Big Brother begs for its life in last ever Channel 5 episode

The finale looked back at the staggering 3.7 years' worth of television 'Big Brother' has produced, while still holding out hope it can find a new broadcaster that will let it make more

Big Brother ended not with a full stop but an asterisk last night, saying goodbye after 18 years but lobbying hard for its reincarnation on another channel.

Host Emma Willis’s lip quivered as she reflected on the show’s legacy, fireworks going off around her and the VTs coming thick and fast.

If this is the end (Channel 5 has thrown in the towel), it couldn’t have found a more fitting final winner in Cameron Cole. The 19-year-old is the youngest ever victor, a self-confessed super fan of the show, and was spurred to victory after emotionally coming out on national television.

19-year-old Cameron Cole is, for now, the show’s final winner (Getty)

Back on day five, Cameron realised that he wouldn’t be able to hide a major part of himself, as was the plan, while being filmed 24/7. “I just hope you’ll think of me the same way,” he told housemates, as fellow LGBT housemate Cian helped him through the process by prompting: “Cameron, are you gay?” “Yes,” Cameron meekly replied, fighting back tears.

Back-to-back, Big Brother has aired 1,352 days worth of television. That’s 3.7 years. We can argue about the intellectual damage sustained by people who consumed even six months of it, but one thing is for sure: the reality show has accelerated the nation’s acceptance of people's sexuality. Indeed, moments like Cameron’s have helped viewers form more three-dimensional perceptions of those who might be different from them.

“Over my 10 years working on the show I had many a row with documentary producers who railed against “so-called reality TV” and asserted their God-given right to be the prism through which all real-life stories were told,” Big Brother producer Philip Edgar-Jones wrote in The Guardian this week.

“I had even more rows with people railing against “those awful people” we were putting on TV. I thought in their snobbery both missed the point. We always aimed to show the diversity of the UK – race, class, gender and beyond – and the likes of Brian, Jade, Pete, Nadia and the rest were largely able to tell their own stories and express their own views unmediated by the eye and the angle of the documentary film-maker.”

Now, the mediating factor when it came to Big Brother’s subjects was of course entertainment-at-any-cost, but Edgar-Jones’s point stands: Big Brother ran the gamut in terms of British identities, showing that everyone has moments of humanity and everyone has moments of sheer idiocy.

The show’s warning message alluded to it being the finale series (Channel 5)

The 19th “civilian” series had plenty of both: strong bonds blossomed out of bitter arguments amid all manner of wacky challenges. They had the living daylights scared out of them in a zombie-filled Halloween challenge and, if the house wasn't claustrophobic enough, were confined in a purpose-built aeroplane fuselage to further test their tolerance of one another.

But there wasn’t much time to dwell on its trials and tribulations in the series finale, which tried to pay off the current series and reflect on the show as a whole, but struggled to do either. The contestants finishing third and fourth – Zoe and Cian – were interviewed simultaneously for speed, but in spite of this, the 18 years of Big Brother were only given a short highlight reel. A Nicki “who is she?” diary room meltdown here, a Makosi-Anthony hot tub tryst there.

The final shot of ‘Big Brother’ was of an empty diary room chair

Instead, the finale served more as a pitch for the show’s renewal. The final shot of an empty diary room chair, accompanied by the newly poignant words from Big Brother’s disembodied voice: “Big Brother will get back to you” was an unsubtle plea from the 300+ members of the production team.

I suspect Big Brother will return at some stage, and in some new format (perhaps viewers will one day plug in at a whim via VR headsets, the occupants of the occupants of the house ever changing). But for now it has served its purpose.

“Big Brother entered our lives in the year 2000 before iPods, smartphones, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter,” Willis said during the final broadcast. For better or worse, Big Brother was in many ways the forebear of our live-streaming, live-communicating, live-updating culture: it first demonstrated the demand for unbridled access to other people’s lives.