A Little Less Show, a Lot More Business

ITV have announced the return to our screens of Big Brother. It will launch on ITV2 and ITV X in 2023, having been axed by Five in 2018.

The show launched the careers of many of Britain’s best known faces. It gave us ‘the eye’, that geordie VO… and whilst on Channel 4 where it launched originally in the UK, it was the catalyst for a raft of brilliant creative output from the TV channel’s inhouse creative agency 4Creative.

Without Big Brother, you would not have Love Island. You wouldn’t have SAS: Who Dares Wins. You wouldn’t have the raft of ‘rigged documentaries’ such as One Born Every Minute or 24 Hours in A+E. Arguably you' wouldnt have had shows like The Apprentice or even The Great British Bake Off. To say the show has been influential would be an understatement. It basically launched ‘reality TV’ as we know it.

But, despite the obvious influence of the show it feels like a slightly regressive move to bring it back. How much more Big Brother will audiences want? I realise that there are younger audiences who won’t have seen it before , but in a world of Tiktok influencers - will the show have the same impact? And how will it stack up versus Love Island.

Has the well of creativity at the UK’s broadcasters run dry? Or, perhaps at a time when the economics of entertainment are under significant stress, it just makes more sense to revert back to established IP rather than investing in new properties which may ultimately fail. We’ve seen this become quite a common thing. Changing Rooms is back on our screens, too.

Are we now seeing an extension of the same trend which has been playing out in the cinema impact the screens in our living rooms? Hollywood’s reliance on established IP is now so obvious that instead of adapting comics and novels to the screen, they’re looking at sequels to films that in some cases are 30 years old.

With routes to profitability ever harder, perhaps the tolerance for risk in our entertainment system has lessened…. are we seeing show business become…. just good old fashioned…. business?