Big Brother's making a grave error that goes against the show
There aren't many reality shows that can be so completely distilled down to their logo. You probably wouldn't even recognise the glittery gold love heart of Love Island's title cards, or the fairly generic bride and groom cake topper of Married at First Sight, if you saw them without the text to tell you what it is you're actually watching.
But when it comes to Big Brother, the entirety of the show is encapsulated in its single, staring, computerised eye. Its legitimately iconic peeper might have been given an M&M World-style makeover for its latest iteration on ITV, but the Orwellian eye still represents the cameras – and the audience gaze behind them – staring down at the Big Brother housemates 24 hours a day.
That logo has been the entire premise of the revolutionary show since its inception. Touted as the ultimate social experiment when it arrived on our screens 23 years ago, Big Brother offered the chance to ogle a batch of randoms stuck in the same four walls at any hour of the day. The only limits to the show were that it might become so tedious viewers expired from sheer boredom.
But none of that happened, because Big Brother became a juggernaut, spawned a global franchise, fell into the doldrums of repetitive TV viewing and has now been revived after a chaste five years off air.
A core part of the Big Brother model has always been its livestream, offering a direct feed of the house at any hour of the day. It gave viewers the chance to see beyond the highlight reel of the main daily show and get a better sense of who these people were and how they interacted together.
A format that has been around the broadcasting houses like no other, the omnipotent Big Brother voice and its unwavering eye have now landed on ITV, the modern-day home of hit reality TV. Yet a notable piece of the latest iteration of Big Brother is how absent the livestream has proven.
The live feed has been boiled down to a couple of hours of unedited footage once the spin-off show Late & Live has wrapped up. Yet even then, the likely inane and mind-numbing chatter is often muted on the feed, replaced instead with the fruitless hum of birdsong.
The wee hours of live footage are beamed solely onto the ITVX platform and then just as soon as it finishes, the feed footage vanishes from the streaming service, as if the thing had never even existed. Any fans who want to watch the stream without overhauling their sleep schedule get diddly squat.
In hindsight, it should come as no real surprise that ITV has cast a defensive spell over its Big Brother incarnation. With an iron grip around unfolding storylines and how they like to tease them out with appetisers like first looks and teasers, ITV has certainly never been a broadcaster that likes to relinquish control to something like a 24-hour feed of unedited events.
Yet even this rather meagre slice of the original format has created headaches, in part because of the approach ITV has taken to its broadcast.
This week, we saw how rumours about things said on the livestream can provide fertile terrain for disinformation to spread like wildfire online, when allegations emerged of "transphobic comments" made against axed contestant Hallie. Media outlets picked up the outrage over comments alleged to have been made by Paul, despite the lack of any clip of said comments and the inability to verify the claims since the live footage continues to be scrubbed from ITVX. The unsubstantiated tweets these articles were written around have now largely been deleted.
Then fans of the livestream were given short shrift when the broadcast was pulled in favour of a murky backdoor eviction away from the prying eyes of the nocturnal watchers.
Big Brother purists will take issue with the intervention in the format, which is predicated on the fishbowl premise of a house of normies – or at least the type of normies who would sign up to this circus – under constant surveillance from the public.
The standard rules about events unfolding untouched by the divine broadcasters on high have been jettisoned, with viewers online regularly pointing out timing and chronology fudges made in the editing room, shifting when things happen on the livestream to when they appear on the main show.
It offers an insight into how this element of the format might be irreconcilable with how reality TV now functions, decades on from when it was first fashioned on our screens.
The existence of the live feed pre-empted an accusation now liberally tossed at the reality TV: that it has been manipulated, edited and PR-ed into a non-reality reality fandangle. Big Brother housemates could hardly accuse producers of handing them the dreaded "bad edit" when a minute-by-minute account of their actions in the house existed.
In an environment of excessive behind-the-scenes manipulations, the livestream presents a clear roadblock to ITV's ability to ramp up perceived tension on screen in a plot and drama-driven enterprise, delaying major bust-ups until the moment they are aired during the 9pm slot.
Yet this halfway house we find ourselves in, where we get a nocturnal slice of the live feed so long as it doesn't interfere with Big Brother's larger plans, is clearly not working. This week's events show that the stream, as long as it does go out in some form, needs to be available to rewatch, otherwise hearsay about what has happened can metastasise online, with no clear way to verify the claims. Otherwise, it might just be better to scrap the thing entirely.
Perhaps it all just proves that a show that has essentially returned to broadcast from its deathbed may still be closer to the afterlife that we previously thought. The so-called social experiment simply isn't on the laboratory workbench anymore – it's on a factory production line.
Big Brother continues on ITV and ITVX.
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