Celebrity Big Brother is back but where did it all begin? The RTS speaks to the man credited with bringing the format to the UK, Sir Peter Bazalgette.
Celebrity Big Brother is back as Katie Hopkins and Katie Price join a cast of celebs in what is already becoming a controversial series.
With two housemates already kicked off the show for separate incidents, the programme remains contentious as regulator Ofcom received hundreds of complaints in just the first week. Some 3.27 million people tuned in for the launch beating Channel 4’s 24 Hours in A & E which had just over 2 million viewers.
As Big Brother enters its 16th year on our screens, The RTS spoke to Sir Peter Bazalgette, the man who brought the revolutionary format to the UK.
Dutch company Endemol invented Big Brother just after it bought Bazalgette’s production company Bazal from the Guardian i the 1990's. The show quickly proved a success, and launched in Germany and Spain before coming to the UK in the summer of 2000.
“We ended up being owned by the company that invented Big Brother and therefore we had the rights to it. We were obliged to bring it to the UK,” said Bazalgette.
The success was a phenomenon for the era as the programme came out at the height of the dotcom boom. It incorporated television, telephone and the internet in a single format.
Bazalgette added; “You voted on the telephone, you watched it on the telly and you could go to the website and take part in what we would now call social media activities - it was technologically highly significant as a format.”
Big Brother was also unique in that it was the first programme to have live streaming available online.
Bazalgette claims programmes are edited to form a narrative. While this was true of the night time show for Big Brother, during the day the house was streamed live, “essentially we were showing the public our rushes, we enfranchised the public.”
Bazelgette, who is now president of the RTS, claims he no longer follows the programme closely – instead watching shows that he hasn’t ‘gorged on’ in a previous life.
However he believes that the format has a great deal of hope for the future, “it has the potential to last 30 or 40 years but it’s very difficult to predict whether it will - at the moment it has a chance.”
“Its primary fundamental visceral appeal is people watching,” believes Bazelgette. A human trait that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere any time soon.
Watch Celebrity Big Brother at 9pm on Channel 5.
By Alastair Ballantyne