In Tuesday’s episode of the revived Big Brother (Sunday-Friday, Virgin Media 2) a thoughtful housemate named Matty explains the plot of a George Orwell novel to an assortment of housemates who are seemingly ignorant of the provenance of the Big Brother concept.
“This guy, George Orwell, in the 1940s wrote a book, a fiction book, about a prediction of what 1974 would be like in 30 years’ time,” says Matty. “He pictured this dystopian society ... He made the phrase ‘Big Brother is always watching you’. So everything you do is regulated. They know where you shop, they know what food you like, they know how much you weigh, they know everything about you and then they control you.”
Yes, you’ve seen the television programme now read the book, 1974, and learn how our hero Winston Smith reckons with the rise of glam rock, hyperinflation and Wombles. Of course, nobody reads books any more because wordsing is for nerds. The housemates have, for the most part, never heard of George Orwell’s 1974. I think this is, in fact, the first reference to Orwell inside the Big Brother house. I take a deep breath and wait for time and space to collapse in on itself. But the structure holds.
Tom is one of two Big Brother housemates with a permed mullet, a dystopian outcome never even hinted at by that hack Orwell
The smartest thing George Orwell ever did, really, was to turn his book into a reality TV show. It’s like when Charles Dickens decided to add muppets to A Muppet Christmas Carol or Aldous Huxley remade Brave New World as Twitter. Nowadays people’s first introduction to the concept of mass surveillance is via reality television not mid-century literature. Big Brother is, essentially, Baby’s First Panopticon (to steal a Twitter post by @onionweigher about a real-life Playmobil prison set; And, yes, Big Brother is a smiley Playmobil prison).
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On Sunday we meet the 16 people who have been chosen from 30,000 applicants to share a garishly painted bedroom owned by a pushy landlord with no respect for privacy. Even if you’ve not seen Big Brother before (the last iteration finished up on Channel 5 in 2018 before this ITV reboot) you’ll be familiar with this concept from the Dublin rental market.
Firstly, up on a sort of runway, surrounded by a baying mob, stands the man himself, George Orwell, wearing what appear to be Oxford bags, standing near his wife, Mrs Orwell, in a shiny skintight jumpsuit (plug here for Anna Funder’s Wifedom about the life of Orwell’s wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy). I assume it’s the Orwells (it’s actually presenters AJ Odudu and Will Best). Then the housemates arrive in individual cars because Big Brother hates the environment. They each have a montage in which they dance, make gurning faces and say brand-clarifying sentences. I believe young people have these montages now instead of CVs.
The first housemate, Jenkin, is a beardy man in a loud shirt. He says: “I love a bitch, I love a bit of a goss ... I can’t help being a bit of an instigator.” These are, of course, the last words spoken by Winston Smith in George Orwell’s 1974.
Then Jenkin goes into the house where, for some reason, he can’t stop screaming. “Aaaagh” he screams on seeing the doorway of the house. “Aaagh,” he screams on entering the vast multicoloured living area. “Do it to Julia!” he screams, though he doesn’t use those exact words.
Tom is one of two Big Brother housemates with a permed mullet, a dystopian outcome never even hinted at by that hack Orwell. Despite his mullet he’s a nice young man who later talks about how he moderates his bad language in front of the older ladies: Farida, a devout middle-aged Muslim and Kerry, an NHS manager with MS.
A bumptious young Boris Johnson-loving Tory named Henry tells us he entered the house so he can learn how to cook and clean, something that was previously done for him at boarding school by his “beloved matron”. Henry is doing his best to make us hate him so I have decided to do the opposite. I love Henry with all my heart.
Matty, my literarily-informed favourite, tells us he is a fan of “ecstatic dancing” and talks about how much he loves “freedom ... to travel, to live, to work, to love, to eat from a bin, to do anything”. It’s hard not to focus on the “eat from a bin” part of this sentence and to conclude that the main freedom Matty is excited about is eating from a bin.
The housemates seem to be genuinely nice people. This difference in tone makes it seem much more like the very early series of Big Brother, when it pretended to be a social experiment and not the Coliseum
There are 16 housemates in all and they all seem surprisingly well-balanced and pleasant. There is nobody with a deranged gleam in their eye talking about how much they “hate drama” while cutting the heads off their Barbies (the ideal contestant in previous series). They seem to be genuinely nice people. On Tuesday Matty talks about how he’s never had many straight male friends and three apparently laddish men tell him that that’s changed and they all give him a hug. On Monday, Hallie, a young trans woman, comes out to her housemates and is received with kindness and respect. This difference in tone makes it seem much more like the very early series of Big Brother, when it pretended to be a social experiment and not the Coliseum.
Other things stay consistent. As they enter the house, Big Brother, represented by a disembodied voice, makes them play musical statues and then hide-and-seek like a whimsical deity. Then he announces that he has more tasks for them. “Ah for f**k’s sake,” says Olivia, a Scottish dancer, who must not have seen the show before. She has a way with words (she later defines a “budgie”, in a conversation about pets, as “a shit parrot, basically”).
Big Brother then gets them to play a game of pass the parcel that also somehow involves asking them which housemate they’d prefer not to share a bed with (they take away that person’s bed), which has the worst dress sense (they blow up his suitcase) and which might be hardest to live with (they declare that person up for eviction). He arranges further challenges over the course of the week: stay in a huge bed for a day to win a prize; secretly endeavour to be the most entertaining housemate to avoid eviction; wear a face cage filled with rats (that might be from the book). He’s quite demanding.
In the “Diary Room”, the kaleidoscopic confessional where Big Brother lives, a deadpan youth named Jordan demonstrates the stoical adaptability of your average Big Brother contestant while summing up his first day: “That whole blowing up the suitcase thing, that was terrifying ... Pass the parcel, that was okay. I liked hiding, I suppose.”
Big Brother is also still very slow-moving. The main activity is sitting down. There are constant reminders of things we have just seen and conversations where people recount things that have literally just happened. Panic-mongering intellectuals fear that young people have poor attention spans, but such lightweight snobs are accustomed to modernist novels where a lot happens. They’ve never reckoned with the tedious repetition of reality television and the sheer stamina it takes your average TikTok-addled youngster/TV columnist to persevere through a series. By the end, we all, like Winston Smith, have no option but to win victory over ourselves and love Big Brother. Which is, as you know, a paraphrase from Orwell’s 1974, just before the chapter on Showaddywaddy.
