In an article written for the Daily Telegraph in 2020, journalist Tom Fordy blames Channel 4’s Big Brother for contaminating 21st century British culture with the “Nasty Nick Effect”. There is no doubt about it, the genre it inspired has become a degrading circus of public spectacle where aging media personalities are recycled on a jungle diet of worms. It also created new ways for passive consumers to transform their egos into reality TV celebrity, we now live in a society of, “it could be me next”. Where fame was once awarded for hard work, talent and creative flare, now it is via the will to power, “I wannabe a personality product”.
Although Big Brother played its part in creating such a portal for consumers to be reborn on the other side of the screen as media product, it did not create the socioeconomic conditions. As noted previously, demands for progressive social change since the 1960s met ruling class resistance which had in large part been challenged through consumer culture and TV shows like Big Brother, that degraded growing critical awareness into consumerist identity shopping. The did however play its part in shaping 21st century contemporary culture, by asserting ruling class survival of the fittest mentality.
Broadcast at the turn of the millennium, this show offers a glimpse into our recent past, where most folk understood the difference between real life and fake. Season one is an artifact from before the tyranny of now, a freeze-frame that captures the reassertion of ruling class authority, when community solidarity was foreshadowed, by the ‘Nasty’ Nick effect. Although his actions were rejected by the British public at the time, in the long run we can see there were lasting effects.
The shows first contestants were social astronauts, pushing the boundaries of self under digital panopticon surveillance. Originally billed as a social experiment, psychologically assessed contestants survived life together under 24-hour TV camera scrutiny. Successfully completed weekly tasks were rewarded with food, alcohol, and tobacco, failure punished with hunger, sobriety, and nicotine withdrawal sweats. Housemates betrayed each other every week to face off a public vote or get kicked out. The last inhabitant after 64 days was to win £70 000.
In the Big Brother house, Generation X came of age in virtual reality, where sociality was stripped bare in the diary room. Interrogation of thoughts and actions, soon to be realised by big tech surveillance capitalism, was piloted on the mainstream as titillation TV. An artefact of recent history, from the no-man’s-land of vague memories, unfinished space age ambitions, cheap holidays in the sun, and the latest hypersonic Dyson vacuum cleaner. In its premier iteration the show was popular psychology meets steamy shower buttock shot.
Reality TV signalled a cultural shift between life grounded in the traditions of place and community, to a digitally remastered projection of pure self. We entered the Big Brother House television studio, to test our wits together, in a dystopian future thought experiment. Like Andy, Dag, and Claire in Douglas Coupland’s book Generation X, the housemates spent time with each other, living in a bungalow on the outskirts of society expressing their identities through stories. This show signalled the moment when popular culture broke from old fashioned ways of being, when the real world was quantifiable with social facts. These first contestants were pioneers of cyber world celebrity, individuals broken, free, making way around the world for post truth presidents and alternative facts.
Ruling class hegemony asserted itself through consumerist ideology, in between bedtime banter, breakfast bust-ups and advert breaks, we were all turned into individual game players. Lackadaisical popular culture eviscerated by neoliberal ideology, buy these cosmetics because L’Oreal says “you’re worth it”. Collective consciousness and community, betrayed by the individual, ruling class values rise to the surface, counter intuitive, self-isolating, move out of daily struggle and into your mind’s eye fantasy.
Sung to each other on nomination night, a secular hymn momentarily overcomes the betrayal of this week’s execution, hoping to survive the public vote to enjoy victory booze, cigarettes, and snacks. These lines are a psalm to innocence lost, corruption at the heart of communal living, survival of the fittest sinner.
Ex-nun housemate Anna composed a song on her acoustic guitar, which the housemates sung together each week on eviction night. All together:
It’s only a gameshow,
It’s only a gameshow,
it’s only a gameshow.
When observed almost quarter of a century later, Big Brother 2000 reveals how much British values have changed since then. The media furore that followed the expulsion of Nasty Nick sent shockwaves through society. Watch this episode now and you realise that there is still a real world outside, before digital communication swallowed us up. The house was a glimpse of the future, now, where everything is observed and augmented via tech giants and top-secret deep state surveillance. Diary Room confessionals with Big Brother, a pre-cursor to cancel culture. Nasty Nick’s act of community betrayal is the moment in popular culture when Rousseau’s social contract is finally blown apart. The ruling class re-assert their ideology, real life prisoner’s dilemma, selfishness, divide and conquer, will to power.
On the eve of his eviction, City stockbroker Nick Bateman appeals to his housemates for their understanding. He couldn’t help himself due to his childhood socialisation. Blaming his dodgy will to win tactics on a Gordonstoun education, where British ruling class nippers are taught that coming second place is no place for life’s natural born winners.
Nick: I spent 10 years at a boarding school where you fight and compete for everything. People are trying to constantly do one over you, they are constantly trying to make you come second or third, it’s a very competitive environment.
His confession reveals the gaps between us, where elite education values, crash up against everyday people, whose big ego ambitions are mediated by a sense of humility. House mate, working class handyman and eventual show winner Craig Philips, offers up some mindful, school of life advice.
Craig: ‘You obviously haven’t considered for any minute what the aftershock this sort of behaviour can do, not just for your personal self, selfish self, but everybody else. But to go about it that way Nick, you mustn’t have any pride in yourself to really go bad, to be so two faced. I do advise you, that you look into your background and work out what made you think being so two faced to people and suggest that you do something about it before you go around upsetting the rest of your friends and family and whoever out there like, ‘cos eventually mate, you will be lonely, you’ll be on your own, you will be lonely, do something about it’
It’s not likely that Nick Bateman cared about what his family and friends thought of his deceptive deeds, top notch education takes care of self-doubt, “fair play old chap”. It’s more likely his stockbroker peers sneered at his failure to succeed. Whisked away from the show to a secret location to protect him from public anger, firstborn gameshow anti-hero celebrity culture explodes into existence. After his expulsion, show host Davina McCall has a ‘private chat’, in front of an audience of millions, to find out his rationale.
Nick: ‘The whole premise was a gameshow and to play games you sometimes have to play mind games with people, and therefore in any sport, the way to win a game is to win it psychologically as well a physically, and in that kind of arena there was psychological warfare.’
It was only a gameshow, if the other players were too naive to realise this, then that was too bad.
Big Brother 2000 is a quantum leap back into the forever of now, where everything is augmented, observed, and audited by big tech corporate state surveillance, at work, in home and while you sleep. Through “the Nasty Nick effect”, ruling class ideology metastasised with popular culture, live on TV, self-centred celebrity culture is born.
Ex-nun Anna’s song is a liturgy to the passing of social solidarity, under the funeral pyre of the all-seeing eye of studio cameras, life became a game extracted from society, we are all winners or losers now.