In recent years it seems the show has been filled with people who want to be famous for being famous's sake. Not that there weren't always that sort, but now that's almost become a career on its own. Most probably have agents before they even go in, and I think it ends up making the show really bland and shallow. It's no longer a social experiment through which X number of housemates from a variety of different backgrounds try living together for X number of weeks.

Instead, it's essentially 12 or so housemates who pretty much might as well be the same person. Same personality, different haircuts.

I understand wanting to keep it 'trendy' to appeal to the younger demographic but does everyone have to be part of the [Essex]Shuuut Uuuuuppppp!![/Essex] brigade?

If you take out the bad language and inappropriate content, the way it's presented now isn't too dissimilar to kids TV. It's never been high-brow television but the diversity seems to have vanished completely to the point where you wonder if they're not just growing archetypal BB contestants in a laboratory somewhere outside Chingford in order to save money.

Yep no housemates who've already been on any reality shows. No housemates who know any ex housemates. And no housemates, who've had even a tiny tiny bit of publicity in any way shape or form before.
Get back to the basics of BB.

Why would you go on Big Brother to become famous? It's rarely watched anymore. If you mention the name of a single Housemate this year to your average person on the street, they won't know who you're talking about. Even Marc, the most talked about Housemate from this year, is only especially known on places like BB forums, and is not a celebrity. This would not have been the case ten years ago. I'd say the most recent person to achieve celebrity status beyond the realms of BB discussion groups was Josie Gibson, and even that was five years ago.

Absolutely true - and the irony of it all is; If they weren't so very very desperate to be famous then BB might regain some credibility and then the housemates might have a chance of becoming famous

In the early days you had big characters who wanted to get themselves on TV and get noticed they were engaging and were willing to give up careers etc to get on TV.
Now they don't bother applying we get a lot of young no-bodies who are quite dull, quiet when they are not on an audition tape and no viewer wishes they were them or idolises them.

They need to go back to getting loud, media friendly faces the the press will give column inches to and people will talk about on social media without shame.
It looks as like Love Island got a cast the media and show viewers got engaged with more, idolising some of them.

The aspirational wannabes and 'professional' housemates are less of a problem than the change from a collaborative to more confrontational character dynamic. That and the 'poisoned well' of outside information being revealed to the house.

In "Ye Olden Days" the general approach was to have a house that was for much of the time at least partly in consensus, where housemates would mix and mingle, form some kind of affinity with others and, yes, settle into groups (or cliques if you want to be pejorative), but that dynamic was allowed to grow and change organically as time wore on, people left and/or joined and tasks, deprivation and isolation brought out the best (and worst) in each other.

Nowadays Big Brother doesn't seem to have the patience for that, believes its ADD-generation viewers haven't either, and actively conspires to pull the rug out from HMs repeatedly (and IMO with a degree of malice) in order to foment discord, set people against each other and create rifts, divisions and arguments believing that shouting = drama = entertainment. At this point Big Brother is actually the enemy of the housemates rather than simply the mildly dictatorial authority figure of old - the nasty mean bastard prison guard rather than the firm but fair warden.

The 'professional contestant' thing that people like to criticise isn't really going to go away I'm afraid, for a number of reasons. Firstly, at this point in the show's longevity applicants these days are not interested in "participating in a new and interesting social experiment", they're applying "to be on Big Brother" and are fully aware of what the show is and how it treats its inmates these days. Therefore, there must be more than the lure of a relatively small chance at winning a moderate (and by no means guaranteed) amount of cash to attract people to apply to be on the show. With the opportunities to parlay your Big Brother appearance into genuine fame and fortune even more proscribed these days than they were in the past (and TBH the chances of rising above the level of tabloid- and chat-mag fodder were never great even in the early days!) the remaining attraction is simply the opportunity to "be on the telly" and perhaps get invited to do PAs at dodgy provincial nightclubs and occasionally wallow in the same shallow (piss)streams of fame as the denizens of TOWIE, Geordie Shore, X-Factor etc.

Secondly, anyone can upload a profile to StarNow.co.uk or any number of similar 'talent' directories and a lot of the younger generation, raised on and envious of the lifestyles depicted in TOWIE and its ilk will do so, and these directories are precisely the sort of places harried production assistants got to to cast Big Brother and similar shows. You wind up with a self-selecting pool of applicants searching for some degree of public recognition and/or self-validation and the problem of having too many 'samey' individuals who are self-consciously trying to "make their mark" whilst simultaneously trying not to "poison their (putative) brand" by being an out-and-out arse results in a house full of 'performers' and a dearth of genuine emotion and drama that is then made worse by the artifice of the producers meddling to drive some other storyboaded narrative of their own.

So you end up with a surfeit of HMs who want to be famous simply as a goal in itself, the majority of whom are, on the whole, realistic enough to acknowledge that the kind of 'fame' an appearance on Big Brother brings is fleeting, trivial and very slight indeed, but hey, it's better than nothing and maybe it means you get to go to Sugar Hut and stand in the same smoking area as [insert name of orange z-lister here]. I myself randomly found myself at a Sugar Hut after party with Dean Gaffney, Dane Bowers, an ex-porn actress or two and a motley collection of assorted other folk simply because a friend of mine had a DJ gig there - No, I'm not proud but shit happens when you're drunk!

I believe that even (some) 'professional contestants' and serial 'reality TV' participants have the potential to be interesting and entertaining housemates if you get the casting mix broadly correct and let them "do their own thing" with substantially less manipulation by Big Brother or giving them huge steers as to how they're being perceived through "Who do the public think is the most...." quizzes and reveals of other HMs Diary Room secrets.

People are perfectly capable of forming and dissolving friendships, flirting, sulking, randomly causing chaos or getting on one anothers tits by themselves in what is meant to be an isolated and stressful environment, they really don't need any extra help from a Big Brother with an overweaning compunction to "light the blue touch paper and retire to the safe distance of the production gallery". The Danny Wiskers of the world are IMHO a minor problem by comparison.

I've always believed that 'Nasty Nick'-gate, way back in BB1 is probably the apotheosis of genuine 'edge of the seat' organic BB drama as it was one of those occasions that just developed unexpectedly and producers had to react to it, whilst the BB Bedsit and the resulting Fight Night is its nadir since it set in motion the whole train of tormenting HMs by revealing what others think of them just to "see what would happen" and deliberately, unnecessarily, stirring up trouble that has now utterly corrupted the show. Whilst BB5 and subsequent shows often had much to offer, if I'm honest that for me is where the rot began.

Of course the Love Island cast were almost exclusively the kind of "famous for being famous" already-got-an-agent-and-a-portfolio wannabes that everybody claims they don't want to see on Big Brother.

Which is all rather ironic.

I agree with you, every word.

Nasty Nick wouldn't happen these days, because part of what made it so gripping was that he got away with it for so long - a couple of Housemates, such as Melanie, were starting to suspect all was not as it seemed with him, but for the most part he got on with everyone and the other Housemates felt really genuinely hurt when it turned out that he'd been manipulating them all along. The length of time it was going on for made that argument so much more than just an everyday disagreement. These days, I doubt it would get as far as Week 3. The moment the producers noticed what Nick was doing, they'd go, 'Ooh, goody! Something to make them row about', and they'd have a task where there is an excuse to reveal Nick's nominations, or else the old 'In our viewer poll, which Housemate was voted the most two-faced? Housemates, you have chosen Craig. The answer is actually Nicholas.' There would be an argument at the time, and in two days it would be forgotten about for the next EPIC TWIST. In order to get the most entertaining moments (and I agree, rows can be entertaining) they have to be passionate and genuine and laced with raw emotion. These days, most of the rows seem to occur for no reason at all. Everyone says that Helen Wood gets into a lot of arguments, but I rarely even understand what she's arguing about. She just seems to do it because she's bored.

While I agree with most of your post, and think you've made those points very well, I think what happened in BB 1 showed that the producers were already bending the rules to try to get more drama, because rather than warn or punish Nick when he started cheating, BB let it continue.

But in a lot of ways that's what they wanted to do - leave the housemates to it. This was way back when BB was still masquerading as an experiment.

So letting the housemates figure it out amongst themselves is far better than what we get nowadays.

Cull the wannabees?

Well there have been a few so far that I would have liked to see peppered in the backside with gunshot, and pegged out by the ears on a BB washing line......

He was actually given a couple of warnings, if I remember correctly.

According to the BB1 book they DID warn him twice - both a verbal and a written warning, apparently. The producers were adamant that they did not see him writing names or showing them to the others but they were aware of him discussing nominations, sometimes in code.

So in recent years who would have remained, had the "professionals" been culled?