On a grainy night-vision camera, half a dozen young adults can be seen lying in bed chatting. Two men, Michael “John” Bric and Michael “Ashley” Cox, beckon Camilla Severi over to their stretch of mattress. When she hops in, one holds her down while the other rubs his penis in her face. “I’ve been turkey slapped!” she yells to the rest of the room. The men on either side of her collapse into laughter.
Big Brother ran for 11 seasons in Australia, but this 10 seconds of season six is etched into its local legacy. The franchise – which originated in the Netherlands – sold itself as a “social experiment” in which a group of strangers were dropped into a house, cut off from the outside world and left to combust. The model guaranteed heroes, villains, comedy and drama. It didn’t foresee a sexual assault.
The “turkey slap” was a “huge lesson for the industry”, says Yana Groves, who has worked in reality TV for nearly 20 years and trains and mentors TV producers. In 2006, when the incident happened, she was working as a control room producer on Big Brother.
“It was pretty scary,” she says. “It was something that happened so unexpectedly that I think it rocked the reality world. The producers did everything they could in that situation – to do the right thing and take the right steps.”
The incident occurred at 4.17am on Saturday 1 July. By the following evening, Bric and Cox had been removed from the house by producers, and footage of the event was handed to Queensland police (who, along with Severi, declined to press charges). It would never be shown on TV.
But that doesn’t mean it was contained. That year, on top of showing six days a week on free-to-air television, the franchise also allowed fans to tune into a 24-hour live stream of the house online. It was from there that the blurry black and green video was captured and disseminated. The story got so big that by Monday, even the then prime minister, John Howard, had waded into the debate, using a radio interview to encourage Channel Ten to can the program.
That night Ten responded by airing a conversation Severi had with Big Brother, in which she characterised the incident as “just mucking around”.
“It was something that happened just in fun and I wasn’t offended as such, but I did think they took it a little bit too far,” she said. “But we laughed it off, and as soon as I said ‘Enough’s enough’ it stopped.” Severi did not respond to Guardian Australia’s request for comment.
In the same segment, Bric and Cox apologised and expressed regret. In their conversation with host Gretel Kileen, Cox described the incident as “a practical joke” and Bric said it had “been blown way out of proportion” by the media. Later Cox told Zoo Weekly that going on the show had “ruined” his life and that he’d been “branded a rapist on national TV”. Bric said that he was angry at how Ten had treated them, and that he felt exploited by Big Brother.
It wasn’t the show’s first brush with controversy. By its sixth season, Big Brother had become a lightning rod for moralising that regularly attracted the ire of conservative groups and Coalition MPs. Particularly troublesome was Adults Only (previously titled Uncut), Big Brother’s weekly MA15+ instalment which featured the sex talk, hook-ups and nudity unfit for the daily 7pm show.
The year before, the show had apologised after airing footage of a contestant putting his penis on a female during a massage. Just a week before the “turkey slap”, Ten announced it would scrap Adults Only on advice from Barnaby Joyce, who told channel executives that keeping the show on air was harming their bid for media reforms. (“ ‘The other night you had simulated anal sex on the TV just three hours after The Simpsons,’ ” he said, having scolded station executives. “Tell me how I explain that to my daughter.”)
In the early days of the show even the housemates were sometimes surprised by what made it to air on Adults Only. Season three’s winner, Reggie Bird, says she “didn’t know they had an Uncut show” until weeks after the series ended.
“I was in Harvey Norman with my sister and someone yelled out, ‘Oi, show us ya map of Tassie, Reggie’ and I just went, ‘What?!’ And my sister goes, ‘Oh, Reg, you’ve got no idea what they’ve shown of you,’ ” she says. But Bird wasn’t fazed. “You know, it didn’t really bother me to be honest. I just said, ‘Oh, poor people, they’ve seen my flange.’ ”
Despite its reputation, Groves says Australia’s Big Brother was always meant to be family-friendly.
“UK Big Brother is what I grew up on and it has that salacious quality to it,” she says. “When I came to Australia one of the first things I was told was, ‘This isn’t the UK Big Brother. This is a family show.’ Compared to other countries, Australia is still very conservative when it comes to anything that might be deemed explicit.”
After the “turkey slap”, Big Brother returned for two more seasons on Ten but ratings had fallen so much by 2008 that it was axed. The incident left its mark on the entire industry. Groves says reality TV makers have been “more vigilant when it comes to processes and duty of care” when dealing with contestants.
Benjamin Norris, the winner of Big Brother 2012 – Nine’s first season of the show’s reboot – remembers producers telling him in no uncertain terms that “there won’t be tits and arse”.
“They really wanted to turn it around ... and move away from from sex and turkey slapping and things like that,” he says.
The 2012 iteration had no Adults Only show, no live stream and avoided explicit content. “People hooked up and had sex, but Channel Nine was really only editing and selecting a very PG-friendly show.
“I mean, I can tell you that one night they got so drunk in a game of truth or dare that one of the housemates got his penis out and a girl put her finger inside the end of it. At that point I was like, ‘I’m going to bed because I just saw something that I never needed to see.’ … And that content was never shown.”
Michael Beveridge, another housemate in 2012, wasn’t aware of the show’s new approach before he went inside. As a result his 85 days in the house were “very boring. Insanely boring. One of the most boring experiences of my life.
“I showered with clothes on for, like, the first two months.
“Had we known ... that nothing racy was ever going to be shown, we would have laid down a tarp and gone fucking hell for leather because there was so much pent-up horniness in there and no one thought they could do anything about it.”
But Beveridge does remember producers being “very clear about consent”.
“There was a very strong ‘don’t do anything fucked to people, please’ message,” he says. “They didn’t have to be like, ‘Don’t hit people with your penis.’ I think that was inferred.”
