When ITV resurrected Celebrity Big Brother in 2024, after this ailing format had languished in TV purgatory for more than half a decade, it seemed to promise a bright new era for a show that has always suffered from a bit of an image problem. Yes, it lacked the sequins and sob stories of Strictly. And it couldn’t lay claim to the high stakes and hardships of I’m a Celebrity. But there would be devious twists! A decent budget! And, as a consequence, proper celebrities! It’d have the camp factor of the previous seasons that aired on Channels 4 and 5, but with ITV’s financial heft behind it, to blow away the faint musty smell of desperation that had always clung to CBB.
What they gave us, though, was pretty underwhelming. Last year’s season amounted to countless hours of X Factor gruesome twosome Louis Walsh and Sharon Osbourne being snide, Ekin-Su from Love Island refusing to talk about Love Island, and Kate Middleton’s uncle Gary getting voted off at the first possible opportunity, after making the most cursory jibes at Meghan Markle. It didn’t exactly feel like essential viewing. In fact, it says a lot that the most exciting part was watching social media clips posted by Walsh’s one-time X Factor protégés Jedward, in which they – joined, for some reason, by TOWIE’s Gemma Collins, a wonderfully memeable CBB contestant herself, back in the Channel 5 days – watched and criticised their former mentor.
Surely it won’t take much for this new season to surpass those not-so dizzy heights, then? You’d think so, but the 2025 launch doesn’t exactly lay the foundations for greatness. The Big Brother set has been given a bold paint job, covered in abstract blobs and drips, but it can’t hide the fact that the new contestants feel decidedly beige. When Chesney “The One and Only” Hawkes meets chat show host Tricia Goddard, they start up a conversation about attending the same primary school. Chris Hughes, formerly of Love Island, spends most of his introductory chat with hosts AJ Odudu and Will Best talking about how much he needs the loo. Former Tory MP Michael Fabricant’s luxuriant hair is more of a brassy yellow than a beige, but his over the top style starts to wear thin almost immediately (and what is it with ITV and putting Tories on reality TV shows?).
As ever, there are tasks to complete, designed to make the doer look as stupid as possible upon meeting their new housemates. These miniature challenges, we learn, are part of Big Brother’s “hush hush very secret game show”, a jarringly twee phrase that becomes more and more irritating each time it is uttered. It’s not exactly an imaginative conceit, and one that seems to have been dreamed up purely so that Odudu and Best can periodically shout “points mean prizes!”, as if momentarily possessed by the spirit of Bruce Forsyth. As ever, Odudu and Best are a likeable duo, but even the force of their combined enthusiasm can’t make this dull concept remotely interesting.
Last to enter the house is actor Mickey Rourke, whose CBB arrival has been the most heralded (partly because he’s, well, an Oscar nominee, and therefore properly famous; partly because he’s reportedly earning £500,000 for his time on the show). But there’s something more than a bit depressing about the whole charade: the way he seems to have no idea what the show entails, the leery way he greeted Odudu. The producers probably hired Rourke as a loose cannon, but, judging from the final 10 minutes of launch night, watching him will probably be more uncomfortable than entertaining.
As the 13 celebrities attempt a half-hearted conga around the kitchen, trying to win points to transfer into prizes, the whole endeavour feels particularly bleak. Surely almost everyone involved is cursing the fact that they didn’t get booked for Celebrity Traitors instead. We’re only two seasons into ITV’s CBB reboot, but it already feels like time to put it out of its misery.
