It’s 9.42am and 16 different people are having to lay in a giant bed together, for a “task.” “Are they putting things in here with us?” screams 40-year-old NHS manager Kerry, glasses askew. “Well, I’m going to get out,” says Henry, a plummy 25-year-old food writer from the Cotswolds, extracting himself from a tangle of pillows. “Henry, you didn’t even try!” admonishes 33-year-old south-London mum Trish. And then everyone breaks into nursery rhymes, their voices overlapping into one hellish cacophony. To repeat, it’s 9.42am.
If you weren’t ever a fan of Big Brother, the earlier versions, or even reality TV in general, you might wonder why anyone would want to watch this ridiculous scene. But for those of us who have always enjoyed the franchise, even after it shifted from Channel 4 to Channel 5 in 2010, this is exactly the kind of stupid crap that made the show so fun to begin with. It’s absurd, silly, borderline surreal – the sort of thing you can only really consume on British television. As culture writer Lauren O’Neill pointed out on X recently, “The bed task on BB is very funny imo [sic]… once in series seven (best ever) they just made them all sit in different shaped cardboard boxes for hours.”
Indeed, to love Big Brother is to love a very specifically British type of camp that is hard to describe and easy to recognise. It’s Nadia Almada, in 2004, dressed in head-to-toe military gear and sunglasses while crying about cigarettes. It’s Nikki Grahame, in 2006, screaming “I’m soooo cooooold” in the diary room. It’s Aisleyne Horgan-Wallace, in 2015, delivering the immortal phrase “basic rations for a basic bitch” to her nemesis Helen Wood. These are the pedestrian yet ludicrous moments that occur when you throw a cross-section of people into a house together for weeks. Already we’re seeing flashes of this in the ITV relaunch. Four lads dancing around a makeshift table to Dua Lipa. Chanelle saying “I know you fancy me” to a bewildered man in a patterned jumper that she met yesterday. Yinran in a towering wig, twice the size of her face, sunglasses stuck in the hair like a roosting bird.
This being a screenshot from the big brother launch and not like… a really good indie movie nobody saw pic.twitter.com/yYPnZaAoIJ
— based gizmo 🏳️⚧️ (@neverthetories) October 8, 2023
It would be naive, of course, to claim that the ITV relaunch is exactly as it was in its heyday. These are different times. Unlike the 2000s and even early 2010s, the housemates are already being discussed to shreds on social media (in older seasons, that job would have fallen to the tabloids). The housemates are also, presumably, more aware of what it means to be watched (it’s hard to imagine someone inserting a wine bottle into their vagina on national television in 2023, because we’re so used to dividing our lives into private and public consumption). There’s also a tangible sense of political tension that didn’t exist in prior decades. Online, rightwing viewers are bemoaning the show for its “wokeness” (read: having a diverse range of people), forgetting the fact that Big Brother has always been diverse. And why shouldn’t it be?
Still, there were detractors when Big Brother first launched and, just like then, there are detractors now. These are often the same people who turn their nose up at perceived lowbrow culture, and think the Kardashians are the lowest form of entertainment. But good television doesn’t always have to be complicated, or stylish, or even particularly slick. There doesn’t need to be a meticulously crafted plot, or some hard-hitting investigative journalism. Good television can also be weird and mundane or just plain silly. It can be a camera zooming in on someone’s unimpressed face, or a man called Jenkins almost crying over his Crocs being returned. That’s why people watch Big Brother – for its everyday strangeness and for the human dramas, as opposed to anything meatier or more complex.
On launch night, the Big Brother reboot pulled in 2.6 million viewers – its biggest viewing figure in more than a decade, and nearly twice as many as this year’s Love Island. This is no small feat at a time when it is rare for audiences to tune in to something nightly, let alone sit down and actually watch TV. Can the show maintain its popular streak? That remains to be seen. But, so far, the odd and ridiculous spirit of Big Brother as we have always known it appears to be exactly what reality television fans have been craving.
