Former contestants and producers on what ITV's Big Brother reboot needs to succeed

Five years after disappearing from British televisions Big Brother will be returning on ITV this weekend, ITV News Arts Editor Nina Nannar reports

The TV producer who was instrumental in bringing Big Brother to our screens in 2000 knew the exact moment the format was a success.

It was when Nick Bateman, aka 'Nasty' Nick, was confronted by his fellow housemates after attempting to influence their votes over who should be evicted, by using banned slips of paper surreptitiously passed to them.

It was a water cooler moment and a headline grabber. It meant people were tuning in to be part of the conversation.

Ruth Wrigley who went on to win a Bafta for TV innovation for the show, had a hard time selling the concept to TV commissioners.

From a format originally screened in the Netherlands she wanted her version screened every night on Channel 4, and what’s more, have it streamed 24/7 on the burgeoning medium of the internet. 

She won the argument and a new mass audience TV genre was born.

On Channel 4 until 2010, then relaunched by Channel 5, it ended there in 2018. Now this weekend ITV will host the reboot.

If it’s to work says Wrigley, it will need a new idea, akin to the phrase that defined the ethos 'who wins, you decide'.  That, and a great cast of characters.

Back in the day she explains, Big Brother really was regarded as a social experiment, not dependent on mass viewing figures, just a case of TV taking a risk.

Now in a multi-channel reality, competition for audience figures is acute and matters to TV commissioners perhaps like never before.

Back then, says Wrigley, the idea that you could watch something like Big Brother in real time was revolutionary.

There was no mass use of social media, the contestants had no real idea what awaited them during the show or after, and they might anticipate simply their fifteen minutes of fame -plenty got much more than that.

I visited Brian Dowling, the winner of series two in 2001, who now hosts a radio show on Dublin’s 98FM.

He won Ultimate Big Brother in 2010 and then hosted the show, as well as fronting other programmes.

He would not have this career says the former air steward without his time on Big Brother. There was an innocence to it all he agrees back in the beginning.

There were no internet trolls, nor ubiquitous mobile phones to capture the contestants at any moment.

The tasks were weekly and involved things like training a dog or keeping a fire burning.

But this was happening just as celebrity magazines like Heat were in need of new faces, Big Brother and the reality shows it spawned would go in to fill the gap.

He captures the loss of innocence of such TV formats by reflecting that when he and his fellow contestants walked into the house in 2001 it was low-key, perhaps two photographers there, and they felt like they were all living together in a house.

Come 2010 when he was back in the Ultimate Big Brother, they were chauffeured to the show, with hordes of fans and cameras waiting, and then felt like they were walking onto a TV set.

The reboot comes as reality TV is under scrutiny like never before. After two former Love Island contestants took their lives in 2018 and 19 serious questions were asked about the duty of care policy on shows in which non-TV professionals take centre stage.

New Ofcom guidelines are now in place, offering more protection and mental health support to contestants during and after their reality TV exposure.

Wrigley says there was psychological assessment during the early series, she gave what she called The Talk of Doom, in which contestants were warned about what the exposure might do to their private lives, and used a psychologist during the casting process.

But she points out that early on their 15 minutes of fame was perhaps the most contestants might expect.

Now, agents are in place, social media contracts are set to be signed and the promise of lucrative appearances means that when this doesn’t happen it can be mentally challenging. 

In the new series, there will be a focus on the psychological well-being of the housemates, with each having an individual support plan in place.

Bateman speaking to me from Australia where he now lives, says he wasn’t expecting or prepared for the backlash he faced when he left the Big Brother house in 2001, but years later he says hard as it was, he willingly signed up to the show.

He says the new series is reliant on the programme-makers having found the right cast, diverse and interesting, and says that former contestants like him would have been very useful in selecting the new contestants.

ITV says the new show will be going back to its social experiment roots, with housemates who aren’t social media figures, in fact, they have asked the contestants to tell their family and friends not to post any content on individual social accounts during the show, in effect a social media blackout.

There will be much that is familiar with the new series, but how will the programme-makers attempt to recapture the audience fascination that made the show a success in those early years?

We will soon find out.

Big Brother begins on Sunday 8 October on ITV1, ITV 2 and ITVX.

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