Britain: How one TV show warped an entire culture

last updated 8 January 2015

What a train wreck it was, said Charlie Brooker in The Guardian. After an 11-year run, Big Brother, Britain’s first voyeuristic reality-TV show, comes to an end this week. Year after year, we watched in horror and fascination as a houseful of misfits bickered and flirted and belched before the cameras. Together, we mocked and grew to love and hate some of our most dense, drivel-spouting, appalling citizens. There was the foulmouthed Tourette’s sufferer, the disturbed anorexic, and the ditsy bimbo who informed us, “I like blinking, I do!” Who can forget Marco, a campy homosexual who divided his time “equally between squealing, squawking, shrieking, screaming, yelling, yelping, and screeching”? As “the human equivalent of fingernails down a blackboard,” he was “the quintessential Big Brother house resident.” While high points were few, lows abounded. One season brought us to the brink of an international incident as jealous white British women badgered the beautiful Indian Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty. Then there was the time that the nurse Makosi had sex with Anthony in a Jacuzzi, then asked the producers for a morning-after pill. And the memorable night when Kinga masturbated in the backyard. The only fitting end would have been to turn the house “into a gigantic kaleidoscope, with reflective floors and ceilings and walls at wacky angles so every time you tuned in it looked like there were 300 people crammed inside, all kicking and yelping in a gigantic, faceless flesh pile.”

I hope we’re proud of ourselves, said John Walsh in The Independent. For an entire decade we have “engaged in a shameless combination of voyeurism, lab-rat inspection, prurience, and moral condemnation.” It has not been elevating. On display for all the world to see was Britain’s finest assortment of “egomaniacs, exhibitionists, dunderheads, sex fiends, liars, fantasists, mentally unstable and existentially challenged victims.” The experience has helped to change this culture. We have all become Big Brother, “in the Orwellian sense,” watching over ourselves and each other, tweeting and Facebooking our own and other people’s flaws, broadcasting every embarrassment on YouTube. Surely it is no coincidence that over the same decade that we watched Big Brother, we became “the most surveyed, monitored, CCTV’d, inspected, followed, targeted, filed, and cross-referenced society” in the West, and probably the world.

Our famous “British reserve” is now extinct, said Katy Guest, also in The Independent. Instead, “it seems to have become a national obsession to parade our shame in public.” Thanks to the obliteration of our national sense of decency, which Big Brother so successfully enabled, the new TV season will see the premiere of a show called Embarrassing Bodies, in which doctors examine “suppurating limbs” and other grotesque features of patients who had been—until now—too embarrassed to go out in public. From witty stoics to crass “humiliation junkies” in a few short years: For Britons, it’s been a remarkable, ghastly decline and fall.