ITV2 made the announcement during the final of Love Island 2022, dropping a surprise teaser in the final ad break. The iconic Big Brother eye was seen pasted over an ITV2 ident as the theme tune played.
The format will remain largely the same, with a new cast of housemates from all walks of life moving into the Big Brother house for up to six weeks as cameras capture their every move.
You think that policemen/teachers/doctors look incredibly young. You become grumpy when your colleagues don’t know what a VHS tape is. You join a gym after seeing yourself in the mirror as you climb out of the bath. And, God forbid, you buy truckloads of Lycra for your new-found hobby of cycling.
Recognise any of this? Sure, you do, as you fall asleep after one glass of wine, tired from a full day at the garden centre, which now counts as “splashing out”. And if you prefer radio to TV, you are on the slippery slope. Welcome to middle age.
Navi Lamba, Digital Commission Exec for E4, commented: “It’s been so brilliant harnessing all the creativity the lockdown has inspired in our indie partners.
“We’ve commissioned across a number of genres and a mixture of animation and live action, hearing the stories of real people across the country and those of well-known faces in comedy, music and TV and all are tailored to work best for our young audiences.”
From comedy to docs, via reality TV: “With my writing partner from university, I was writing script-based comedy… we got close a few times to getting things away but it wasn’t quite working,” recalled Cary.
He landed a job as a runner at Endemol, working on BBC Three show Celebrity Scissorhands and then Big Brother: “I exploited every connection I had at Endemol and got a job at North One, which used to make a lot of Cutting Edge [documentaries] for Channel 4.”
Documentary film-maker Arthur Cary shared how he tackles difficult subjects with great sensitivity at the RTS Student Masterclasses 2019.
Click here to read the session report.
It’s a good time to sit down with Ben Frow, Channel 5’s director of programmes. A purple patch that started with the station winning Channel of the Year at the Edinburgh TV Awards last August has just been topped with the station’s best Christmas since 2005 – and all this after Frow’s “carnage” assessment of the first half of the year.
From his now much more comfortable perch, the executive is happy to reel off a catalogue of titles that, in those first months of 2018, passed most of the nation by.
There are so many different jobs in the reality TV field, from Story, Art, Gallery and Edit Producing to Directing, and the best way to get into the genre is usually as a Runner or Logger. When I started out in TV I didn't know games teams existed but I knew I wanted to work in a creative and ideas-based environment. I worked in a few development departments, but it was frustrating pouring my heart and soul into creating formats that sadly sometimes just wouldn't get commissioned. Then when I heard about games from a colleague, it was like fireworks going off in my head.
Beating Channel 5 staple Big Brother in Monday night's ratings, the erotically-charged TV contest won 6.9% of the audience share with 1.3million viewers over BB's 1.2million.
ITV2 has already started looking for 2017's participants after announcing earlier this week that season 3 had the green light.
The show caused uproar among the viewing public for broadcasting sexually explicit encounters between housemates. Nonetheless, Love Island's audience peaked at 1.5million, improving on last year by 700k.
Michael Jackson's stellar career encapsulates much of the creative history of TV during the past 30 years. He was an innovative independent producer back in the 1980s, reinvented BBC Two in the 1990s, and went on to run Channel 4. There, he launched Queer as Folk, Ali G and Big Brother, before crossing the Atlantic to work for the legendary mogul Barry Diller.
Today, still based in New York, his career has swung full circle. Jackson is once again working as a producer.
