Walking through central London in early October, I was stopped in my tracks by a billboard that read, ‘Big Brother – The Ultimate Social Experiment’. The daddy of all reality shows was returning to our screens once more, yet rather than setting a reminder to tune in on launch night, my mind was cast back to a peculiar time in my life in which I participated vigorously in another, in many ways stranger, closed society.
ThisIsBigBrother.com, or TiBB, as it is commonly referred to by its patrons, is an online forum created in the early 2000s for discussion of the eponymous television phenomenon. It’s a strange corner of the internet that I inhabited for roughly four years as a teenager, and it is home to many formative memories. When I joined in February 2008, I was a tween who enjoyed unbridled access to the internet. Neither of my parents knew much about computers, so it’s probably fair to say they were not fully cognisant of the unfurling world of information that was at my fingertips when, upon moving house when I was ten, they installed a 32-inch plasma television screen in my bedroom and hooked it up to what had once been our family computer.
Both my computer and media literacy were advanced for my age; my Big Brother fandom was where these two competencies intersected. Not content with leafing through the pages of Heat magazine to devour gossip on ex-housemates, for the show’s eighth series I decided to get in on the action myself, so I set up a fansite where I would post photos of the newly unveiled house and regurgitate articles from the Sun about the rumoured twists in store for the show’s latest contestants. Once the series began, it was my ambition to be part of the weekly press cycle for ex-housemates.
This dream was then crushed by Emily from Big Brother 8, a 19-year-old Peaches Geldof lookalike who had been ejected from the show for using the n-word. In an early display of journalistic acumen, I found her private MySpace page and reached out to her, to request an interview for my site. ‘Hey,’ she replied. ‘I would be down for this but you’ll have to go through my agent.’ I wasn’t yet familiar with the channels of communication for a disgraced reality TV contestant, so you can imagine my shock when Emily promptly blocked me after I responded in earnest: ‘I can’t go through your agent – I’m 11.’
My experience with Emily left me jaded by the world of media, but I still loved Big Brother. Naturally, the forum was particularly busy in the run-up to the annual summer series, which was still something of a cultural juggernaut in 2008. I watched that series mostly with my parents and, once the credits rolled, I would retire to my room and dissect the episode for an hour or two on TiBB. It filled in the blanks of the summer before I began secondary school – a tricky time for anyone, when you’re too old for kid stuff but too young for literally everything else. Once the series ended, a decent amount of the regular posters remained on the site, discussing other shows and eventually migrating to MSN where we could chat more aimlessly, away from the glare of the site’s moderators.
It was on MSN, in ‘off-season’, that I became part of what can be best described as a forum clique. Composed of about another ten teenagers, mostly in the UK, we began speaking in a group chat every night for hours on end, often until four or five in the morning. At the core of the group was a bunch of mid-teen queer boys who had bonded in the forum’s dedicated threads for Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, plus a couple of girls with a wicked sense of humour who were probably, in their real lives, spending much of their time defending the closeted boys in their respective school years.
Among the gang were Shaun, an acid-tongued David Bowie stan and, to my memory, the first bisexual person I ever ‘met’; Hugo, a bitchy-to-point-of-trolling gay from Nottingham who we later uncovered was lying about his identity; and Hannah, a pretty ingénue from Brighton who bedazzled me on Skype by rapping all of the lyrics to Dizzee Rascal and Calvin Harris’s Dance Wiv Me. Having developed our own vernacular, we would often ruin discussion threads with our in-jokes or by viciously coming to each other’s defence in heated debates over which X Factor contestant ought to have gone home that week.
We weren’t the only ones who formed intimate bonds from the forum. TiBB began to operate like the lunchroom from Mean Girls – various groups formed and dominated certain corners of the forum, some even had names like ‘The Brotherhood’, who were a group of apparently straight male football fans who were the arch-enemies of our crew.
