Big Brother: I can't criticise reality TV wannabes because I've been one – Aidan Smith

When the conversation turned to porn film dialogue in The Salon, Aidan Smith knew his time in the reality TV show would soon be up

I cringe now when I read it. The opening page of my first book when I was striving for stunning context and the cultural event which would sum up exactly where we were at the story’s beginning. Unwittingly – semi-tragically – this also told us who we were. What did I choose? Big Brother. Who were we? A bunch of imbeciles for ever having watched it.

It is “we” because you were hooked, too… and you and you. Some will have hit the phones on Eviction Friday, jeering at the losers like they were front row in the Colosseum. Some will have decided this was so much fun that they would definitely be applying to become contestants next time. No use boasting that nowadays it’s all improving podcasts; back in the day the whole country was obsessed with the daddy of reality telly.

And there it is in my book. Big bloody Brother. Crumbs, I’ve even mentioned the winner of the show that year: Nadia, just the one name, as if that would suffice, like Madonna or Prince. None of this can ever be erased. What was I thinking, writing that? And tuning in night after night, sometimes right through the night, trying to establish in fuzzy monochrome exactly what was happening under the duvets, besides all the snoring and farting?

Your correspondent's sadly disappointing, from his perspective at least, turn on 2003 TV reality show The Salon (Picture contributed)

And yet, as Big Brother prepares for a comeback, a post-Covid reboot for the original lockdown experience, I have to remember that I was once a reality TV wannabe. That, immediately through the self-locking doors, nothing was strange, antiseptic and fake, as I had presumed it would be, and that I quickly forgot about the millions watching at home. That I loved the all-seeing, hidden cameras and hoped they would love me right back.

Big Brother, you’ll remember, had lots of little brothers, b*****d children and dire rip-offs. Oh and one called Britain’s Hardest Workers which exploited minimum-wage jobseekers – widely condemned as the nadir of elimination shows. The Salon, though, was a bit of fun, jooshing up some entertainment from the most trivial of conversation: the chitter-chatter between hairdressers and their clients.

The difference between Big Brother and The Salon, filmed in a windowless hangar in Balham, South London in 2003, was that, at the end of the day’s shoot, the customers could walk out. But there was still a competitive element: failure to amuse and engage star crimpers Adee (shaven-headed Essex Boy, self-confessed bimbo-chaser, won an award for creating David Beckham’s Mohawk) and Ricardo (Brazilian, pony-tailed, drama queen, possibly the only man from his country not to like football) then you could end up being granted only minimal screen-time, with the rest of your footage discarded on the floor like so many clumps of shorn hair.

Really, what chance did I have? Among the freaky types, there was Steve who’d been in the Guinness Book of Records for having the longest tongue in Britain – 9.5cm. The rest of the professional fame-seekers seemed to be resting actors, experienced at selling themselves at auditions and, for them, The Salon was just the latest one.

I’d been getting on pretty well with Adee talking about football until Julian turned the conversation round to porn. These two were soon trading classic, spare lines of dialogue from German-made flicks (“Schnell! … Schwanz!”) and I reckoned that Channel 4, daring broadcasters of both The Salon and Big Brother, would lap that up. I was right; my rival won. Still, I got a lifetime-best haircut out of it.

At the height of reality TV mania, the author Martin Amis told me that Andy Warhol’s prediction about celebrity – how in the future everyone would be famous for 15 minutes – needed revising. “Now everyone is going to be famous for ever, but only inside their own heads,” Amis said.

Certainly by the time The Salon came along, the wide-eyed innocence of the first Big Brother three years before had disappeared. As Phil Harrison writes in The Age of Static: How TV Explains Modern Britain, the initial batch of housemates were “sheepish, bashful, strikingly human [and] didn’t appear to know what to do with themselves”.

Contestants soon did. When Big Brother launched it had been suggested – quaintly – that they might grow their own vegetables. Later intakes preferred to grow their own careers in showbiz. As Jacques Peretti notes in his book, Edge of Reality: “Finding that holy grail of the authentic contestant, the ingenue who isn’t going to play up to the camera, was becoming increasingly hard.”

The Salon had celebrity customers, too, including Michael Barrymore who wisely declined to join the over-the-top Ricardo in the Jacuzzi. I was sorry to have missed Dani Behr, late of The Word, as we’d met previously during a recording of that riotous show and could have discussed how the slot “I’ll do anything to get on TV” – example: consume one’s own vomit – had helped light the fuse for what Big Brother et al became.

If Big Brother really did start out as a social experiment then that was soon forgotten as a gaggle of crazed exhibitionists queued up for the chance to leave the building trade – the occupation of first BB winner Craig Phillips – far behind.

I cannot criticise them too much. On The Salon I started out wanting to write a piece for this paper having all my prejudices about reality TV confirmed, only to end up showing off. And George Galloway cannot criticise, admitting to me about his turn on 2006’s Celebrity Big Brother: “I started out fully intending to write an epic novel in my head about the Spanish Civil War. By the end, I was falling out with [pop singer] Preston over ownership of a bun.

“That’s Big Brother, though. It gets everyone in the end.”