A new series of Big Brother starts on Monday. Most of the time we can do without Big Brother. But this year, given everything we’ve heard about it so far, Big Brother is going to be the absolute last thing that any of us need.
This is not an exaggeration. Because even though Big Brother is already as much of an empty clang as television can get – all shriek and clatter, witnessed by no one – this year the producers have upped the obnoxiousness by choosing “The United Kingdom of Big Brother” as the show’s theme. That’s right: in its race to the complete scientific bottom, Big Brother is going Brexit.
In terms of decor, that doesn’t mean an awful lot. The 2017 Big Brother house – as with all Big Brother houses before it – looks like it was built for a niche porn shoot set in the abandoned Mr Blobby Land theme park. There’s chintz, there’s belaboured sub-Banksy social commentary in the form of a graffiti-smeared bedroom and, of course, there is a fully exposed shower for viewers who aren’t quite ready to commit to being a full-time sex pest in public.
But in terms of the show itself, it’s potentially catastrophic. The series starts in the week of a general election, and the public are already worn down by a recent cluster of pointless and divisive national votes. If it’s hard to get excited about who will get to lead the entire country, god knows how anyone will muster the enthusiasm to decide which glitter-speckled nonentity should be evicted from an eye-bleeding house of bellends. Maybe they won’t. Maybe we’ll all be so disillusioned by decision fatigue that this will be the first series of Big Brother where everyone stays put for decades before eventually dying of natural causes.
Worse, Big Brother is actively leaning into this gimmick. On Monday, we’re told, potential housemates will be done up like party leaders and forced to lobby the public on-screen to be “elected” into the house. Think of something worse than that, I dare you. Think of something worse than being asked to engage your brain specifically to decide whether you want someone you don’t recognise to be part of a television show you don’t like. What an impossible waste of brain power.
But the aspect of this new Big Brother I find most troubling is its easy adoption of Brexit, and all the anti-immigrant ill-feeling it has stirred up. The show is already a tinderbox of combative narcissists, so flinging something as divisive as Brexit at it might cause the whole thing to blow. After all, this isn’t exactly a show that handles racial harmony deftly.
If I asked you to close your eyes and think of the standout moment from Celebrity Big Brother past, assuming you’ve done the sensible thing and hidden George Galloway’s unitarded cat impersonation behind some impenetrable psychic firewall, chances are you’ll remember the 2007 series. This was the year when Jade Goody, Danielle Lloyd and one of S Club 7 rounded on Bollywood actor Shilpa Shetty with such overtly racist vitriol that the show lost its sponsor, was condemned by Gordon Brown and was taken off-air for a year.
2007 was an all-time low point for the series, and it potentially counts as one of the ugliest moments in all of television. Even the suggestion that Channel 5 might be courting that same territory is enough to make your heart sink. Unless it handles the Brexit theme with the utmost sensitivity, we might be swinging towards a repeat of that ugliness. Honestly, that really would be the last thing anybody needs.
