Dead Famous (2001) is a comedy/whodunit novel by Ben Elton in which ratings for a reality TV show, very similar to Big Brother, rocket when a housemate is murdered.

The novel is about a murder that occurs on a reality television programme called House Arrest, which is very similar to the program Big Brother, and the efforts of three police officers to identify the killer by watching all the video recordings of the ten housemates while the remaining housemates continue the reality television show.

The novel jumps back and forth in time to show the events in the live video recordings, leading up to the night of the murder, where the remaining eight housemates at the time had to remain in an Indian sweat box—an old-style sauna with a pitch-black interior, the intention being to prompt the housemates to have sex.

The housemates: The television crew: The police: Elton makes references in this novel to both Shakespeare's Hamlet and Macbeth.

The book parodies the cult of celebrity brought on by simply being on television and says in the credits that "without [the Big Brother contestants] this novel would not have been written".