Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

How Big Brother lost touch with reality

Big Brother 2023 (Credit: ITV)

Big Brother is back – again. The show was axed by Channel 5 in 2018 but ITV has dragged it out of the grave. Watching the show’s opening episode last night made me wonder whether we’re trapped forever in a time loop with the big TV shows of the early noughties – Strictly, I’m A Celebrity, The Weakest Link – doomed to keep coming back. But where once they were exciting and fun, now they look exhausted.

Big Brother 2023 comes with all the trappings of our age. Everybody on the first show last night talked in the customary over-excited mid-Atlantic screech of the 21st century. This won’t last, because it never does; one of the great sources of fun is watching these affectations drain away, leaving the contestants effing and blinding at each other like Wolverhampton fishwives.

Several of the contestants claim to be entering the house to ‘show’ something about their identity group.

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