If Big Brother wants a successful return it needs to go back to its roots.
The sneaky announcement that Big Brother was coming back was made during the Love Island final, and the British public very rightly lost their minds. The reality competition has been gone from our screens for over four years ago and left a hole that no new iteration ever managed to fill.
The golden era of the show was when the likes of Nikki Grahame, Nadia Almada and Pete Bennett ran rampant. Those close-knit few years from series five to eight still regurgitate legendary viral moments that fill the Twittersphere for brand new fans to discover and nostalgic viewers to fall in love with all over again.
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It was an astounding four years where the thought of a follow-up television career was deemed ridiculous and Instagram hadn't even been invented yet. Fast forward several years and the new goal of a reality contestant is to get the bag of whatever fashion retailer fits their image and to do the rounds on every 9pm panel show there is.
When Big Brother started focusing on the careers of its contestants after the show instead of in-the-moment entertainment is when it started to crack. It was around this time it started to lose its viewers, not because there wasn't interest, but because the rapid change was unwelcome.
The final farewell for the Channel 4 show invited previous winners and notorious contestants back for one last hurrah because they knew that was what viewers wanted. So, considering they knew the formula for a happy audience was an old-school vibe, they still decided to shoot themselves in the foot and never truly recovered from it.
Those who entered the show with a set character, persona and goal were quickly forgotten about - Ryan Rucklege, Marco Pierre White Jnr, Lateysha Grace - but the lasting legacy of Big Brother is the housemates who threw all caution to the wind. Makosi and Anthony in the hot tub, Nikki screaming in the diary room, Mikey getting hit across the head with a baseball, and Kinga and her wine are the Big Brother moments the public wants a return to.
Casting influencers and career chasers arguably goes against the entire idea of reality television. We're not viewing normal people in their most vulnerable and chaotic moments, we're watching highly calculated people try and manipulate television bosses. We need to have, not the most compatible housemates or the sort to hopefully cause drama, but the most random characters possible.
The show started as a social experiment to see how people from all walks of life would manage in a pressure cooker locked away from the outside world. There were behavioural experts on call for side shows and a 24 hour live stream on E4 to really drive home Big Brother being the father of all reality shows. Since then, it lost its charm. The later series didn't have any spark, flair or even decent characters in some instances.
Series seven had a Posh Spice wannabe, a south London bad girl, twins, several housemates reaching retirement age and a winner who had never heard of Shakespeare. That's what we need. That being said, the 2023 show has already adopted the unfavoured Big Brother eye instead of the original so who knows what direction ITV2 will take but at this stage, the public has made it very clear what they want.
If there's one thing ITV2 needs to learn from the show's slow spiral into irrelevance is that they need to cast people who don't care about their image.
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