It’s beginning to feel like 2008 again. The economy is rock bottom, political leadership is in turmoil and ‘Big Brother’ was front and centre of public attention. Yes, five years after departing our screens for, seemingly, the last time, the programme will return next year. Broadcast on ITV2, news of its return, as the latest series of ‘Love Island’ concludes, was greeted with joy and nostalgia.
Viewers love continuity, and ‘Big Brother’ viewers look set to get that in heaps and spades. ITV have stated the show will contain a range of housemates from a variety of backgrounds. Cameras will capture their every move for six weeks, with tasks, public nominations and all-important evictions. Sound familiar? ‘Big Brother’ as a concept today appears so ingrained in our public life, that it’s easy to forget just how unusual the format was. Launching in the Netherlands in 1999, the show began in Britain at the turn of the millennium on Channel 4 (a sign of the channel’s innovation which privatisation could threaten). Pitting ordinary people in the same space, the contestants were completely disconnected from technology and unaware of how they were perceived. The housemates could formulate a game-plan to win, but had to adapt to events. The innovative format allowed a further 18 series of the original show, while 22 series of Celebrity Big Brother were created. Switching to Channel 5 in 2011, its novelty wore slightly off. Why? Partially because a celebrity version of anything - even if it includes Z-listers - has an air of extravagance. Many appeared only for the paycheck. As series continued, the excitement of the start, where nothing could be planned for, faded away. Ordinary members of the public simply wanted to kickstart any showbiz career. Similarly, the rise of other reality TV shows, like ‘Love Island’, ‘First Dates’ and ‘Naked Attraction’ provided a new format, even if their inspiration was the most iconic of reality shows. While Big Brother concluded in 2018, its cultural impact remained the same. The show was fundamentally about one word: judgement. Individuals within the house routinely judged themselves, trying to predict how the producers would snippet 24 hours of coverage into less than an hour. Housemates would judge one another, using the Diary Room as a location to air their grievances. Viewers were constantly making impressions of the contestants, with the media fuelling this interest. Judgement continues to reign strong in our lives today. Historically, judgement linked to whether one attended church and was in a stable marriage. Now, social media has provided the perfect modern day equivalent. Individuals spend hours everyday examining the Instagram and TikTok feeds of others, which are purely an illusion, a mirage into someone’s actual life. Users of platforms feed this craze by offering up the curated version of perfection. It is perhaps the best solution society has stumbled across to managing the exciting, but volatile, dangers of the online world. Future contestants will have to be careful about what they say. The desire of any programme is high viewing figures and so anything newsworthy will be picked up. In 2007, Bollywood superstar Shilpa Shetty was treated appallingly by three fellow housemates, including the late Jade Goody, which led to over 40,000 Ofcom complaints and a huge diplomatic row. That same year, contestant Emily Parr was removed from the ‘normal’ version for using a racist term. Yet society today has gone far beyond rightful condemnation of racism and bigotry. Though George Orwell, creator of Big Brother in ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, may find constant comparisons to his book and name a cliche (which he loathed), the censorious nature of ‘cancel culture’ has only accelerated since 2018. The identities of the constants are currently unknown, but, to guarantee future career success, could they just end up being immensely mellow? Whether the revival is a success or flop, it is sure to guarantee attention. Maybe a love for personalities, drama and guaranteed friction are intrinsic to human nature, driving audiences to the screen every night. It could just be that its inventiveness has meant, love or hate it, the programme, unlike ‘Piers Morgan Uncensored’, is unmissable. One thing’s for certain: Reality TV is far from dead.
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