It’s 9.42am and 16 different people are having to lay in a giant bed together, for a “task.” “Are they putting things in here with us?” screams 40-year-old NHS manager Kerry, glasses askew. “Well, I’m going to get out,” says Henry, a plummy 25-year-old food writer from the Cotswolds, extracting himself from a tangle of pillows. “Henry, you didn’t even try!” admonishes 33-year-old south-London mum Trish. And then everyone breaks into nursery rhymes, their voices overlapping into one hellish cacophony. To repeat, it’s 9.42am.
If you weren’t ever a fan of Big Brother, the earlier versions, or even reality TV in general, you might wonder why anyone would want to watch this ridiculous scene. But for those of us who have always enjoyed the franchise, even after it shifted from Channel 4 to Channel 5 in 2010, this is exactly the kind of stupid crap that made the show so fun to begin with. It’s absurd, silly, borderline surreal – the sort of thing you can only really consume on British television. As culture writer Lauren O’Neill pointed out on X recently, “The bed task on BB is very funny imo [sic]… once in series seven (best ever) they just made them all sit in different shaped cardboard boxes for hours.”
