What killed Big Brother?

Channel 4 is pulling the plug on the show that changed TV for ever – but that has been stretched way beyond its shelf life

Mark Lawson

When I wrote a piece for the Guardian last month declaring the death of Big Brother, all the indications from many sources were that the series would soon be cancelled, but we still expected a ritual denial from Channel 4. None came and we now know why.

Some surprise has already been expressed that the network's announcement allows one final run of BB and its celebrity sibling next year but this is for legal and practical reasons.

Channel 4's senior management will have known that they would face heavy questioning at yesterday's autumn launch and next week's Edinburgh Television festival on the future of the house-share franchise, and so a statement this week was the sensible move.

The channel's current agreement with Endemol will also have included a date this summer on which negotiations had to begin on whether to extend the contract that ends next summer. This grace-time gives the production company a chance to seek alternative hosts from 2011: Five and Sky One must be thought likely bidders for a property which, even in its final decline, can still deliver a steady 2 million viewers.

In short, Big Brother, after a decade, was killed by three things: the fact that it has stretched beyond the shelf-life of most television shows (very few of even the most successful entertainment formats thrive for longer than eight years); a general sense that the death of Jade Goody, the loser who became its best known player, marked a symbolic full-stop; and the eerily collective decision by tabloids and entertainment magazines to withdraw coverage this year from a show to which they had previously devoted front pages.

And, inevitably, these nooses overlapped: journalism lost interest because it felt the show was over which, in turn, hastened the end.

Channel 4 may yet regret this decision: it will not be easy to find a new franchise that regularly delivers even the numbers of Big Brother in its slow final phase. The ratings may, inconveniently, even rise next year, in the same way that a shop's closing-down sale brings a rush of customers.

Like Jade Goody, Big Brother will be remembered as a miracle of publicity, but one which raised troubling questions about the moral and cultural state of Britain. The show also changed television for ever and, in some ways, beneficially – raising the level of realism and lowering the age range. However, it rapidly lost its innocence and was hi-jacked by tedious attention-seekers

Big Brother to bow out next year

Channel 4's final series of reality TV show Big Brother will be broadcast next year, it has announced.

The station, home of the programme since it began in 2000, will honour its deal to screen series 11 next summer.

Channel 4's director of television Kevin Lygo said the show "had reached a natural end point on Channel 4 and it's time to move on".

Big Brother has suffered from falling ratings in recent years, with the current run the least watched.

The latest series has picked up about two million viewers per show, compared with an audience high of eight million in 2002.

Speaking at the broadcaster's new schedule launch, Channel 4 head Julian Bellamy said: "Big Brother has been our most influential and popular programme over the last decade."

But he added that "inevitably we're both excited and ever-so-slightly terrified by the prospect of getting by without it".

Mr Bellamy said the loss of Big Brother would leave a "huge hole" in the station's schedules, but would prompt "the most fundamental creative overhaul" in Channel 4 history.

He stressed that Channel 4 was not seeking a like-for-like replacement for the reality programme, but admitted that fans of the show would be "disappointed" by its demise.

The broadcaster said it had already started to allocate funds which would have been spent on Big Brother into new drama.

The show also spawned Celebrity Big Brother, with one more series of the spin-off to be screened at the beginning of 2011.

Big Brother may not disappear from British TV screens, with the prospect of producers Endemol securing a deal with another broadcaster.

The show's makers said in a statement they are "enormously proud" of their partnership with Channel 4.

"We have every intention of celebrating the show's historic run on Channel 4 with great final series of both Celebrity Big Brother and the summer series in 2010," it continued.

"As for 2011, stay tuned. Big Brother will get back to you…"

The programme thrust contestants including Jade Goody, "Nasty" Nick Bateman and Kate Lawler into the spotlight.

It has also courted controversy, including in 2007 when Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty won Celebrity Big Brother following a series of rows with Goody, who was accused of bullying and racism.

Meanwhile, the winner of this year's Big Brother will not receive the original prize money of £100,000, the programme's makers have announced.

The housemates were told the news after some of them attempted to stage a break-out from the compound on Tuesday.

The contestants broke out through a fire exit in the garden after being instructed by Big Brother to do something "entertaining".

The winner of the 10th - and penultimate - series of the show is due to be announced next week.

INSIDER'S VIEW

Torin Douglas

Torin Douglas, Media correspondent

Big Brother's ratings may have fallen from their peak - and it no longer fills page after page in the tabloids.

But it still attracts more viewers than most Channel 4 programmes - night after night - and that brings in a lot of advertising.

Dropping the show is a risk - it makes a good profit for Channel 4 and there's no guarantee that the programmes that will replace it will be as successful.

So will Big Brother move to another channel?

Some rivals will be doing their sums and opening talks with the show's producer Endemol.

But it's expensive to produce - some estimates put it at £20m a year.

That rules out most digital channels but it could still make financial sense for Sky or Five.

Remember why we used to watch Big Brother?

Hugo Rifkind

Big Brother took a long time to die, but it was Jade Goody who killed it. God rest her soul, but she was just so enchantingly stupid. On she came, way back in 2002, not knowing what East Angular was and thinking Rio de Janeiro was a person. You could imagine producers sitting up, counting the headlines, licking their lips, and deciding that this was the future. That was the beginning of the end.

Everybody remembers the stupid ones off Big Brother. There was Jade herself, of course, Queen Dumb, but there were plenty of others, too.

You might remember Helen from 2001 (hobby: blinking), Emma from 2004 (evicted after a fight, top kept falling off), or Nikki from 2006 (“the mind of a 12-year-old,” said Russell Brand, “in the body of a 12-year-old”). In later years they were nearly all stupid save the customary older bloke, normally with a degree, who was expected to spend his time being moodily incredulous and ogling the girls in the hot tub.

This was a shame, because it was actually the clever ones who made Big Brother great. Not the geeks, but the plotters. The ones who thought they were better than all the others, and had plans and strategies. The ones who actually treated it as a game show, rather than a showcase for a future career in minor celebrity. Remember “Nasty” Nick Bateman?

Remember the crazy, manipulative Makosi, or the science geek Jon Tickle, or predatory, terrifying Michelle who might have won her year if she hadn’t been so hellbent with getting that pretty chap called Stuart into bed? This was what kept us coming back.

We forget, because we were encouraged to, but when Big Brother began, they actually made quite a big deal about how it was all supposed to be a great big psychological experiment. It was all about how people would behave, confined together, under constant scrutiny. Once, the answer to that question wasn’t “Just like a Big Brother contestant”. That was what made it so fascinating.

And it was fascinating, don’t let anybody tell you otherwise. Big Brother didn’t just change British telly, it also changed Britain. Before the first series, who would ever have believed that the top three in what was essentially a British popularity contest could have been a camp black man, a Geordie builder with a speech impediment, and an Irish lesbian ex-nun?

Celebrity Big Brother was another nail in Big Brother’s coffin, because it was just so much better. You didn’t need to learn about the housemates from scratch ½ they had established public personas already.

Few things on television have ever been better than CBB 2006, with George Galloway, Michael Barrymore and Pete Burns. At present, CBB’s future is uncertain. Most likely, it has another year.

Poor Davina McCall. Whatever will she do now? Hardly anybody has been watching BB this year. According to those who have, it has actually been a quiet return to form, with ample scheming and petulance, and backstabbing.

The whole concept, alas, has grown stale. Nothing lasts for ever. This time around, the youngest contestant is a chap called Cairon, who is 18. That means that, when the show began, he was 8.

Davina must feel ancient.

What killed Big Brother?

Channel 4 is pulling the plug on the show that changed TV for ever – but that has been stretched way beyond its shelf life

Mark Lawson

When I wrote a piece for the Guardian last month declaring the death of Big Brother, all the indications from many sources were that the series would soon be cancelled, but we still expected a ritual denial from Channel 4. None came and we now know why...

Good to see that the actor playing OLTL's Brody has a second job.

Big Brother is slowly fading away, but it isn't surprising. For me, personally, the ONLY Big Brother worth watching is the American for the simple reason (strategy) while everything else can be easily faked by the network or the producers.

Even Croatia is done with the show (seeing as how they completely screwed up the show).

Im surprised they cancelled it bc the current season was great.