job, the blurring of fact and fiction can be a little odd. "The fans love that but it means when people write to you or meet you in person they already feel that they know you," she says. "We were in Ireland doing a press tour and we had lunch with some fans. There was one girl who called me Charlie the whole time. She was kind of in awe. She didn't ask me anything about me – Tara – just Charlie."

"There's always been that element of people feeling that they know you, but this is different because the show carries on after the videos are finished – it has a life of its own," says Little. "Our characters get messaged and they message back. In a way the characters live outside of the realm of the videos, they have their own personalities which are ongoing even when we're not working."

So the reason viewers might think they know Charlie is not just because they watch her but because they've had messages from her. "It's entirely new and nobody really knows where it's going to go," adds Little.

Another aspect of the production that is new is the way it makes money. There's not the same kind of product placement that saw characters in the movie The Truman Show bursting into ad-speak out of nowhere, but products are all over KateModern. They call it "brand integration" and companies pay a lot of money to get in on it. The car I had my hand on was a Toyota – the episode is actually called "Touch the Toyota" – and brands including Microsoft, Orange and Gillette have paid as much as £250,000 to feature in the show. Advertising on terrestrial channels may be on the slide (no one needs to tell ITV chief Michael Grade that) but online, things are rosy, not least because the rules that apply to product placement on TV don't apply on the web.

Back to the drama, though, and I'm trying desperately to remember my line and to work out how you look angry when really you're just freezing. The two boys standing beside me are discussing what "wicked Facebook tags" being in an episode of KateModern will make (I think that means they'll be pleased to tell their friends to look out for them) and the camera is being passed between the actors who film parts of the show as well as acting in it to add to the air of authenticity.

Watching the finished product, the result of all this camera-shaking is the risk of motion sickness, but it's only for three minutes. "It might look like there are no producers or writers and directors involved but actually we go to quite some lengths to make it look like that," says Little. "There's a script, production meetings, it's as professional an outfit as any other.

"There is a real feeling that people in the TV industry don't quite know what's going to happen," says Little. "This is a definite step towards the future but what the next step's going to be, who knows?"

And just in case you're interested, none of them know who killed Kate ...

For more information visit www.bebo.com/katemodern