Big Brother reeked of desperation when it ended in 2018 – why is it back?

Oh Big Brother, what art thou? Five years after ascending to the big diary room in the sky, the reality show to rule them all beams back down to ITV on Sunday 8 October at 9pm (having previously graced Channel 4 and then Channel 5). But does a franchise regarded as having outlived its relevancy when cancelled in 2018 have any business coming back in the radically changed cultural landscape of 2023? Can a flogged-to-death reality horse ride again?

ITV’s answer is essentially that it’s bringing back Big Brother, only not quite as we remember it. Going out largely on Love Island’s home turf of ITV2, the series, with new presenters AJ Odudu and Will Best, will have a “sense of ITV-ness”, promised commissioning editor Peter Tierney in an interview with Deadline. He added, “Big Brother presents us with the perfect opportunity to make reality ‘real’ again.”

But do we need more ‘real’ in our reality? Since Big Brother went off air, reality television in Britain has had to contend with the suicide of three individuals associated with Love Island: contestants Sophie Gradon and Mike Thalassitis and presenter Caroline Flack. Gradon’s death predates the departure of Big Brother; nonetheless, in the intervening years, the debate around reality TV and its obligations to contestants has become fraught.

Unlike in the early days of Big Brother, it is no longer acceptable to set up a camera and allow housemates to have at it. It is understood that broadcasters have a duty of care towards their overnight “stars” – and that the pressures of social media can make life post-spotlight every bit as testing as during their time on air. In the case of Love Island, that aftercare involves offering participants a “minimum of eight therapy sessions” and maintaining “proactive contact” for 14 months following the end of the season. 

Big Brother was out front in reducing ordinary people to two-dimensional heroes or villains. You wonder how viewers would feel today about the demonisation of “Nasty” Nick Bateman from the very first Big Brother or the late Jade Goody – scorned while alive, revered in death.

Many would surely feel that these people had been fed into the maw of the ratings machine. If ITV did likewise in 2023, it would be the broadcaster rather than today’s version of “Nasty Nick” who would be regarded as the baddie. Nor can the franchise have been helped by revelations around Russell Brand, who had fame handed to him on a platter when Channel 4 hired him as host of Big Brother’s Big Mouth.

That times have changed is acknowledged by Tierney. “Duty of care and welfare of contributors is now as important as any other element of the show,” he said.

Still, ITV wants to have it both ways. It has promised BB 2.0 will lack gloss. The obvious challenge will be stripping away the artifice while keeping a protective bubble around the housemates. “Lots of polished, glossy TV is out there but hopefully we are going back to something raw that has a hands-off producing style with a very fast turnaround edit,” Katy Manley of production company Initial told Deadline.

The contestants have yet to be announced. However, host Best said they would be “real” individuals with whom viewers could connect. 

“The housemates are what make the show special, and I know they’re going to be amazing. Real people, properly representative of the UK today, all chosen because they’re genuinely interesting. It means there is so much more for an audience to connect with. It’s unfiltered and unpredictable, which makes for unbelievably engaging telly.”

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Whether the new Big Brother is an improvement on the old will remain unclear until Sunday. What can be said for certain is that it will require a radical reboot – to essentially become a different programme – if it is to have any chance. By the time it slunk off Channel 5 in 2018, it was in terminal decline. Ratings were in freefall: the first series garnered 10 million viewers in 2000 while the latest instalment of Celebrity Big Brother saw viewership sink to below 2 million.

It also found itself at the centre of an unwelcome firestorm over former Emmerdale actress Roxanne Pallett’s swiftly debunked assertion on air that she had been physically abused by eventual CBB winner Ryan Thomas (video playback confirmed he had playfully tapped rather than assaulted her).

Truthfully, however, Big Brother had been in decline for some time. Relocating to Channel 5 in 2011, it struggled to reclaim its early notoriety, when it scandalised the public and made overnight stars of contestants such as the aforementioned Bateman and the late Goody. 

If Big Brother had a message – beyond that it’s never a good idea to become intimate with someone when night-vision cameras are rolling – it was that anyone could be famous, provided they wanted it badly enough and were prepared to behave outrageously. Like a contagion in the water supply, it’s a message that has entered the DNA of popular culture. It lives on today, on Instagram and TikTok.

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It’s no exaggeration to describe the original 2000 series as a light entertainment earthquake – one of the defining television moments of the decade. The concept of sealing a dozen average members of the public in what was essentially a network of mildly luxurious sheds, and watching what happened, was regarded as genuinely revolutionary and 40,000 people duly applied to participate.

That the idea had originated with Dutch production company Endemol was, moreover, perceived as applying a veneer of continental sophistication to the endeavour. Indeed, at the time Big Brother was received as much as a social science experiment – the equivalent of lab rats fighting over cheese – as a cheap attempt by Channel 4 to commandeer more eyeballs.

And if the goal was to illustrate the tooth-and-claw reality of human nature in the wild, it more than succeeded. Viewers were riveted as “Nasty” Nick slithered about setting housemates against each other. Great cheer was taken from the fact that, after 70 days in confinement, the decent Craig Phillips was voted the winner. It says something for the shadow cast by that first season that, nearly two decades on, those names still chime a bell, while many pop stars and actors from the early 2000s have been reclaimed by obscurity.

Big Brother would quickly confirm that the hype over its launch year was no one-off. At a time when television was undergoing deep-rooted change, it was a phenomenon like no other and yet was not regarded in a benign light. Its portrayal of housemates with mental illness was widely criticised as crass and exploitative. For instance, Tourette’s sufferer Pete Bennett was sold as a lovable weirdo while Nikki Grahame, who was anorexic and had attempted suicide, found herself painted as a hysterical villainess prone to exploding over the tiniest slight.

“I think reality TV programmes do a lot of damage,” Vanessa Feltz, who appeared on Celebrity Big Brother, has since argued. “Nothing prepares you for the scrutiny and incarceration and worrying what people might think of you and trying to survive all at once. Believe me, it was extremely intense and a most unnerving thing.”

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The remarkable power of Big Brother was personified in the rise of Goody, the third-series contestant who became a national laughing stock because of her perceived lack of geographic expertise (believing Rio de Janeiro was a person rather than a city, etc etc).

The public loved to hate her – which she parlayed into a place on the Z-list prior to her death from cancer in 2009 at the age of 27. After Big Brother, she starred in her own TV shows (Jade’s Salon, Just Jade) and was a regular in the tabloids. That she could become famous by projecting an image of mid-level cluelessness was a klaxon warning that, in terms of celebrity, we weren’t in Kansas anymore.

But her somewhat cuddly persona was undermined with an appearance in Celebrity Big Brother in 2007 when she was accused of racism towards fellow housemate Shilpa Shetty (Ofcom was inundated with a record 44,500 complaints). The outcry prompted an extraordinary intervention from then chancellor Gordon Brown, who interrupted a state visit to India to attack the programme (protestors in India were burning images of the Big Brother producers in the street). “I want Britain to be seen as a country of fairness and tolerance,” he said. “Anything detracting from this I condemn.”

Amid slumping viewing figures, the franchise transferred to Channel 5 in 2011 (upon purchasing the network, media baron Richard Desmond declared Big Brother top of his wish list). This brought a change of presenters (original host Davina McCall had stepped away in 2010, with Emma Willis eventually becoming the face of Big Brother on Channel 5). The emphasis on bad blood between housemates remained.

How much of this was a result of cynicism on the part of the producers is difficult to tell. Channel 5 endured a backlash in 2018 when a season of Celebrity Big Brother, ostensibly marking the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage, found room for Dapper Laughs, the comedian accused of misogynist humour.

Big Brother was not missed while in TV purgatory. At a time when the schedules are heaving with reality fare – from The Great British Bake Off to Strictly Come Dancing via Love Island and I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! – it is just one lowbrow distraction among many.

Still, it set the tone for the shows that followed, as well as contributing to this imperial age of the social-media celebrity (a demographic that used to be called “famous for being famous” but is today better described as “famous for being on Instagram”).

It’s hard to overstate its influence on television. But whether that is enough to justify its return is hard to tell. All will be revealed on Sunday – as viewers are introduced to the housemates and Big Brother returns to Britain. The obvious worry is that high-profile comebacks are not always worth the effort. Big Brother reeked of desperation in 2018. How optimistic of ITV to believe anything has changed in the meantime.

‘Big Brother’ premieres on ITV1, ITV2 and ITVX at 9pm on Sunday 8 October