Originally Posted by Dancc:
“Well Big Brother is bound to return to our screens at some point in the not so distant future. This year's summer series will not be the end of the format in this country, that's for sure, however much certain people may like to see the back of it. But Channel 4 at least have expressed a clear and consistent desire to move on and I think that needs to be respected. Creatively it was bogging them down because they were relying too much on it, and then maybe in a bid to try and correct that they took their eyes off the prize a bit. For what it's worth, I would attribute most of the ratings decline in recent years to the Shilpa Shetty controversy of 2007 and bad casting for the summer series, for which the producers are entirely to blame. I think it's also fair to say they began to run out of ideas on how to take the series further, which is hard when you're putting out 3-4 months of a reality show every year.”
Five's history of taking on other broadcasters original shows isn't a good one though - most don't make a second series.
The race row was the obvious turning point, but not so much the event itself but how the show failed to move on from it. The following BB8 did have to be relatively subdued, but by BB0 the press and viewers had all moved on - but the producers are still obviously showing restraint, whilst C4 were obviously keeping BB as their dirty little secret - and it's only for this celeb series that they've shown it anything like the level of promotion it got in earlier years. As has been said so often in the last few weeks, now they put the effort in, they got the rewards.
The other issue of running out of ideas has some truth in it too - notably unlike the beginning of the decade around the world the next big twist to the show hasn't really happened anywhere, so they were solely reliant on their own ideas.
BB9 was a great series but once again they didn't have faith in their own format, waiting six weeks before implementing the seasons big twist and ditching it four weeks later. CBB6 got off to a good start by developing the Head of House idea, but after a week of viewers and HMs speculating who would be the next Head of House and how that would affect the show producers dropped it without a trace - and the show just fell apart. BB10 fell apart from launch night!
I still think it's too early to rule out the main series having a future until we see what happens in the summer - it could see a similar bounce to CBB if they put the effort in. I do think a break is needed though and when it does return, where ever it turns up it needs to be treated as a fresh show, cutting the links with the past (so bye bye Davina, bye bye Marcus, bye bye spin-offs) - and the live feed absolutely has to return online at least.
Back to ratings
I actually don't think those figures are too great. I know they don't include C4+1, but considering they've been getting around 3.5m most nights this week, and assuming the C4+1 figure will add 500,000 at most, those figures are a few hundred thousand down on where they should be IMO.
