Inside Big Brother: Nasty Nick (Ep 1)

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1:19Day one in the rest is Entertainment Studio, 1.33pm. Marina Hyde is talking to former housemate Kate Lawler and television executive Tim Hinks about the history of Big Brother. Hello, members, and welcome to this bonus episode series of The Rest is Entertainment with me, Marina Hyde. And I'm so pleased to say that to discuss the whole inside story of Big Brother with me today, I have Tim Hinks, former president of Endermol and who now runs Expectation and knows where all the bodies are buried. Kate Lawler, presenter, podcaster and winner of season three of Big Brother. I would love to know if there's anyone better to discuss this with, but I can tell you there is not a better line up and I am totally excited.

2:14Very happy to be here. Thanks for having us. Can I do a tiny bit of background on Big Brother? So it started in the Netherlands in 1999. It was like an instant hit. Everyone loved it. Now 700 series of Big Brother have aired around the world in 70 territories. There have been 36 ,000 episodes. My God. And since January 2004, not one day around the world has gone by without a new episode being broadcast somewhere. It totally changed the landscape of television, of pop culture. And I definitely think society, politics, all sorts of things. I think it's like one of the most influential things of all time.

2:51The guy who is credited with creating it is a guy called John DeMoll, sometimes also known as the king of trash TV. You said it, I didn't. Yeah, no, I know. But he did lots of other shows, right? He did Fear Factor, Deal or No Deal, The Voice. Oh! Yeah. I didn't know this. Yeah, he had a company called Endemoll, which was a combination of his name, Mol, as you say, DeMoll, and a guy called Ute Van Ender, who was a theatre impresario. and together their names formed this company, which does sound like an ointment you find at Boots in the foot care section. Endemol was this Dutch company and they started buying other companies around the world.

3:27One of the companies they bought was the company I was. I was about seven years old at this point and they bought this company called Basel Productions, which is an independent television producer. And I remember the day that it was announced that Endemol, this company we'd never heard of from, I had heard of Holland, but basically we hadn't heard of this company. And they bought us and we were making really uncool. So if you go back to the 90s, there was like loads of cool telly, like The Big Breakfast and The Word and, you know, Chris Evans and all that. And then there was quite a lot of uncool stuff and we did that at Basel Productions.

3:58What did you do? We did Ready Steady Cook. No, that's not uncool. No, I mean, I'm sorry. It's not insanely cool, but yeah. Can't cook, won't cook. And I don't want you to get too excited. I haven't told you this before I came on, but I was the producer of Ainsley Harriot's Party of a Lifetime, which I know is a game changer. So we made all these cooking and lifestyle shows and so we weren't very cool. I think I probably hadn't been to Channel 4 at that point and suddenly this company buys us, Endemol, this Dutch company. One of the things we remember was they made a show called Sound Mix Show which is otherwise known as Stars in Their Eyes, which is one of their shows.

4:31Then they made a whole load of stuff that wasn't that recognisable including famously in Endemol terms a show called Diary of a Sheepdog which was a Dutch period drama about the 1900s in southern Holland, which we didn't end up pitching as it happens, but I'm sure it had its place. Then they had this thing called The Golden Cage, which is what Big Brother became. At that point, it was called Golden Cage. Oh, I never knew that. In fact, even before that, it had the worst name, the worst secret name for a project, for a show you've ever heard. Go on. It was called Project X. Oh, great. So there was this show.

5:06And we looked at it back then, and a guy who ran the company in the UK called Peter Bazalgette looked at it and ultimately brought it over here. But certainly at the time, it looked, as you'll remember, ultimately it didn't look like television. That's what was odd about it. So we're looking at it. And I think we all like to tell ourselves, we said it's a bit too cruel. And that's true, and lots of people did. And in Holland it was very controversial. But ultimately, more than that, it didn't look like telly. It looked quite dull. it looked sort of black and white, often in a sort of, you know, rainy house in Holland.

5:37It didn't look like the sort of big breakfast and the sort of the fast moving kind of cool television that was beginning to surface at that point. So it looked a bit dull. But when it moved to the UK, you did you did stuff to it. You did stuff to the format, right? Because they didn't have Ruth Wrigley said that it was it was slow and not a lot happened. They thought put it late night instead of prime time and then have evictions. So there was no evictions no there were so so the thing is ruth wrigley's brilliant and she was the first executive and launched it and you know and and what a show to launch hundreds of people no one ever made anything quite like it so she she deserves all the credit she gets brilliant producer as you've said on your podcast like look at traitors or something british tv producers have an issue and one of the issues we have is that we keep thinking we're the best in the world at tv and there are some arguments for that but i don't know if you've seen american television it's really quite good so when a show comes over here whether it's traitors which is wonderful or or big brother we like to say and thing is it was a bit strange and it was a bit foreign and what we did is we turn it and the truth is the basics were all there the votes the house I mean it did go on longer in Holland it went on for like a hundred days I think something like that and it probably wasn't as sort of let's say cool Britannia right it was it was so what the British team brilliant team did is they made it much cooler they changed the title music at one point we were almost going to have to use the Dutch title music which I can tell you now I'd love to hear that I would love to hear it I could hum it if you want.

6:58Please do. And the Dutch graphics, things like that. So it became, you know, more British, a bit cooler. One of the things that Ruth and the team, Conrad Green, did so brilliantly is they therefore tapped, they brought in people who had been working on The Big Breakfast and The Word. So they had people who were very good at fast moving, kind of cool music montages and so on. That track, the whole title sequence, everything about it is absolutely epic. It felt cool. And that was very good for things like The Best Bits, stuff like that. But there was an issue with it, which is in the first cuts of it, when we were trying it out with what used to be called guinea pigs.

7:31That doesn't age well. It was just people trying to trying out the show, you know, as you know, before the main show is that they cut it a bit like a fast moving magazine show. That didn't quite work because actually what you needed to do was slow down a bit and let the story. So the storytelling, don't forget, no one had done anything like this before. So it was a combination of kind of the word and those sort of MTV with kind of old fashioned documentary storytelling. and when they fused, that's what made it magical. Because you wanted to sit with the discussions, some of which were about completely, I mean, the most ridiculous.

8:04Were you a viewer at that point? Were you watching it? No, no, no, I didn't watch it. So you didn't watch season one? No, I did. I watched it back on VHS, the good old days of VHS. But that was as a recommendation from the psychologist who was kind of questioning my motives. You probably ought to watch this. Yeah, why do you want to go in? I was like, number of reasons really, but 70 grand tax-free cash is basically my main reason. But then he suggested, good old Brett, God bless you, Brett. He said, it's a good idea to go back and watch the series if you haven't already. I'd watched the back end of series two because it becomes such a national obsession.

8:36There was no getting away from it. Everybody was talking about Big Brother. So I'd watched the back end of series two. And then when I watched the first two series on VHS, like all the highlights, I went back from my second meeting with a psychologist and I just said, well, this is maybe I want to do it even more. I think he thought it would put me off that is a winner's mindset yeah that's amazing I said I've never been to university before but it's pretty much like how I imagined uni would be yeah just having a doss in a house getting drunk people voting you out yeah possibly a few romances except you don't come out in debt you come out 70 grand richer potentially so yeah this is an incredible way of looking at your life changing format but except I tell you what I think that shows you it reminds you that it was so So it was on at 11 o 'clock at night.

9:21I mean, that first series. Series one on 11. Yeah, yeah. The first series did catch fire. It did really, really well. And I think it started around about 3 million viewers, which, you know, Channel 4 would kill for now, but it was different times. And by the end, it was at 9, 10 million, that final, you know, after the nasty nick and all of that. So it certainly caught fire. The magical thing, I remember watching it really early on, and you watched two people having an argument in the bedroom. So you watch them have the argument. Then you watch one of them walk to the kitchen, talk to someone else and say, I've just had an argument and this is what I think.

9:55And you think, hang on a minute. You only see that in drama. You don't see that in actual real life. And there we were able, and of course famously everyone says they watch them brush their teeth and all those things. Yeah, I remember logging on to the feed. Also the internet at that stage just literally could not cope with any of this stuff. No, no. Because like, people complain about things now about their broadband, trust me. If you're trying to do a dial-up just so you can watch Darren brush his teeth in season one, You go all the way there. But when you got in, you were so excited that you were watching.

10:21Because this is happening now. Because it was the fact that it was happening right now. And that they were just somewhere. I lived in London at the time. But that they were somewhere else in London. And that this was occurring. It was so nuts. But also just putting ordinary people on television doing ordinary things. We'd never had anything like that. So it really was fascinating to just see Nick from Leeds or whoever. Yeah. Just making a cup of tea. because we'd never had any of that people watching before. Like people came up to me after Big Brother and was like, I used to watch you sleep. But they were like, I used to watch you sleep.

10:54And when a housemate would get up to go to the toilet, be so excited because something had happened that I was there to witness at 3am. But I think that's so interesting, Kate, because one of the things, the way you'd watch people before is usually with a bloke who was a documentary maker telling you this is what these people are doing, this is what you should think about them. And Big Brother sort of laid it out and said, just watch without anyone intervening. Now, I know there are lots of charges. The producers were more or less involved. So we can, I'm sure we'll talk about that. But ultimately, you're watching people sort of just be themselves.

11:25That was felt very radical. And there's another thing about it in Holland and in lots of other places around the world, it nearly always was about romance was the big thing that broke through. And of course, that did happen in the UK many, many times. But that was a big defining moment for them. In Britain, it was much more class and the sort of competition and subterfuge so it was slightly different feel that first series they cast it in january 2000 there's 45 000 people respond to an advert looking for contestants you cut them down to 300 and then lots of screen test interviews they want to play games as groups what was that like just thinking how do we pick these ones because now there's such a lot of lore and in both sense LORE and LAW about like reality TV contestants and duty of care and all that stuff you obviously just there wasn't anything like that right?

12:14I think then you know Ruth Wrigley and the team were picking these people there was definitely and Channel 4 were obviously very very involved there were definitely stereotypes that you look for that you'd still think now right? I think it's maybe much more conscious now but if you look at any reality show you know I'm a celebrity get made of it as a classic you know you're looking for sort of there's the posh one there's the quiet one there's the one you know so so i think there was an element of that but it was sort of not as knowing then you know so i think ruth wrigley for example would say that anna for example the ex-nun i mean it was a very sort of big breakfast you know put make get to know someone in a few lines almost quite tabloid so anna was the skateboarding lesbian nun right i don't know i've seen a couple of shots of her skateboarding she doesn't seem that amazing yeah but i don't think she just and she wasn't a nun anymore you know and so but it helped you so you understood So I think there was this feeling of looking for stereotypes.

13:04But I think Big Brother is all casting, right? I mean, ultimately, that's the most fundamental thing about it. So when you get to Big Brother 4, which was known as the boring one, you look at casting before you look at anything else. By the way, in parentheses, this show was so good in the early days. The boring Big Brother, this is four years later with Cameron, Cameron was secretly taken to the Big Brother Africa house, swapped with a contestant for Africa. I forgot that. Yeah, and you think that was on a boring one. That was on a boring one. I mean, that on any normal show would be like absolutely extraordinary.

13:36I forgot about that. So the casting, it was really, I think, felt very important. You had sort of people that we might call, say, are authentic. Yeah. This was when Essex was invented in TV terms. Yeah. Because what suddenly happened is like you think, well, we all knew Americans were good. Any Americans good on camera. It turns out people from Essex seem to be really, really good. That's our America. That's our America. Yeah. So you started to see people on television that maybe you hadn't seen or certainly hadn't seen before. And you were looking. So so Ruth, again, will tell you quite late on, I think I'm right about this in the casting.

14:07There was a sense that they're quite wild. There's a sort of an energy here. We need to calm it down. So they put Nick in. So Nasty Nick was put in as a sort of just someone who maybe calms it down a little bit more middle of the road. So I suppose what it, well, it also shows you that when you think these are experts in casting, you just don't know. And I always remember when years to come, like your audition was like the people always talk about the keepy uppies you did with the football. And I don't know what that told us. And maybe it is a phrase that doesn't age well. Ladettes, you know, was it something about that?

14:43She was sporty. One of your epithets was like, she's really fit and sporty. Well, also, Phil Edgar Jones, I remember telling me afterwards that one of the main reasons I got chosen as a housemate was because it was the World Cup that year. And then when they saw me doing KPRPs, I think their minds went to Tars, KPRPs, Girl Playing Football. And we were very much in Laddette culture back then. I mean, it was Zoe Ball, Sarah Cox and the like. And drinking was quite heavily promoted. No one gave a shit, did they? Everybody just went out and got drunk. Turning up to breakfast shows like Chris Evans' era.

15:14And so I think in my audition tape, it was back when because you didn't have to audition as such back then it was the requirements for you entering or applying was a really long application form in which you had like psychological questions and just questions about you followed by a three minute video that you could do whatever you want and I remember saying to my sisters what should I do I remember saying should I put on like a naked fat suit which is so like on PC now and run down Bromley High Street and what was I thinking I think it was slightly on PC then Kate but worth a go back then I meant back then not now I was like, back then, I didn't think back then.

15:48I was 21. And I just thought, that would be funny. And like, terrible idea. And then I was like, I can't do that. I just want to be, it was back when everyone had those little handheld camcorders. Do you remember the Sony hand cam with the little tapes? And I already had footage from previous holidays, so I cobbled that together. And then I thought, I'll just show things, show the producers what I love doing. One was keepy uppies. One was me in a pub downing a pint. Like, I genuinely thought, I was like, I'm such a liar. One of them was me all glammed up in a tartan miniskirt just about to go to the Blue Orchid in Croydon nightclub.

16:18I was like, I'll show them me dancing, cuddling my dog and boxing because I love to box. And I think I just put together everything and just sent it off last day of like closing date. And I mean, it was a long old process. They also invited you to play games in a group. And I always remember Jade Goody being in my audition. Oh, is that right? That when we were playing games, you had to like work as a team. And it was like, I mean, it was brilliant because the games they were getting to play, they were getting us all to play. Everyone was falling out. and then at the end of the audition as such, we all had to nominate somebody to be evicted and everyone chose Jade.

16:50And so they were like, she's going in. That's fascinating. And as soon as I saw her, I was like, I know exactly why she's here because she rubbed everyone up the wrong way so they thought she'd be a brilliant houseman, which she was. We had to find a host. So you chose Davina, why? The host of it, you know, in some ways, the host is sort of not as present as in a normal show, right? Because most of it is the recap from 24 hours before. but again I think you'd find that decision making there is a really simple one in the end and I think you can see this now in television in a way that perhaps wasn't true before Big Brother which is that Davina if she wasn't the host of it she would have applied to be in it and I think she said that and if she hasn't then it's definitely true because that is and she was someone who would inhabit it watch it if you look at those early shows when she's presenting it I was watching the other night I would do anyway even if I wasn't doing the podcast just go over old Big Brother episodes.

17:42No, I wouldn't. It is that on the first eviction, which is Sarda and Caroline, you can see the moment she goes live to the Big Brother house. I mean, you're probably getting chills here as you think about it because you remember what it's like. So Davina, hello, this is Davina. Please do not say it. And they're really, they go like, oh, it's Davina. And Davina goes, oh, it's them. You know, you can feel her excitement that she's talking to the housemates. So she loved, loved, loved the show. Most importantly, it seems nothing now. she'd done this show called Street Mate. Yeah, loved Street Mate.

18:13Now, Street Mate at the time was just Davina wandering around provincial shopping centres trying to match people up. And again... Again, it's probably quite obvious you've seen that. Also, you'd probably feel she'd do that without cameras anyway. Like Davina is that, you know. And so it felt live and quite sort of edgy and young. She'd also done MTV. So in the end, there was this feeling at the time that Ruth and the team had, which is you have to make Big Brother kind of cool. And Channel 4 was a cool channel. it needed to be young it was a lot the casting was younger than in Holland and Spain and all the rest of it I was trying to remember I do believe that at times I think Graham Norton's name was mentioned I'm sure he didn't know that he was mentioned I'm sure he wouldn't have done it at all but there were obviously other names mentioned but I think Davina was really key and clear and you know you can't think of anyone better and if you fast forward to when it finished on Channel 4 10 years later she said it's like a sort of grieving when it stopped and I believe that you know it was her world and you can't imagine it without her she was incredible I always remember when she came into the house because back then she came in after I'd won I was the last person there and she walked in and I was like I can't believe it's you and she was like I can't believe it's you I watched actually I came across the entire finale on YouTube the other day and she just looks so different but I always remember her wearing a necklace that said yes which was I always said yes for some reason and so I was like wow she's wearing this necklace with a word that I said in the series okay so it airs from July to September 2000, 64 days, 11 housemates and the£70 ,000 prize.

19:44But it's like a 150 people crew. It was really interesting. And everyone became obsessed very, very quickly. I remember this with how do they do it? You know, you could see that, okay, hang on, these are like two way mirrors and there are tunnels all the way through the house. But everyone couldn't understand, you know, like how it could be possible to have that many kind of cameras everywhere. And there were plans put out of the houses so that people could see how it was all built. So they had, the cast was given one week's notice so that the press wouldn't find out about them. Anna Nolan said she just like went into work and said, you know, I'm leaving to do a television show.

20:18I might be two weeks, I might be ten weeks. It's like some sort of really weird form of jury service. Yes, yes, yes. OK, so there's no launch show, but there's an introduction for Marcus. Let's hear it. For the last four years, ten people have been living an especially built house completely cut off from the outside world. No TV, no radio, no newspapers. They've volunteered to share their lives with the nation over the next nine weeks. A production team of over 100 people work 24 hours a day. They're able to control how the house operates, from turning on the hot water to opening. and closing doors.

21:05They monitor over 26 remote cameras, 36 microphones and five manned cameras hidden from view behind mirrors. Big Brother is always watching. This episode is brought to you by Lloyds. Now, show business loves a club. I love all these sort of unofficial groupings of people. There's two Brat Packs that I'm big fan of. There are two Brat Packs. Yeah, there's two Brat Packs because there's the movie Brat Pack, all of the Judd Nelson and, you know, Rob Lowe and Charlie Sheen and all those guys. Everyone in the Breakfast Club. Yeah. And then there's also the Brat Pack of those kind of turn of the 90s novelists, Bret Easton Ellis, Jay McInerney, Donna Tartt.

21:49And that's the thing, creatively, it's actually very, very useful to hang out with other people who are incredibly talented because you drive each other on to do things. Because a lot of the British novelists in the 80s, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, they all used to sort of go and have lunch and go and have dinner. And you could just tell, you know, they would talk about stuff and they would make each other's work much better. And that's the benefit of being in a group, being in a club. It becomes more than the sum of its parts. Clubs really do have benefits, like Club Lloyd's, an elevated everyday bank account with exclusive benefits, plus a lifestyle perk like cinema tickets.

22:20And you get no fees on debit card spending and withdrawals abroad, an exclusive mortgage rate discount, interest on your balance. To join a club worth being in, search Club Lloyds. You must be a UK resident aged 18 or over to apply. This account has a£5 monthly fee refunded each month you pay in£2 ,000 or more. That iconic voice. Did you know it when you had it? There's a woman called Liz Warner who was at Channel 4 who was very key to the launch of it. And she says that when he did a couple of tests, basically they went to agents to get voiceover artists and so on. And then they gave him a few lines to say from Big Brother.

22:54and one of them was something about the chickens because of course chickens are weirdly important in that first series in a way they perhaps were less and it was the way, I'm not going to try and do the accent but it was the way he said chicken or actually that wasn't bad. No, it wasn't bad. She said that's it, you know and again it's hard to sort of imagine now but a voice like that, a regional voice like that you know on Channel 4 felt like really kind of different and edgy and what I seem to remember I think this is true He was very, very factual at the beginning. And I think the first comic relief, Big Brother, Jack, Dee and everyone, where it was a little bit more fun, and so he became a little bit more editorialised.

23:34So that first Big Brother, he's very factual. For people who can't remember what he's actually doing, aside from sort of introducing the housemates and things like that, he's saying it is nine o 'clock on Wednesday and Darren is in the garden talking to a chicken or something like that. He's just narrating really like, Dear two kids in the bathroom after an argument with Alice. That is an astonishing impression. I've known Marcus for many years. I mean, his voice is just... Do you know what's really funny? Watching the new show, because I'm doing Big Brother, the group chat now, and we get to watch the show before it goes out, and they don't have Marcus in it, so there's just a guy going, day one, so and so.

24:09And you're just like, it would not be Big Brother without Marcus Bentley. I completely agree with you. And I think that voice, which, of course, we came to love and associate, as you say, Kate, One of the really important things about the role of that voice, you know, without getting too sort of over romantic about it, there was a sort of mission amongst the producers with Big Brother. And that kind of mission was to say we want to make telly in a way that no one's quite made it before. And what we want to do is we want to be really transparent about what happens. We want to be really open about what happens.

24:35We don't want to use TV producer tricks. And I know that in the years to come, there'll be all sorts of accusations and some of them founded. But the notion was we want to do something in a way that sort of almost trusts the audience, like takes the audience seriously. That notion of this is exactly what's happening. So one of the big things that Phil Edgar-Jones will tell you is we never showed shots that were out of time. So if someone's told a joke and you, Marina, are not laughing, imagine such a thing. We're not going to find you laughing from later. No. We're going to show exactly what happened at that time.

25:05And although that seems a small thing, that was part of the philosophy from that first day of saying, we're just going to show you what's happening. But the other big revolution, which we haven't touched on in a funny way, which is worth reminding everyone of, is the notion of you decide the audience. Because that was there from the beginning. And so although you had other shows like there was the Survivor, Expedition Robinson. Pop Idol. Yeah, these shows. This notion was you as an audience. Who goes? You decide. You decide. And that's such a fun. So it wasn't really the voting was important, but there were other shows of voting.