Over its 18 year history, Big Brother provided us with some of the funniest, most outrageous and iconic moments in reality TV – and also some of the most uncomfortable.
So it was no surprise that when Big Brother: Best Shows Ever – an ode to BB to mark its 20th anniversary – kicked off this week, Rylan Clark-Neal warned: ‘There are some things that we have taken out of a few shows that just didn’t feel right for 2020.’
As a long-time viewer of Big Brother, that was pretty obvious to me. No matter how notorious the episodes are, nobody wants to see Shilpa Shetty being the subject of racist abuse or Shahbaz Chauhdry expressing suicidal thoughts – things that shouldn’t have been aired in the first place. What fans want to watch are the classic moments that made us howl with laughter and revel in the genius that reality TV could be.
But what I wasn’t expecting during this nostalgic retrospective was for the most iconic, loved episodes of Big Brother to be cast in a much dimmer light.
On Tuesday night, I was positively giddy as I settled into watch the one with Who Is She? – a classic from series seven, probably the best civilian series there ever was. Big Brother truly hit the jackpot with this line-up – Pete Bennett, Glyn Wise cooking an egg for the very first time (ah-um, ah-um) and drunkenly puking all over the house, Aisleyne ‘you better know yourself if you’re talking about me, little girl’ Horgan-Wallace… and then there was Nikki Grahame, the ultimate housemate that is TV gold, but you would rather tear your own hair out than live with.
I was 16 when this series aired on Channel 4, and I remembered it as clear as day – Nikki’s tantrums, her romance with Pete, and Susie Verrico entering the house as a Golden Ticket housemate, after she got her husband to buy 60 boxes of Kit Kats to find the golden tickets across the UK; a real life Veruca Salt, if you will.
Or, at least I thought I remembered it as clear as day. The vision I had of this episode was Susie being an entitled snob buying her way into the house, lording over the younger housemates and being zero fun, and Nikki and Grace Adams-Short throwing a tantrum when she put them up for eviction – resulting in Nikki screeching ‘Who is she? Who is she? Who is she? Where did you find her?’ in an all time great diary room moment.
What I actually watched in 2020 as a now 30-year-old woman was blatant bullying being passed off as entertainment.
The whole point of Big Brother is that housemates have to choose who to nominate. Susie was given no choice in the matter, and a twist that she was unaware of meant that only she would choose who faced eviction. Pretty standard BB fare. But as much as Nikki and Grace insisted they were just annoyed at being ‘unfairly’ nominated by someone who barely knew them, they came across as cruel schoolyard bullies, joining forces to pick on the new girl.
I felt seriously uncomfortable as I watched the two housemates, legends of the series, bitch about Susie – a woman 20 years their senior – behind her back. Grace seethed: ‘She’s a boring, f***ing old hag. With her big old silicone chunky thunder thighs. She can f*** off, she can actually f*** off.’
I felt hurt for Susie as they sneaked into her bedroom to steal her champagne, and my enjoyment of the episode had all but ceased as they skipped past Susie, who was making dinner for all of the housemates, dressed in gold bikinis and straw hats to make fun of her.
Even the ‘Who is she’ scene, something which I had always placed on a pedestal, was tainted as Nikki referred to Susie as ‘it’.
Now, to be fair to the show, this bullying behaviour didn’t go unnoticed. Perfect angels Pete and Glyn were seen telling Grace and Nikki that they were upset with them as they were being unnecessarily cruel, and Aisleyne, Lea and Richard all shared their anger at the treatment Susie was being given.
And a week later, Grace was evicted to huge boos. What shook me so much is that as a teenager, I completely looked past it, because Nikki was funny, Grace’s exit was great TV and Susie was ‘boring’.
Firstly, Susie wasn’t boring. The absolute legend was so desperate to be on the telly that she got her husband to splash out on about 6,000 Kit Kats, was pro-sex work in defending Page 3 girls and just spent a few weeks sunning herself looking like a Bond girl. How was I so blind to miss this icon?
And secondly, it wasn’t funny. A woman was being bullied on national television because she followed the rules of a game everybody was playing, and we all lapped it up.
There’s a reason why the E4 flashback was called The ‘Who IS She?’ One. Those funny moments inspired by horrible playground cruelty are what stay with us, not the bullying behaviour.
Maybe it’s because I was young, or maybe it’s because TV was different back then, or maybe both. But it’s concerning to me that while we rightly look back at moments in Big Brother like Roxanne Pallett punch-gate or Ken Morley’s appalling language as the reasons for its downfall, we haven’t examined the less explosive slips into the gutter, when the misery, belittlement and isolation of stars was used as a forgettable set-up for iconic moments.
It’s left me thinking what else I missed, when I was taking the scenes at face value. Anamelia irritated me no end in the final series of Big Brother, but now I feel guilty when I remember she was accused of attention-seeking when she got emotional talking about being made homeless as a child.
I always thought of Celebrity Big Brother 4 as sublime, pure TV, with the ascent of Chantelle Houghton from normal Essex girl to genuine celebrity – but just one episode casually showed Dennis Rodman’s sexist and overtly sexual comments towards the women in the house.
Nowadays, we’re much more sensitive to the mental health of people on reality shows, and for the most part, we call out bullying and gaslighting when we see it (although in many cases, like when it comes to black women on TV, we have a long way to go).
But we weren’t always woke, and while it’s hard to stomach, it was the culture that was tainted, not just one or two rotten episodes – and things don’t have to rack up Ofcom complaints or top ‘most controversial moments of all time’ rankings to be as problematic as those that did.
There are some pure nuggets of telly gold amongst the Big Brother wreckage, from ‘Yeah Jackie’ to ‘David’s dead’. But I’ll watch the rest of Davina and Rylan’s favourite episodes not only with anticipation, but with a slight sense of dread as I reexamine the cruelty I giggled away at as a teenager.
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