ITV resurrecting Big Brother is a weird move to make

For a second past midnight on January 1, 2000, the world breathed a sigh of relief.

your computer is still working. The banking system did not collapse. The hospital’s life support machine was out of order. No passenger plane fell from the sky.

People’s worst fears about what the millennium bug – also known as the Y2K problem and a host of other names – could do to society when the clock strikes 12 o’clock. Happy New Year!

This is by no means the most important thing that happened in 2000. It will be the birth of our third daughter in February, weeks earlier than expected and bald as an egg. boiled, but otherwise perfectly fine.

In the summer of 2000, Channel 4 started showing a new series called Oldest brother, an English version of the successful Dutch format created by media mogul John de Mol in 1997.

The easy option would be to say Oldest brother was trash in the first place, except that wouldn’t be right at all. The first season is a compelling, addictive TV show that transcends all demographic barriers.

Putting 10 complete strangers into a purpose-built house wired with audio and vision and observing their interactions for over 9 weeks is both a cunning idea and a social experiment. legal.

It was also gifted to a snake-in-the-grass perfect villain: Nick Bateman, a realtor in the City of London who tried to play other housemates against each other for a better chance of winning. Earn a £70,000 bonus.

Viewers can see what the scheming Bateman, quickly dubbed “Nicky Nick” by the UK tabloids, is doing, but his fellow contestants have no idea he’s trying to manipulate how are they.

A month after the show started, the producers informed the others about what Batemen had done and they confronted him. He was immediately kicked out of the show.

the first job Oldest brother — victory over the good Liverpudlian builder Craig Phillips, with Irish contestant Anna Nolan runner-up — a success because the housemates were completely unaware of them and the series was well received by viewers and the media. how to see.

They didn’t know how big it had become until they walked out of the house in front of a row of flashing lights. It will never reach those heights again. After the first season ended, the spell was broken and could not be renewed.

The moment a season two contestant calling herself “Bubble” and wearing a stupid little hat (look at me – I’m weird!) entered the contest Oldest brother home, obviously the game is over.

The series has quickly become a magnet for narcissists, who see it as a quick route to becoming a D-list celebrity without asking for anything inconvenient like have real talent.

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Channel 4 signed a series of multi-year contracts to show Oldest brother, which means it stuck with it as the audience started to plummet year by year.

There’s a lot of relief inside Channel 4 when Oldest brother ended in 2010. The £50m-a-year resource it had devoured is now ready to fund other projects, such as a new TV series (early beneficiary being Shane Meadows .’s four-part series This is England).

Oldest brother was watched for the second time on Channel 5 between 2011 and 2018. By that time, the already meager audience had dwindled to 1.2 million.

When even the most hardcore terrestrial broadcaster in the UK calculates it has low viewership on hand, you tend to think it’s time Oldest brother deposited in the dustbin of television history.

And yet, it’s about to be revived Again of all TV stations, ITV. Oldest brother will return for a second time on ITV2 later this year.

Rylan Clark, Celebrity Award Winner Oldest brother in 2013, is said to be the host of the show. Needless to say, it will also be shown on Virgin Media 2.

ITV tried poaching Oldest brother from Channel 4 when programming was at its peak in the mid-2000s. But why splurge on something that passed its peak nearly two decades ago?

Maybe the broadcaster has a cunning plan, like mating Oldest brother with love island and catch all the bikini housemates and doll smugglers.