PROFILE: BIG BROTHERChannel 4's biggest success has been a show where people sit around doing very little while cameras watch them 24/7. But the format that spawned numerous spin-offs and a new form of celebrity is now facing eviction from the TV schedules
WHAT HAVE you heard about Big Brother this year? Probably a lot less than about previous seasons; maybe only the news that next summer's 11th season will be the last.
If you haven't been watching this series, do you know anyone in it, what's been happening? In previous years, there's a fair chance that you would have known something about Big Brother, even if you weren't watching it. In its first year, you'll have been made aware that the sneaky manipulation by "Nasty Nick" Bateman became one of the media stories of the year. In its second year, you might have known that an Irish guy, Brian Dowling, won it; or that the third series featured Jade Goody, who became its most ridiculed housemate, then its most loved and ultimately its most successful. During the 2007 series of Celebrity Big Brother, you'll no doubt have been ambushed by the "racism" furore that involved Goody and the Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty.
In 2005, you'll have heard that there was a transsexual winner; in 2008, that there was a blind contestant and that his chief contribution to equality was the revelation that a blind man could be just as annoying as everyone else.
But do you know anything about his year's batch? Do you know, for instance, that the contestants broke out of the house and into the camera run this week, and were subsequently told that they had forfeited the £100,000 (€113,000) prize money? Probably not. The reason being that, for the first time in its decade-long run as a summer staple, Big Brother has been largely ignored by the tabloids. This is significant. Heat magazine became a publishing success on the back of treating its nobodies like the celebrities they would briefly become. The red tops each year followed events daily. The broadsheets would hold their nose and regularly report what others were reporting.
But this year, its housemates have been absent from the headlines. And this is where Big Brother met its end. It's not just that the show had lost viewers, it had lost the papers. And the attention it needed in order to thrive is gone with it.
Channel 4, meanwhile, has lost its most important programme. It takes up three months of the year, and has birthed several offshoots: Big Brother's Little Brother, Big Brother's Big Mouth, plus the live streaming which plays out to the soundtrack of birdsong whenever bad language or slander needs to be disguised. Over 240 housemates have walked through the doors in the show's various guises, and it made temporary stars out of some of them, and one international star out of Russell Brand (the original Big Mouth presenter). And it made a fortune for Channel 4. Between 2002-2006, Big Brother made a profit of €77 million a year. It agreed a three-year deal with producers Endemol worth €200 million - although it seems to have made that deal out of fear that ITV would pinch the show. That contract will lapse with its final series.
THE SHOW WAS a Dutch creation, first conceived in 1997 and broadcast in the Netherlands in 1999. By then, The Truman Show - in which the protagonist gradually realises that his entire life is a television show - had already been released. But Big Brother's extreme version of reality television immediately piqued the interest of the world's media - and its television stations.
It was a complex undertaking, but with a simple idea. People live in a house, sealed off from the outside world, guided by an unseen hand, and all while being filmed by dozens of cameras, 24 hours a day. It took the idea of the surveillance society to the extreme, by coupling it with a generation of exhibitionists willing to trade privacy for celebrity. The UK's first housemates, however, were the last to lack the understanding of the format, unlike everyone who followed them. They were exhibitionists - they stripped off on the very first day - but they had no idea of how exactly the game worked. That exhibitionism, ironically, revealed a certain naivety. In the years since, nudity has become rare on the British Big Brother. Its housemates may be attention-seekers, but they still shower in their swimming costumes.
The UK edition made its debut in 2000, with the antics of Nasty Nick, remarkably tame by the standards that followed, becoming a genuinely seminal moment in British television history. The show was otherwise relatively gentle, and terribly slow.
Now, housemates are given one task a day; then, they had one a week. They slept a lot, talked, mooched around. Channel 4 had fewer highlights shows to fill, and the housemates weren't expected to be that entertaining. An original idea of the show as a "social experiment" remained part of the brief. And what proved most interesting was how utterly nice everyone (except for Bateman) was to each other. Its final night's ratings peaked at 9.5 million viewers - its highest since.
The fourth series offered its first crisis, when the format's inherent potential for banality won through, so from that point on the producers became far more proactive, jettisoning the social experiment notion in favour of a mousetrap scenario in which contestants were constantly expected to perform, and aggressive contestants became increasingly common. Big Brother regularly played out to a soundtrack of screaming and occasional outbursts of violence.
It so changed the tenor of the show that it proved difficult to retune it. Its average ratings held relatively steady, hovering either side of 4.5 million viewers per show, but as it threw more housemates in each year, and stretched the show across almost 100 days, it began to exhaust itself. Over the past three years, average ratings have dropped to the 2.2 million watching the current series. When that ends this Friday, its final night's ratings may peak below the show's average ratings of only four years ago.
IT IS A British programme, but has had an influence here. The first series featured two Irish housemates, Tom McDermott and Anna Nolan; the latter went on to become a regular RTÉ presenter. In fact, several of the Irish participants remain television fixtures here. Ray Shah has just featured on Charity Lords of the Ring. By the standards of Irish celebrity, an appearance on Big Brother elevated them pretty high and kept them there even when they'd fallen several rungs down the UK's celebrity ladder. The show, then, is not just a ratings-grabber among a section of Irish viewers, it's made an imprint on Irish television.
The format, of course, made an impact on television globally. Before The X Factor perfected the talent show formula, that genre spent the early part of this decade mixing it with Big Brother-type scenarios in which people were put into a house together. RTÉ didn't have Big Brother, but it had "celebrities" working on a farm and creating a radio station in what were variants on the theme. Meanwhile, I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! became ITV's successful attempt to create its own version, by throwing it into a pot with the Survivor idea of people in the wild that emerged about the same time as Big Brother.
Its influence spilled over. Ben Elton wrote a bestselling novel in which a contestant is murdered in a Big Brother-type show; a decent zombie TV drama was based around it early this year, drawing unsubtle parallels between the gaping stares of the living dead and the show's audience; and it has provided a decade of "collapse of civilization"-type moralising from certain sections of the press.
It gave Britain a new type of celebrity. Jade Goody may have begun her public life as an example of all that was wrong about the British education system, but she went on to prove herself far more astute than any other housemate. She went into Big Brother, and never truly left. Her time in the house ended with her eviction, but she continued to sell her life to the papers, bit by bit, until it ended with her death from cancer early this year.
Unless another broadcaster buys the show, there will be no more Jades after 2011. And Channel 4 will need to fill a lot of hours. The show is still making money, but the station says that it is time to redistribute its programming budget. It is time to make new fiction rather than repeat its summers of manufactured reality.
CV Big Brother
What is it?Game show in which contestants are put into a house and filmed 24 hours a day.
Why is it in the news?Its 11th series - in 2011 - will be its last for Channel 4. Ironically, the show is increasingly popular in the US.
Most appealing characteristic:In the long summer months when there's little on television, Big Brother provided nightly doses.
Least appealing characteristic:It was often nightly doses of yelling, abuse, tantrums and aural violence.
Its makers are most likey to say:"Let's throw a tiger into the house and see what happens."
They are least likey to say:"Let's put ourselves into the house and see what happens."
