With Channel 5 announcing that it is to axe the show, is this really the end for the reality series? The people behind the phenomenon on its rise and fall

In 2000, auditions took place for a show that was, the BBC reported, “billed as a real-life version of the Truman Show”, adding that out of the thousands of hopefuls, the 10 successful contestants would be paid a nominal fee to live in a house for 10 weeks and have their every move monitored by TV cameras. Craig Phillips was one of those auditioning for the first UK series of Big Brother. He’d had a bit of a headstart, having seen a documentary about the original Dutch version, and had written to the producers, saying if they ever did a British show he would be interested in being in it. A Liverpudlian builder, he was working on a rooftop – “I was doing lead flashing around the top of a chimney breast,” he remembers – when he received a call inviting him to the audition.

Phillips went on to win the first series: he donated his £70,000 winnings to a friend to pay for medical treatment. By then, the show had dominated headlines, turned one of its contestants, “Nasty” Nick Bateman, into a panto villain and changed the nature of television, celebrity, and even – if you want to be grand about it – society itself. It would not be long before Ben Elton wrote a book inspired by it (Dead Famous), Charlie Brooker based a horror TV serial on it (Dead Set), and Big Brother gave us Jade Goody, the first reality TV superstar.

It can be hard to remember how influential the show has been, as it splutters through its 19th series, which started last week with its lowest-ever audience, just after an announcement that its current home, Channel 5, won’t be bringing it back next year. It has been overshadowed by shows with glossier formats (Love Island) and more authentic, uplifting contestants (Bake Off).

My life changed that moment I walked out the door: bodyguards, managers, press officers. I didn’t go home for 97 days Craig Phillips

“If you’re looking at it now, it all seems very tame but when it first began it was a defining moment,” says Kirsty Fairclough, an associate dean at the University of Salford’s School of Arts and Media. “I think a lot of people thought of it as a social experiment back then. It managed to address a number of real issues, particularly around identity.”

At the time, Lucie Cave, editorial director at Bauer media, was working on Heat magazine. “Heat was the first magazine to put a reality TV star on the cover,” she says of the cover featuring “Randy” Andy Davidson, one of the first series contestants. “It was a huge risk because it wasn’t Posh Spice. But it sold an unprecedented​ ​amount and we knew we had hit on something. The whole office could talk of nothing else; we had been captivated by this group of ordinary strangers.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Craig Phillips leaves the Big Brother house with Davina McCall. Photograph: Ken McKay/Rex/Shutterstock

For Phillips, his overwhelming memory of being in the house is one of boredom. “We sat around every day, chatting, but after about three or four weeks, things started to dry out,” he says. “I think there was only one task a week. It wasn’t that stimulating. I found it quite difficult, and it was pressurised having the cameras [there].” He had no idea that outside the walls of the purpose-built house, he was suddenly famous. “My life changed completely that moment I walked out the door. I was in a different world. I was surrounded by bodyguards, managers, press officers. I didn’t go home for 97 days. Every hotel was paid for; there were cars, meals, planes. The press were trying to chase us, and the police were stopping them. I got taken to this hotel, where I sat down with Brett Kahr [the show’s psychotherapist]. He talked to me quite calmly and said: ‘Your life has changed now; whether you like it or not, this is what has happened; the whole country knows your name and you will be on the front page of every newspaper and magazine.’” He later became a TV presenter (other former contestants, including Anna Nolan, Alison Hammond and Kate Lawler, have also gone on to have media careers).

Ruth Wrigley was the executive producer on the first three series. She and Peter Bazalgette, chair of Endemol UK, had gone over to the Netherlands to see the original version and they decided to bring it to Britain. The appeal to her, she says, was the challenge of doing something new, and fast at a time when, unless you were doing a live show, a half-hour programme could take weeks to turn around. “In the Netherlands, the eviction show was a man in a suit [who] shook your hand and that was that. Channel 4 wanted a big entertainment event. It was technically someone leaving the house and walking across a car park, but it had the atmosphere of a rave.”

Nobody knew if it would work. It was commissioned to go out at 11pm; Wrigley remembers Tim Gardam, then the Channel 4 commissioning editor saying “if it works, I’ll put it on at 10pm, but if it doesn’t it can just be an interesting social experiment”. She says: “I’d like to credit Channel 4 and Tim in particular for taking a huge risk, which doesn’t happen in broadcasting any more.”

These were unvarnished underdogs. And unlike traditional stars they were prepared to share everything about their lives Lucie Cave

The moment she knew Big Brother had made it, she says, was the whole Nasty Nick saga. “I was in a car with Nick; there was a whole operation to get him out. We disappeared into the depths of Hertfordshire to a hotel and it took 24 hours for the press to find us. When we went back into London to do a press conference, people were almost up the wall, it was packed, it wasn’t even standing room only. He was on the front pages of the tabloids, demonised, but also being offered lots of money. That’s when I thought the world had gone mad. This was bigger than I imagined.”

It appealed, says Cave, because people “wanted their celebrities real and relatable, and when Big Brother came along we had a whole new genre of celebs who were exactly that. These were a different breed of people in the public eye: they were honest, unvarnished underdogs and we wanted to know everything about them. And unlike traditional stars they were prepared to share everything about their lives.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Russell Brand, who shot to fame on the back of Big Brother’s Big Mouth. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock

The world was also changing. As Gardam said in an episode of Radio 4’s The Reunion about the programme, “this was 2000. It was the end of a feckless decade that was the 1990s. It’s when Tony Blair was still in his first term as prime minister. It’s before 9/11 and a darker time. It’s before the dotcom bubble bursts. It’s a completely different sort of Britain, a Britain that is transitioning between John Major’s Britain and Tony Blair’s Britain. Out of this, comes this programme which is candyfloss in many ways, but also is telling you an awful lot about what sort of society we’re becoming: what a younger generation is beginning to think about, and what a younger generation is comfortable with that an older generation is not.”

There had been reality shows before – such as Survivor, made by a British team but which debuted on Swedish TV in 1997, in which strangers are marooned on a desert island – but none had Big Brother’s interactivity. “I knew that the core was the ‘Who wins? You decide’ idea. That was new,” says Wrigley. Now, from X Factor to Strictly Come Dancing, phone voting is taken for granted. “People didn’t decide who won things. You might have a phone vote that was announced a week later, but that instant contact with the viewer made me understand people would watch that because they were being invited to have an opinion. It was the way things were going.”It would be a stretch to say that Big Brother paved the way for platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, but you can see overlapping themes: a change in what we consider “privacy” to mean, a broader idea of what it is to be “famous”, an explosion in narcissism, an appetite for public humiliation, the value placed on opinions and the power of mob judgment.

In television, the show ushered in huge changes, from the spinoff format that made a star of Russell Brand, to the celebrity version, which began in 2001, paving the way for shows such as I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!, and particularly the idea that stars who were past their peak made far better television than big names. The first Celebrity Big Brother was done for Comic Relief, and Wrigley says she was promised huge stars; what she ended up with was former boxer Chris Eubank riding in on a scooter, dressed in a kaftan: “It was genius.”

It had to become more and more outrageous and the producers had to cast more conflict to keep the thing going Ruth Wrigley

Big Brother started suffering in the mid-to-late 2000s, largely a victim of its own success. For a while, it felt like one of the most diverse shows on TV, celebratory of difference: the winner of the 2001 show, Brian Dowling, went on to become the first openly gay children’s TV presenter; the 2006 winner Pete Bennett has Tourette’s syndrome. But a low point was the Celebrity version in 2007, memorable for the contestants’ racist bullying of Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty, which brought more than 40,000 complaints to Ofcom and condemnation from the then-chancellor Gordon Brown. The contestants were too self-aware, too obviously fame-seeking (in later series, many of them had already done the rounds of other reality shows). “You could become famous for going on these shows,” says Fairclough. “Everybody became so cynical. It reached the peak, there was nowhere for it to go. It has limped along for a while. What can it do that’s different?”

By the time it left Channel 4 for Channel 5 in 2011, Big Brother was struggling. “People knew how to play the game,” says Wrigley. “There was a lack of authenticity, it had to become more and more outrageous and the producers had to cast more conflict to keep the thing going.” But shows such as The Only Way Is Essex, which was also produced by Wrigley, came out of this knowingness. “People were playing a version of themselves, which didn’t work in Big Brother but if you embraced it in a different way, it did work. It gave birth to lots of programmes that would not have existed without Big Brother: Towie and Made in Chelsea are obvious, but even things like Gogglebox.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Contestant Nadia Almada in an improvised spacesuit, 2004. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock

Big Brother is not dead, insists Peter Salmon, chief creative officer of Endemol Shine, which produces the show. “There are other roads you can take with this format so we’re pretty optimistic.” It is still doing well around the world, he points out. “It’s currently on in five more territories this year than it was last year … It’s on in 20 at the moment, the UK is just one of them. It’s one of these superbrands that has a life beyond television channels, whether it’s on new platforms or living in a digital space. I think it’s highly likely, from conversations we’re having, that it will continue here.”

But many will think it’s time for its own eviction. It has run its course, says Cave. “It completely changed the shape of British TV and celebrity culture. In its heyday, this was the show that shone a spotlight on society and held a mirror up to who we were, and who we didn’t want to be.”