Upon reading Graeme Blundell’s article “The past is another country”, one particular point stuck with me. His mention of Big Brother. Blundell describes Big Brother as “the most influential show of the decade.” This immediately struck me as strange. Big Brother? The most influential show of the decade? Although secretly indulging in Big Brother, I’ve always thought it was the most stupid show on television. There was no content behind it, and there were real people called “Hotdogs.” Channel 10 even advertised the contestants as being stupid.

Blundell then goes on to say “The show was not just cheap and dumb TV, as many of us thought at the time, but a response to a new broadcasting context in which traditional drama, comedy and documentary was becoming too expensive for free-to-air networks to produce.”

Was Big Brother really smarter than I thought? How clever to produce a show with no paid actors, no huge sets, no paid script writers, a show which was so cheap to produce, but which drew mass attention. Viewers were watching Big Brother more than they were watching drama, comedies and documentaries. And Big Brother cost half the price to produce.

Blundell also says he “liked Big Brother for the way the show blurred the conventional boundaries between fact and fiction, drama and documentary, and the way each year its various producers imaginatively tested the conventions of the format.”

This too is true. What other shows before this displayed real live people, in dramatic situations? It was a live soapy, with real people as the actors. What could be better? I distinctly remember discussing with my friends whether Damien and Mirabi would sleep together, and what would Turkan say about Peter? And we all remember the Merlin incident, when he put tape across his mouth as a protest for the refugees, and refused to speak. That had us talking for days. This reality show, as stupid as it was, had all of us hooked.

Blundell says when he watched Big Brother on set through the 2-way mirror, he felt as if he was “a peepologist, a slave to virtual reality.” But I think that being a “peepologist” is the appeal to Big Brother. Everyone who watches it feels as if they are an expert on people and their behavior. They study the contestants on the show as if they are professional “people watches.” The viewing of Big Brother can be seen as perverted. Watching people 24 hours a day. That’s the thrill of Big Brother. Every viewer is a “fly on the wall”.

Big Brother became such a phenomenon that there are now several books and academic articles written about it. These books describe how Big Brother marks a keynote internationally, in the relation of television to real life and the positioning of television within popular culture.

Big Brother marks the beginning of reality TV, a huge trend still very alive today. Shows like Masterchef and Australias Next Top Model, shows extremely popular today, base themselves on Big Brother’s framework. Therefore, quite the contrary to my initial belief, Big Brother is not stupid at all. It is a breakthrough TV show which began a new era of reality. As Blundell puts it, “No other show in the decade asked, in quite the same way, what it was like to live in today’s media culture and how to remain authentic when the whole world was watching.”