"It's only a game show."
The return of Big Brother and the history of show as a 'news' source for hungry tabloids and sanctimonious broadsheets.
Previously — Review: Amol and Nick's SmugSodCast
What is the point of the Today podcast? And just how much news banter can we take?
I was 16 when the first episode of Big Brother aired in July 2000. I’m 39 as the second attempt to reboot it on British TV begins. The first two iterations of the show ran for a cumulative 18 years — on Channel 4 until 2010 and Channel 5 until 2018 — but I tuned out for good at Season 7. If I’m honest, I was basically done after Season 4 of the celebrity version in 2006 (when ‘fake’ celeb, Chantelle Houghton, won and became a real celeb for a bit).
Big Brother was a perfect show for the tabloids: It offered the papers fresh meat — the contestants’ pasts could be mined for stories and scandals — character arcs during the programme’s run, and new ‘celebs’ as each contestant left the house. Some contestants — notably Allison Hammond (evicted 3rd in Big Brother 3) and Brian Dowling (1st in Big Brother 2 and Ultimate Big Brother) — are the gifts that keep on giving, having achieved genuine and lasting fame. Others — ‘Nasty’ Nick Bateman (the ‘villain’ of Big Brother 1 for the heinous crime of… sneaking in paper and pencils to influence votes), for example — could be caricatured and then discarded.
The broadsheets always liked to play it both ways with Big Brother — just as they now do with Love Island — sneering at the tabloids’ fascination with the goings on, while offering their own ‘high-brow’ coverage and analysis. “What does this mean about our society?” columnists would howl, while equally as addicted to the mundane and the malicious in the housemates’ antics.
In the Observer review of the first episode of the first series, Andrew Anthony1 sneered:
Watching Big Brother, Channel Four’s new contribution to the fad for ‘reality TV’, the viewer is confronted with an inescapable moral question: is the prospect of winning £70,000 sufficient cause to be confined in a house alongside Craig, the self-confessed ‘Scouser’ with a habitual impatience to remove his clothes.
It’s certainly minimal compensation for living with Caroline, the former marital aids saleswoman from Birmingham who boasts: “People have described me as mad.” I also hesitate to put a figure on what it would require to get me under the same roof as Sada, the New Age author and aspirant yoga teacher. Whatever the amount, I’d feel short-changed…
… One of the ironies of the modern media is that as it grows more and more pervasive its aim is increasingly to record unmediated experience. So television wants to show the world as it is, but the world as it is has been irreversibly warped by television. We’re all performing a received version of ourselves…
… At this early stage, it’s a reasonable bet that the security cameras in the forecourt of your local petrol station contain footage with more character and tension.
A few weeks later, Emily Bell in the same paper2 admitted that the show could not be ignored (‘Why no one can afford to ignore Big Brother’):
There is nothing on television more compulsive than Big Brother. The Channel 4 10-week experiment sounds on paper like a sick joke that would hold the attention of only a tiny handful of sad individuals. But in reality it is the only programme outside the limited parameters of the soap genre to reinvigorate television as a social medium...
… to some people it may be the kind of trivia that would give Lord Reith a coronary — were he not dead already — but it is essentially a perfect use of the medium and the first, and possibly last, example of a piece of interactive television really working. If Big Brother had been produced by Lars Von Trier and presented as art house cinema, it would have swept the board and seafront at Cannes.
As it is, the intelligentsia, by which I mean David Aaronovitch at the Independent and Jonathan Freedland at The Guardian have been slightly miffed as to what to make of its undoubted success. (Though I thought Freeland’s observation that the group never discussed politics was an excellent point to pursue — could we perhaps have the comment pages of the Guardian, or even the Observer, dropped from helicopters onto the Big Brother house?
Aaronovitch — not yet an avowed fan of wars, nor a victim of a fake leather jacket scam — pondered in The Independent:
There is nothing Nick [Bateman], Channel 4 or the psychologists can do to obviate the fact that all the Brotherites are staggeringly, skull-crushingly, die-on-a-sofa dumb... There is, however, an upside to all this. What the Channel 4 kids also demonstrate is far less inhibition than earlier generations, much greater openness and - yes - more tolerance. And perhaps blandness is a price worth paying for that. Just.
In The Guardian3, Freedland sniffily concluded:
… Big Brother is utterly a product of its time. We have got used to men and women making public what were once private emotions (think of the vogue for confessional columnists) and this lot are merely getting in on the act. It’s striking that not a single minute of Big Brother has shown a discussion of what we used to call public affairs: there is not a word about politics. It is all about relationships — with each other, past loves, or themselves.
We are not that different. We too are filmed constantly, by a CCTV presence that makes Britain the most watched-over society in the world, with cameras in ever bank, every shop, every street corner… We watch and we are watched. Maybe that was the twist George Orwell never imagined: we are Big Brother.
At the series’ conclusion, Jenny McCartney reflected in The Sunday Telegraph4:
The new breed of Instant-Stars are crashing the Fame Club, and finding that they enjoy the taste of the free champagne — even if their presence is not always welcome. After Caroline O’Shea and Nichola Holt were evicted they attend the TV Quick awards in the Dorchester Hotel. Lurching drunkenly around the dance-floor they bumped into Vanessa Feltz, a writer and interviewer whose fame has been recently enhanced by her spectacular weight-loss. Ms Feltz was sent flying to the floor, hastily got up and left: ‘Caggy’ and ‘Nicky’ remained lying on the ground cackling and wriggling.
There was one moment when fame did not seem so sweet — when Mel, widely viewed as the house flirt, faced the public for the first time. The crowd’s shouting was, rather unfairly, laced with jeers and boos: a flicker of unease danced across Mel’s face, before she remembered to shriek and yell in the approved, adrenalin-filled manner.
If Mel looks at her fellow contestants, she may learn not to take it personally. Shamelessness is the key to continued success. The most gripping moment in Big Brother, amid the endless hours that contestants spent sun-bathing and tending to their sickening chickens, was the group confrontation of Nick Bateman…
… first Nick was defiant. Then he wept. then in an absurdly high-flown stab at stoicism, he told the Big Brother voice in the Diary Room: “You live by the sword, you die by the sword.” The Sun — which had campaigned to have him kicked out — immediately signed him up as a columnist.
Nominated spokesman for the tabloids by The Daily Telegraph, Piers Morgan — then halfway through his period as editor of The Daily Mirror — crowed:
Big Brother has been a great perpetual success story for the whole media industry — for television, newspapers, and the contestants — and that sort of show is obviously going to continue to be very popular. But it’s a different world to celebrity coverage. When we put David and Victoria Beckham on the front cover, sales automatically go up. I couldn’t say the same of anyone on Big Brother.
That calculation would change two years later when Jade Goody — who came fourth in Big Brother 3 — became a tabloid obsession. During the series, she was the target of tabloid abuse: The Sun’s gossip columnist and future editor Dominic Mohan told his readers to “Vote Out The Pig” while The Sunday Mirror screamed Goody Is A Baddie, writing about her father’s prison sentence for drug offences and her confessing to her housemates that she was cautioned for shoplifting as a teenager).
But once it became apparent that the public mood toward her was shifting — with a warm reception when she left the house — the papers changed their tune. The Sun which had printed Mohan’s columns dubbing Goody “the pig with the biggest mouth on TV” and called her a hippo and a baboon, now shifted to praising and pushing her. It was joined in this volte-face by Morgan’s Daily Mirror which had dismissed her as “a vile fishwife” and the Daily Mail which had previously decided she was “a foul-mouthed ex-shoplifter”.
In The Evening Standard5, Allison Pearson — still evolving towards her final form as the Lidl knockoff Leni Riefenstahl of The Daily Telegraph — illustrated how the ‘quality’ papers had it both ways; pouring disdain on the tabloids and their targets in equal measure:
As Big Brother 3 moves into its closing stages, the show has recovered from charges that it had become boring to achieve some of its highest ratings. One way it has done this is by demonising Jade Goody. A 21-year-old from Bermondsey, Jade’s main crime is daring to be fat, loud, female and unapologetic about it. If you took Sharon Mitchell, the former landlady of the Queen Vic, and blew her up with a bicycle pump until you couldn’t pump any more, then you’d have Jade…
… Goody is what you get when you give a kid a chaotic childhood and raise it in a society where self-abasement is considered a career move.
Allison Pearson is what you get when you send a kid to Cambridge, tell her that her opinions are best, and let her spend over 30 years propagating cruelty, cynicism, and hypocritical cant in the pages of national newspapers. She makes money from a poisonous personality but sees herself as eminently superior to Goody.
Jade Goody made the most of her notoriety to make money — egged on and exploited by Max Clifford — but the papers got more than their cut. Here was someone who shifted papers and broke Morgan’s prediction about BB contestants. She was box office.
Then came the explosive episode of racism on Celebrity Big Brother — Goody, the model Danielle Lloyd, and the S-Club 7 singer Jo O’Meara all made racist comments about and bullied the Indian actress Shilpa Shetty. Goody — the one who shifted newspapers, remember — became the focus of the tabloid opprobrium and the overall media storm. The Daily Mirror front page screamed Beauty v Bigot, the BBC led bulletins with the Big Brother story — on the day a political advisor was arrested over the Cash for Honours scandal — while Tony Blair and Gordon Brown (then on a visit to India) made statements on the issue.
The following year, Goody appeared on the Indian version of Big Brother — Bigg Boss 2 — apologising for her treatment of Shetty in her opening VT. Two days into filming, she was informed — on camera, in footage that included her conversation with her doctor in London — that she had cancer. The papers shifted their angle once again: Goody now moved from racist pariah to “Tragic Jade”.
In March 2009, Goody died. Having been given just weeks to live, she earned more than £700,000 by selling the media rights to her wedding. It was money for her sons. The News of the World purchased another set of rights — to the story of her death — and she told its interviewer:
I’ve lived my whole adult life talking about my life. I’ve lived in front of the cameras. And maybe I’ll die in front of them.
The Sun, which had called on its readers to “roast the pig” just 7 years earlier, marked Goody’s death with a front page that forced crocodile tears — At Peace On Mother’s Day — and promoted a 16-page ‘memorial’ pullout on her life. The equally complicit Mirror — now edited by another ex-Sun man, Richard Wallace — managed to be even more mawkish with the headline Mummy’s in Heaven but just eight pages for its “tribute to an extraordinary life”.
OK! published its tribute issue the week before Goody died.
Jade was not the last ‘character’ to emerge from Big Brother’s first and second UK incarnations but — with the possible exception of Nikki Grahame who also died tragically young — public fascination did not tend to last. But the list of winners suggests a rather different Britain to the one newspaper columnists tend to paint: In 2004, the fifth series was won by a trans housemate, Nadia Almada; in 2006, Pete Bennett, a musician with Tourettes, took the crown in the seventh series. More depressingly, Brian Belo — who came out top in series eight — is the only Black contestant to have won so far.
And that brings us to Series 20 — ITV’s reboot — which was greeted by The Daily Mail with the inevitable headline Big Brother viewers slam show for 'going woke' and 'ticking boxes' as diverse lineup features disabled housemates and a practising Muslim. The paper scraped together a smattering of tweets complaining about the casting, scattering a few putting the opposite view near the bottom of the page for balance, and called it a day.
Back in 2004, Alamada — described by The Independent as “the transsexual bank clerk who triumphed” and “a flamboyant chain-smoker who was rarely seen without heels and a plunging neckline” — won Big Brother with the highest-ever winning margin up until that point and “collected three times more votes than [the] runner-up”.
The voting audience backed Nadia and her father — tracked down by The Sun, which backed her like the other public opinion-chasing tabloids — who had not known about her transition told the paper that “God [had] given [him] the daughter [he had] always prayed for”, but the press was far from universally pleased as memes now suggest. The Independent on Sunday’s6 profile of Nadia, written by Cole Moreton, concluded:
Big Brother was always a freak show, and more so than ever this time. Sorry Nads, but however much it hurts you and those of us who wish people who change sex could live equal, unmolested lives, victory just makes you its most popular freak. Time for another fag, love. All those post-pub BB fans who phoned and sent texts voting for you were not voting for a woman. They were voting for the bearded lady.
Inevitably, columnists like Amanda Platell filed similar sentiments. But it is still striking that the clippings from 19 years ago are far more positive and less splattered with bile than modern coverage of a trans winner would inevitably be.
Episode one of the new series received mixed reviews. The Guardian sneers, in the very particular way that only The Guardian can, that:
The new Big Brother admirably tries to create a cross-section of society, while being unable to escape the fact that 99.9% of that society would rather clean their teeth with an angle-grinder than appear on Big Brother. The new show has found a diverse, faultlessly representative sample of Britain’s squawking self-publicists.
The Independent, in a review that is classically Independent-like in its fence-sitting, bet-hedging, ho-humming, says:
Big Brother has always been a franchise that has thrived on chaos, and this opener doesn’t give us that. Can this new cohort of housemates rise to the challenge of keeping us gripped six nights a week? In our era of shortened attention spans, they’ll have to work pretty hard to do so.
The Telegraph meanwhile is off-brand with an assessment that is surprisingly hinged:
… ITV have done a good job at picking a broad cross-section of 16 participants…
… Do we really need Big Brother back? Of course not. Raw and real? Obviously not. But this was fun and is at least striving for a degree of authenticity while also knowing it has to entertain. “I don’t want to kick off on the first night,” said Olivia forebodingly. “There’s no escape.” There certainly isn’t.
For the Radio Times, Emma Bullimore ponders:
The concept of sharing a house has been poached by almost every other reality show – can it still whip up enough drama to get people talking? While ITV’s reset looks like it may be elevating the brand from the gutter, it’s unclear whether it will be enough to dominate the public conversation as the show once did.
I suspect that the newspapers and their columnists will not be able to resist offering their opinions on Big Brother, its contestants, and what they and it mean for the UK in 2023. It’s a machine for generating easy stories, easy traffic, and polarising opinions. After all, columnists and Big Brother contestants both understand what they’re up to:
It’s only a game show.
Thanks for reading. X/Twitter is one of the main ways people find this newsletter so please consider sharing it there…
… and also think about following me on Threads and TikTok.
Upgrade to a paid subscription to this newsletter, you’ll get bonus editions, and I’ll be able to keep writing these newsletters).
It really helps and allows me to spend money on research and reporting. You can also buy a t-shirt if you’d like to make a one-off contribution and get a t-shirt
‘Let’s Bomb Them’, Andrew Anthony, The Observer (23 July 2000)
‘Why no one can afford to ignore Big Brother’, Emily Bell, The Observer (13 August 2000)
‘We’re watching it’, Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian (9 August 2000)
‘After Big Brother who needs talent?’, Jenny McCartney, Sunday Telegraph (17 Sept 2000)
‘Why do we turn our noses up at Jade?‘, Allison Pearson, Evening Standard (17 July 2002)
‘A Heroine for Our Times?‘, Cole Moreton, Independent on Sunday (8 August 2004)
Great read, Mic - thanks.
David “get thee to a tannery” Aaronovitch is a rich seam to mine.
If you can still find it on YouTube, Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe did an amazing piece on the media hypocrisyfest surrounding Jade Goody's death.