Big Brother

Beating Channel 5 staple Big Brother in Monday night's ratings, the erotically-charged TV contest won 6.9% of the audience share with 1.3million viewers over BB's 1.2million.

ITV2 has already started looking for 2017's participants after announcing earlier this week that season 3 had the green light.

The show caused uproar among the viewing public for broadcasting sexually explicit encounters between housemates. Nonetheless, Love Island's audience peaked at 1.5million, improving on last year by 700k. 

Michael Jackson's stellar career encapsulates much of the creative history of TV during the past 30 years. He was an innovative independent producer back in the 1980s, reinvented BBC Two in the 1990s, and went on to run Channel 4. There, he launched Queer as Folk, Ali G and Big Brother, before crossing the Atlantic to work for the legendary mogul Barry Diller.

Today, still based in New York, his career has swung full circle. Jackson is once again working as a producer.

Ben Frow is not as other directors of programmes. They tend to be sober, jargon-ridden and cautious – at least when speaking to me. They talk of "passion" but rarely show it: steady as the ratings sink or, occasionally, rise. Frow is funny, camp and outspoken, easily bruised and easily enthused.

He was obviously not what Richard Desmond, the Daily Express publisher and, for four years, owner of Channel 5, was expecting either, when he summoned him for a job interview in 2012.