The Stage

Reality check - Peter Bazalgette and Big Brother

Published Monday 25 April 2005 at 10:10 by Nick Smurthwaite

When Peter Bazalgette brought Big Brother to Britain in 2000, audiences were split in delight and disgust at the money-spinning reality format. He tells Nick Smurthwaite why the divisive show was pounced on by the young and explains how he came to write a book examining the phenomenon

Condemned and admired in equal measure, Peter Bazalgette is no stranger to the vicissitudes of popular taste. During Iain Duncan Smith’s leadership of the Tory party he was invited to serve on a commission looking into young people’s voting habits.

“Comparisons can be a bit facile,” he says, “but there is an equation between voting for Big Brother and voting in an election. Both are popularity contests. Now that there is nothing much between the parties, politics is nearly all about personalities. To my mind it is not trivial to ask people who they like and trust to run the country. Young people are not idiots, it’s just that they are not turned on by politics because they feel they are being sold a lie. Politicians will insist it is about issues, not personalities.”

No such confusion prevails on Big Brother. The success of the show is that it makes no bones about being a personality contest, a fact that has clearly resonated with many millions of young viewers. “The viewers of Big Brother are more female than male and more young than old,” says Bazalgette. “What they are doing when they watch and vote is replaying the game they played at school - an endless analysis of who is popular and who is not.

“Some would argue that this is a juvenile attitude and that as we grow into adulthood we realise that life has to become a series of white lies and strategic falsehoods. Others find something very positive about these idealistic instincts.”

Bazalgette goes on to cite Melvyn Bragg’s analysis of the programme. Describing it as “quite heartening and quite new,” Bragg applauded the show’s egalitarianism, being more focused on deep-seated qualities such as sincerity, honesty and kindness than outmoded concepts of class and breeding.

In his new book Billion Dollar Game, Bazalgette charts the evolution of Big Brother from its germination in Holland in 1998 through heated controversy and outrage to worldwide domination. The concept has now been taken up by 24 countries with varying degrees of success, making Bazalgette and its originator, John De Mol, rich beyond their wildest dreams.

Now international creative head of the Endemol Group, Bazalgette says he wrote the 300-page book because he wanted to take stock of “the most significant TV show of the last decade,” and find out what makes it tick. An ex-journalist, he is at pains to present all sides of the argument, not just the pro-Big Brother camp. He even includes Salman Rushdie’s eloquent broadside: “Who needs talent when the unashamed self-display of the talentless is constantly on offer?”

“It stirred up sentiments and emotions you could never have imagined,” Bazalgette says. “What was appalling to an older generation, who have a sense of privacy and decorum, was appealing to the younger generation who are not at all worried about bad language or nudity. In that sense it is probably the most divisive programme ever produced.”

In Germany, producers of the show received death threats long before the first series was transmitted, and a senior cabinet minister declared that it was an affront to human dignity. For a generation still living in the shadow of fascism, the idea of incarcerating a group of people behind high fences with barbed wire for entertainment was unacceptable.

But the viewing figures told a different story, reflecting a younger appetite for warts-and-all reality TV. Nevertheless the producers agreed to turn the cameras off for one hour a day in order that housemates could “preserve their privacy and dignity” during that period.

In America the show was attacked by Bill Clinton, who accused the contestants of “prostituting themselves to media conglomerates”. Bazalgette says Clinton’s outburst proved to be a turning point in the show’s US success. “Now that the older generation had condemned it as heartily as Elvis Presley had been condemned in the fifties, it would gain credibility with the younger generation.”

When it transpired that one of the housemates was a former black militant, another was an ex-stripper and a third had killed someone in a hunting accident, the show was assured of cult status among the young.

Whatever your opinion of Big Brother, there is no doubt that its arrival on British television changed things forever. The concept of what Bazalgette calls “convergent TV” - programmes that bring television, phone and internet into play simultaneously - is now common currency, as is the idea of running reality shows on consecutive days.

“With so many channels to choose from, it gets more and more difficult to get your voice heard,” he says. “So putting on special, day-by-day events does at least allow you to raise your head above the parapet. People tend to sit down and watch these shows on the night, rather than record them, so there is a much greater premium for advertisers, because viewers are less likely to fast-forward through the ads.”

Does Bazalgette himself share the problems we mortals have in keeping up with the rapid pace of media technology? “I’m very good at spotting what the technology can do, although my use of its functions are sneered at by my 14-year-old son. Keeping up with new developments isn’t difficult, what’s difficult is focusing on the important things, the things that have real potential.

“We have only been living with hi-tech interactivity with three or four years, so what was a passive experience has become an active experience. We have only just begun to work out what that really means. There are huge opportunities and huge challenges ahead.”

• Billion Dollar Game is published by Time Warner Books, ISBN 0316729159