Simone Reddington

Last Sunday night saw the launch of Big Brother 2025 reboot and, as a fan of reality TV, I couldn’t resist staying up late to watch it.  I have an on/off relationship with the show as I either become absolutely obsessed with it some years, and refuse to miss a single episode, or I lose interest straight away in some series.  This year, I switched the TV off before the launch show was even over.  

Named after the omnipresent character in George Orwell’s dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, the premise of Big Brother involves locking contestants from all walks of life in a house with constant TV camera surveillance and allowing the public to vote for their favourite to win.  The concept was created by Dutch television producer John de Mol Jr, who developed the original series in the Netherlands in 1999, and the franchise has since been adapted in over 63 countries around the world.  When the UK version premiered on Channel 4 back in 2000, it was groundbreaking.  Millions of people tuned in to watch the social experiment unfold on live television. It is in our human nature to be nosey and see how other human beings behave when in forced proximity with complete strangers.  The show launched the careers of notable housemates such as Jade Goody and Josie Gibson and is the pioneer of the reality TV genre.  Two decades later, host Davina McCall’s iconic catchphrase “you are live on Channel 4, please do not swear” is still instantly recognisable.   

 Over the last twenty-five years, the show has been cancelled and rebooted by nearly all of Britain’s terrestrial television networks.  It’s original broadcaster, Channel 4, aired Big Brother for a decade before it was axed in 2010.  The following year, Channel 5 acquired the rights to air the programme, and did so until it was dropped in 2018.  When ITV announced in 2022 that Big Brother would be returning to our television screens after a four-year hiatus, I, like many other people across the country, rejoiced.  We naively thought that we would be returning to pre-internet halcyon days of the early noughties, when contestants would have no media training whatsoever and would cause absolute carnage when put on television.   

In fairness, the first two series of ITV’s reboot were pretty decent.  The producers succeeded in casting a more diverse range of contestants than shows such as Love Island and The Only Way is Essex.  The show saw over-40s, people of colour and various members of the LGBT+ community mix with the typical aspiring influencers.  There have also been a wide range of political views expressed by the contestants in the last couple of year, mirroring the divided, post-Brexit political climate in the UK.  In this series, the contestants include a bisexual Indian immigrant, a transgender man and a right-wing political influencer who has previously made multiple appearances on GB News.  Obviously, the producers have selected these people in the hope that they will publicly share their (assumed) opposing views, and normally I would welcome these political debates.  Everybody is, of course, entitled to their own opinions and it is vital that we, as the general public, hear both sides of every argument so that we can form our own individual opinions.  Popular television shows, such as Big Brother are often brilliant mediums for people from marginalised communities to be represented in the media and educate people about issues that they have experienced.  For example,Nadia Almada, won the hearts of the nation when she became the show’s first transgender winner in 2004, the same year that the Gender Recognition Act was passed in the UK.  Last year, I really enjoyed watching housemate Khaled Khaled talk about growing up in Manchester as a Lebanese refugee. 

However, in the past year there has been a dramatic shift in global politics.  The growing increase in support for the far-right is evident in both Donald Trump’s victory in the USA presidential election and Reform UK’s success in this year’s local elections, when they took control of 10 English councils.  Both Trump and Farage are multimillionaires who blame society’s most marginalised groups such for their country’s economic failures and have outlined their plans to remove diversity and inclusion policies that protect them from abuse and discrimination.  One only needs to look at the abundance of St George’s flags that have been strung from lampposts across the UK this summer as part of ‘Operation Raise the Colours’, a campaign organised by supporters of the English Defence League, to see the support that the far-right has from white working-class communities.  Whenever I log into Facebook, I see more acquaintances sharing racist content displaying incorrect information about asylum seekers.   It genuinely feels that people are now completely unafraid to share the most derisive and offensive opinions and it’s not hard to imagine how these people will react to the variety of contestants who entered the Big Brother house last Sunday night.  I was not surprised at all when I spotted a headline this week from right-wing tabloid newspaper, The Sun, blasted the show as being “woke” and “dismal” for simply showing queer people existing.   

I firmly believe that it is of upmost importance that racism and bigotry should always be called out and challenged.  We, as a society, must not let it win.  We have less than four years in Britain, before the next General Election, and a lot of listening and learning needs to be done in that time if we want to avoid the political turmoil that America has found itself in.  These conversations need to take place in real-life with people who genuinely know what they’re talking about, as opposed to regurgitating false information from unverified online sources.  Watching edited snippets of these conversations between unqualified contestants on an ITV2 reality TV show makes the topics of the debates seem disingenuous. Viewers tend to vote to save the ‘nasty’ housemates who continue to stir up drama in the house, so the public’s perception of a particular contestant’s politics can often get conflated with that of their overall persona portrayed on the show.  For example, even though I completely disagreed with the conservative opinions expressed by Big Brother 2024 finalist Nathan King (as well as most of his general behaviour), I admit that found myself wanting him to survive evictions purely because his presence provided more entertaining television than the other housemates who appeared to me to be much kinder people.   

Who knows, I may yet find myself tuning back into Big Brother this year.  Emily Hewertson- the right-wing influencer whom I mentioned entering the house- was the first contestant that the public voted to evict this year, suggesting that I may have been wrong about the mindset of the viewing public.  However, if I want to watch some easy-viewing television this Autumn, to distract my attention from the politically fraught world that we currently live, I’m going to choose something else instead.