How Big Brother lost touch with reality

Big Brother is back – again. The show was axed by Channel 5 in 2018 but ITV has dragged it out of the grave. Watching the show’s opening episode last night made me wonder whether we’re trapped forever in a time loop with the big TV shows of the early noughties – Strictly, I’m A Celebrity, The Weakest Link – doomed to keep coming back. But where once they were exciting and fun, now they look exhausted.

Big Brother 2023 comes with all the trappings of our age. Everybody on the first show last night talked in the customary over-excited mid-Atlantic screech of the 21st century. This won’t last, because it never does; one of the great sources of fun is watching these affectations drain away, leaving the contestants effing and blinding at each other like Wolverhampton fishwives.

Several of the contestants claim to be entering the house to ‘show’ something about their identity group. ‘A lot of people think that wearing a headscarf might stop you from having opportunities,’ says Farida. I must confess that this thought hadn’t occurred to me, nor I suspect to anybody else.

Trish, from Luton, tells us she’s there to ‘humanise refugees and immigrants, especially in this political climate…We are important simply because we exist, not only when we participate in capitalism.’ That’s nice, dear, but I wasn’t expecting to have my political consciousness upended while munching crisps, slumped in front of ITV2.

Like everything else on TV, Big Brother is cast to reflect a Camden Council pamphlet and not the world as it actually is. There are numerous people claiming to be ‘queer’, whatever that means, a high mix of minorities and a man who thinks he is a woman. But if the show looks ‘representative’ their talking points are hardly an accurate depiction of modern Britain.

The reality is that Big Brother will never again repeat the highs of its second outing in 2001. The secret of that series was that no one on it cared much about politics. Contestants like Helen Adams, a 22-year-old hairdresser from Newport in Wales, and Paul Clarke, a 25-year-old car designer from Reading, cared more about trying to hook up. Their romance was a gem to behold, with Adams dropping unintentional solecisms such as ‘I like blinking, me’, and Clarke declaring that he had ‘always lived the life of an international pop star’. (In a Reading car showroom.) The series’ winner was the infectiously chirpy young gay man Brian Dowling, 21. Because this was a decade before the Great Madness of identity and grievance, his win was regarded casually as a nice thing to see, and then everybody got back on with whatever they’d been doing.

Clarke, Adams, Dowling and the rest were held up by some po-faced critics as the faces of a future where the young didn’t much care about the world they lived in. What bliss! At the time I was reading historian Michael Burleigh’s book The Third Reich: A New History. It was a good advert for why we shouldn’t be unduly bothered if young people aren’t political. The sight of Helen, Paul and Brian et al talking rubbish seemed wonderful to me. It was a sure sign of societal success that these daft young people had the freedom and the space to live peaceful, daft, young lives. No, they weren’t interested in William Hague and Tony Blair. But neither were they ranting about the master race and Jewish conspiracies, like the youngsters in the book. That seemed a pretty good thing to me.

Twenty years and a bit on, and some political apathy among the young would be welcome. From race to the environment to gender we hear a lot of (identical) youth opinion. Everything formerly divertingly light and fluffy must now be laden with portentous political significance. The world has become like one of those cover versions of ‘Proud Mary’ where the singer seems convinced it contains the meaning of life, although it’s about a bloody ferry.

Big Brother has only been gone five years, though nobody but me and the contestants’ relatives were still tuning in by 2018. Most people will remember only the first few series, not the increasingly less interesting one that this new version is more reminiscent of – where the contestants are a cross section, not of the public per se, but only of the people mad enough to go on Big Brother. ITV have promised to make ‘reality TV real again’ and ‘raw’, but that certainly isn’t apparent yet; significantly, the opening night was a pre-record, which takes much of the frisson away. There is a heavy aura of what we might call ‘the Ofcom sweats’ about the thing, a squeamish nervousness that cuts across the unbridled spirit of it.

Television nowadays reflects such an inaccurate image of Britain. There are still many more Helens and Pauls – the extraordinary ordinary Brits – out there. We just hardly ever hear from them. We probably never will again. (Tellingly, the only entrant of Big Brother 2001 who still lingers on our screens has reinvented herself as a very angry faux-leftist rent-a-gob on GB News.)

Unsurprisingly there were no Helens and Pauls on last night’s show. Big Brother 2023 shows that ‘representation’ isn’t actually representative – in fact, in a grand example of television eating its cake and having it, it often means something uncomfortably close to a circus freak show. Reality? Not really.