Our writer, a lonely tweenager in rural Ireland, took to his computer and found new galaxies of possibilities – on a Big Brother forum.
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.
In 2024, most of us live in constant dialogue with people online, be it through WhatsApp groups, Slack channels, Twitter, TikTok, et cetera. But back in 2009, with social media in its infancy and smartphones still inaccessible to many, it was unusual to live your life in a perpetual and uninterrupted group conversation, particularly with friends made on a Big Brother forum who you’d never actually laid eyes on. So I tended not to mention my foray as a digital socialite to my real life friends (who, believe it or not, did actually exist). Little did I know, however, that the arrival of a new member would be the catalyst for a seismic shift in the virtual upper echelon I’d become accustomed to.
As soon as I spotted the first post from new user ‘kerplunk124’, my back was up. I immediately recognised the name as it was also the Bebo username of Karl, an older brother of a real-life classmate. We weren’t particularly friendly but we weren’t enemies either. I remembered Karl from childhood birthday parties and had no reason to fear him as an individual, but his arrival spelled bad news for me because, like Hugo before me, I too had employed some poetic licence when it came to my identity.
It started out innocent enough. I was a measly 12 when I first logged in, so thought it best to bump up my age a couple of years when first asked. Then another question: where did I live? The swinging town of London, of course, but I wasn’t from here, no – I’d moved from New York. Before I knew it, I was presenting myself as a 17-year-old transatlantic dauphin, when I was in fact a pre-teen, middle-class Big Brother fanatic in Sligo, Ireland.
At first, I tried keeping a low profile and avoided interacting with Karl. I had the advantage of knowing who he was before he knew I was me. I would instantly leave MSN chats if he was added and complain if anyone wanted to add new people. But the problem was that Karl was friendly, and more importantly, he was funny, which was a valuable currency on a Big Brother forum. He quickly integrated into the community and even became a bonafide member of ‘The Brotherhood’. While exploring the forum’s archive he eventually wandered into a thread called ‘Show us your bedroom xD’ where I’d previously posted a selfie in my teenage boudoir, the epicentre of my virtual existence. ‘Gary!!!’ he replied.
I moved quickly, opening a side chat with my closest confidants to face down the story and come clean. To my astonishment, they informed me that they already knew of my deception. They had worked it out themselves months earlier but they didn’t really care because they still enjoyed chatting with me. Admittedly, my commitment to the bit was lacking – I really struggled to get my head around the UK school system I was supposedly about to graduate from, and I was, in all fairness, quite visibly a child. ‘I think a lot of us probably always thought, okay, sure,’ Shaun said when I reconnected with him for this piece some 14 years later. ‘It was commonplace for everyone to talk themselves up as more interesting than we actually were. You were in your little fantasy bubble – and what were the fucking chances of someone you knew in person just showing up and bursting it. That one was probably one of the most tame exposés, no offence,’ he said with a laugh.
‘Jaysus, TiBB, that’s a throwback,’ Karl responded when I reached out to pick his brains. ‘That’s so funny, I had no idea I had this much of an impact – I’m so sorry for crashing and burning your whole thing you had going on there!’
After my reveal, I continued chatting with Shaun and Hannah, and sometimes even Karl, for about another two years or so, but with decreasing regularity. My days were becoming fuller thanks to a growing roster of real-life friends, but to each new friendship I brought things I’d taken from TiBB – a sharper sense of humour, an encyclopaedic knowledge of where to illegally stream TV shows. In some ways, it feels like my years in TiBB were like a practice run for friendships I would later go on to cherish in person.
According to my TiBB profile I was last active there on 5 November 2012, at 1:17 PM, after more than 15,000 posts. I probably stopped communicating with people from the site entirely, save for the odd like of a tweet, roughly a year later, once I’d gone to university (and, ironically, turned 17). ‘It’s interesting how we all ended up in these intense, almost parasocial relationships – quite ahead of their time,’ Hannah said when I dropped her a line.
‘It was kind of intimate, I definitely shared a lot of myself with you guys,’ Shaun recalled. ‘I know for a lot of people who were in the closet at the time, the forum was an escape to express themselves a little more, let’s say, fruitily, than maybe they were comfortable doing at school.’
‘I went to a grammar school where a lot of people were super rich,’ he continued. ‘People were going on ski holidays and I grew up on benefits so I always felt the odd one out.’ He recalled once noting when, in Year 7, his best friend’s parents were building a house worth a million pounds while his mum didn’t even own her own home, let alone a million-pound one.
‘I hope that was helpful,’ Hannah concluded, wrapping up a series of late-night voicenotes. ‘That was fun to think about,’ she added, and I agreed. Speaking with all of them again had been eye-opening, and it affirmed to me that this period of my life was, in fact, ‘real’ all along. But these days, jobs, partners, friends and grown-up responsibilities await us each morning. Mine are even in London – for real this time, promise.
