The third season of Netflix’s abstinence-in-bikinis reality show, Too Hot to Handle, launched on the platform in late January with a surprising twist. At the beginning of the first episode, the show’s narrator, Desiree Burch, explained to viewers that one day after wrapping up the filming of season two last year, an entirely new cast was introduced to the show’s villa in the Turks and Caicos Islands. As with the second season’s brigade of contestants, season three’s group were not informed that they would be appearing on Too Hot to Handle, whose agonising reputation precedes it. Instead, the programme-makers told their band of singles that this was a sexy show called Pleasure Island, complete with a fake host and its own in-show lingo.
The participants in Too Hot to Handle’s third season had no idea this trick had also been used on their predecessors. They seemed dejected, if still slightly knowing, when they were told. But it’s not surprising that the show’s producers were keen to pull the rug out from under them in pursuit of “authenticity”. Reality TV is now self-consciously commercial, with contestants increasingly seeing its shows as a fast track to brand partnerships and sponsorship deals in a TV-to-Instagram-influencer pipeline. Contestants take part with the intention of growing their social media followings and signing lucrative promotional deals when they leave. Over the years, even the format and production values of reality TV have become predictably staged: we get scene transitions with establishing shots, musical interludes and stock character tropes that become even more pronounced during the edit.
Many reality TV fans are old enough to remember that things were not always this way. Recently, I’ve noticed internet users sharing grainy, boisterous clips from the UK’s original reality juggernaut, Big Brother (during lockdown, three “superfans” even launched a podcast devoted to analysing each episode). Despite the scandal this show courted during its 18-year run and the fact its early contestants were forced to contend with a savage, pre-Leveson tabloid culture, clips from the series now seem like a raw counterpoint to current reality TV. The first series, which launched on Channel 4 in 2000, was billed as a “social experiment”. Contestants included a bricklayer from Liverpool and an Irish ex-nun. To begin with, there was no expectation that contestants would do anything but come as they were, to a house where their every action would be filmed for two months. People arrived from all walks of life, and top-percentile hotness was not necessarily a prerequisite for selection.
Of course, Big Brother was not without controversies: it was accused of shamefully showcasing public prejudice, exploiting vulnerable contestants and stigmatising welfare issues. In 2020, season six contestant Makosi Musambasi told Grazia magazine that she believed she had been treated differently to other contestants by the audience because of her skin colour. And the press reaction to the show was cruel: the late Jade Goody, during her appearance on Big Brother season three in 2002, was branded a “pig” on the pages of the Sun.
While Big Brother exposed often ugly truths about the UK, it is the show’s bizarre but simple format and often dishevelled contestants that are remembered with a peculiar fondness by millennials like me. Big Brother and its long-running celebrity iteration were remarkably unpolished. Many shows, such as Strictly and The Masked Singer now consist of heavily formatted celebrity competitions that couldn’t be further from the deeply real magic of a Welsh teenager making up a song about “cooking an egg for the very first time” to a rapt audience of millions.
It was six years, last month, since one of the greatest British TV moments in recent history: when Celebrity Big Brother season 17 contestant Tiffany “New York” Pollard mistakenly believed her fellow housemate David Gest was dead. (Gest, in a tragic coincidence, actually died only a couple of months after leaving the Big Brother house.) Even though this happened in 2016 (only a year after Love Island, as we now know it, began), the video footage of the moment – which is poorly lit, and features the housemates looking as unkempt as you’d expect of people who have not left home for over a week – feels worlds away from the glossy, preened appearance of Too Hot to Handle.
Reality TV is partly an oxymoron – the nature of editing something into a piece of entertainment has always meant removing at least some of its likeness to real life. It’s important to note that this creation of distance between viewers and contestants can also be a useful corrective to the strong, unfair and deeply personal attacks that many fans, now armed with social media accounts, frequently aim at reality TV recruits. But as the genre has evolved, the “reality” aspect has become more jumbled. Where Big Brother might have been a funhouse mirror held up to daily life, our current formats feel more like a phone camera with Instagram filters. So it’s no surprise that those of us who can recall the first decade of Big Brother are finding enjoyment in revisiting its pure “please do not swear” chaos.
Lauren O’Neill is a culture writer for Vice UK
