Big Brother is back – but can it be ethical and entertaining?
When Nick Bateman entered the Big Brother house back in July 2000, one of the first UK contestants picked out of tens of thousands of hopefuls, he had no idea what was coming.
Thirty-five days later, he was asked to leave via the back door following his attempts to manipulate nominations. After a showdown with housemates led by the eventual winner, Craig Phillips, he returned to real life to find his face splashed across the tabloid front pages, and the nickname that remains to this day: “Nasty Nick.”
“You’re not trained for that,” Bateman tells Sky News. “You’re not trained in life, or school, or university, to be a normal person one day and well-known, famous – infamous – the next.”
Craig Phillips, pictured with original host Davina McCall, went on to win the first series after his confrontation with Bateman
This weekend, Big Brother is being revived by ITV and contestants now will be well aware of the millions of eyeballs on them. But back then, the inaugural housemates failed to believe anyone was really paying attention.
It was the start of the noughties reality TV juggernaut, paving the way for everything from Love Island and Britain’s Got Talent to the likes of Shattered (in which contestants were deprived of sleep) and the controversial There’s Something About Miriam, the dating show that cruelly exploited the fact it star was trans as a “twist” for the unwitting men vying for her attention.
Would reality TV have turned out differently, perhaps more kindly, had we never witnessed the scandal of that first series? The Nasty Nick drama was a ratings winner, lighting the flame for our obsession with real-life tension and controversy. From that moment on, producers on shows across the board were tasked with keeping it burning.
Bateman, who now lives in Australia, says duty of care back then was about “box-ticking”, with no support after your time on the series ended. The reaction to his “crime” was shocking but he was able to handle it. “Of course it upsets you but you have to be fairly thick-skinned because not everyone will like you,” he says, gamely. “It’s part and parcel if you’re in the public eye that you have to accept you can’t be universally loved.”
Love Island has increased welfare packages for contestants in recent years. Pic: ITV/Lifted Entertainment
Other reality TV stars have not coped so well, and shows such as Love Island in particular have been criticised following the suicides of former contestants, and host Caroline Flack, with welfare packages for later series bolstered.
Now, there is increasing focus on duty of care, and Big Brother producers Banijay have announced a lengthy support programme for the new housemates as they prepare for instant fame. But for those glued to the drama, it’s also undeniable that the fights, squabbles and drunken antics have often made the best TV.
Several episodes of Love Island have sparked complaints to Ofcom over duty of care to contestants – but at the same time, those episodes are also ratings winners and the most talked about on social media.
So can reality TV in 2023 be ethical and entertaining?
‘Generating strong emotions has to be handled carefully’
Big Brother is back! Here’s how it looks in 2023. Pics: Initial TV/ITV
“There’s no doubt that what people like to see in broadcast productions is drama, and drama often involves heightened emotions – both positive and negative,” says Professor John Oates, chair of the British Psychological Society’s media ethics advisory group, who has helped develop guidelines for duty of care for broadcasters.
“It’s really how that’s managed and how that’s evoked, if you like, from the participants. That’s an ethical and moral matter, and I think we’ve come a long way in realising that deception, withholding information from people and doing what the industry calls ‘reveals’, may be unethical. And generating strong emotions has to be handled very, very carefully so that it still respects the dignity and the autonomy and indeed the privacy of the participants.”
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It is increasingly recognised that being involved in a production such as Love Island or Big Brother can have long-term effects, says Professor Oates, and it could be argued that these types of shows encourage the “voyeuristic impulses” of viewers.
“I think most people are quite intrigued to see other people’s lives, partly because we don’t always know or think that we’re managing our own lives awfully well… and in shows like Big Brother, you are looking quite deeply inside other people’s lives. That could be seen as voyeurism.
“But it can also be said that this can be helpful to people, to see how people manage their lives, how they manage stress, so on and so forth. So there are positives and negatives, and managed well, reality TV can be beneficial to audiences.”
‘Entertainment does not need to be at the expense of welfare’
Katy Manley, managing director of producers Initial, part of Banijay UK, says Big Brother will return with an “authenticity and a rawness” that differs from the glossiness of Love Island.
And when it comes to the balance between ethics and entertainment, she says you can have both.
“Obviously we want entertaining content to happen in the house, but that does not need to be at the expense of anybody’s welfare,” she says. “That is the most important thing, our housemates and our whole team and our crew – everybody’s wellbeing is important.
“But that’s not exclusive of producing entertaining content. We’ve got so many experienced people there watching and ensuring that the support for the housemates is there, while we’re still getting good, exciting shows.”
Will the revival work?
For Bateman, almost 10,000 miles away on the other side of the world, there’s a sense of curiosity about the return of the show, which will be hosted by AJ Odudu and Will Best. Its success will lie in the casting, he says.
“It can work if the cast works, but if they get the casting wrong then it will just fall flat on its face… Big Brother is synonymous with what’s happened in the past, they can’t get away from it. And I think they’ll panic if they get low viewing figures or there’s no chemistry between the people.”
Producers should go back to basics, he says, and “not create situations or manufacture people to do things they don’t want to do”. And his last piece of advice? Perhaps they should have sought help from those who know it best.
“I think the best way to cast any shows like this is to get the ex-housemates to cast it, because obviously we’ve been there, done that – and we know the tricks.”
“AI has changed my life, absolutely,” Lucas Horne tells Sky News. “When I play my music, I’m happy because the words I know mean a lot to me can now be heard by everyone else.”
Lucas was 17 when, in December 2016, with no warning, he suffered a large, traumatic bleed across his brain.
He didn’t wake up until almost four months later.
Unknowingly, he had been living with a defect in the blood vessels known as an AVM (arteriovenous malformation), a ticking time bomb which had ruptured, and the next three years of his life were spent in recovery in a care home.
Lucas spent almost four months in a coma after suffering a brain bleed in 2016. Pic: Fanvue World AI Creator Awards
He couldn’t walk and struggled to talk. Writing down his thoughts, almost like a diary, was something he says he wanted to do from very early on.
“During my care home days when I couldn’t really express myself very well – I still can’t – but I could write about it, it was an outlet for me,” he says. “Since I woke up, I’ve been writing… but for a long time I couldn’t record anything.”
Lucas, now 26, has spent years working on his physical recovery and speech. But when he was eventually physically able to record the songs he had been writing himself, he became frustrated by the way his voice had changed.
“It never sounded how I had [it in] my head,” he says. “I’m very monotone in how I speak, I struggle to really display emotion.”
And so he turned to AI (artificial intelligence). Now, Lucas is also known as The BTO Kid, and is one of 15 creators from around the world, shortlisted from more than 500 entries, for the inaugural Future Sound Awards – celebrating artificial intelligence in music.
DJ David Guetta is among the big-name artists who have embraced AI. Pic: Christoph Reichwein/picture-alliance/dpa/AP July 2025
While some artists such as will.i.am, David Guetta, Grimes, Timbaland and even Sir Paul McCartney have embraced certain aspects of AI, it can be a controversial subject in the creative industries – with concerns raised by many in the about issues including copyright, human replacement, fakes, and regulation.
It was one of the issues behind the Hollywood actors’ and writers’ strikes in 2023 – and the more recent video game actor strike, which ended in June after nearly a year of industrial action.
Despite the criticism, AI isn’t going away. Last year was a “breakout” year for the technology in music, according to the International Music Summit’s latest annual business report, with 60m users using AI software.
Lucas says he is a perfect example of how the technology can be used for good.
“I’ve been able to use AI to express how I’m feeling,” he says. “It’s been big for me to create [music] that I’m proud of. I can see the arguments [against it], but from my view I know AI helped me create something I couldn’t before. I’m not Adele, but I have been able to make something that I’m proud of and that expresses my view point of what’s happened to me.”
Read more on AI in the music industry:
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‘AI is lowering the barriers’
BTO stands for Beat The Odds and his shortlisted track is titled AI Gave Me A Voice. “I pinch myself every day because this just can’t be true,” is the opening line – which he says reflects how far he has come from the moment he woke up and discovered what had happened.
“That comes from reality. I do have moments where I think so much has happened that it must not be true… every line means something to me.”
Lucas, who lives in Nottingham, used the AI-powered music production platform TwoShot to create the track, using prompts on what he wanted for the sound alongside his lyrics, inspired by melodic rap.
“I think we’re gonna get quite a lot more people like me that can’t record music and have been given a voice through AI,” he says. “AI is lowering the barriers to entry for a lot of things.” Which can be a negative as well as a positive, he acknowledges. “We’ll have to see where it goes.”
Gallis is among 15 music creators shortlisted for the Future Sound Awards. Pic: Fanvue World AI Creator Awards
Launched by the Fanvue World AI Creator Awards, The Future Sound Awards aim to highlight the ethical use of AI in music, organisers say. Fanvue is a subscription creator platform with more than 180,000 users.
Some 15 artists from the US, Europe, Australia and Asia, as well as the UK, have been shortlisted for prizes, and the winners will be announced later in September.
Lucas is one of two British creators on the list, alongside Gallis, from Essex. The 31-year-old first dipped his toe into the waters of the music industry about 10 years ago, after joining the urban-pop boy band Mr Meanor, but says the industry was hard and “it all got a bit too much”.
He is now a tattoo artist and fine painter, but continued his songwriting and started to try out AI music production tools about 18 months ago.
Read more on AI in the music industry:
‘Regulate it before we’re all finished’
‘It’s like saying you can burgle my house unless I ask you not to’
Silent album released in AI protest
UK Music organised a protest against AI copyright plans at Westminster earlier in the summer
AI has ‘made me more creative’
As an artist, he says he had his own concerns about AI before he started using it himself, particularly after image generators started becoming prominent online.
“It was stealing the work that I was doing,” is how he describes his initial feelings. “But I ended up jumping on board with it and for me personally, it’s inspired me so much. It’s made me quicker at what I’m doing, it’s made me more creative. And I think it’s the same with music. I think it’s gonna, if anything, grow the industry.”
However, he says he agrees with criticism about the ethics of how some AI models are trained – following controversy about work by human music artists and authors being used without consent. “And trying to impersonate exactly someone else and using someone else’s voice, I don’t agree with that at all,” he adds.
Gallis’s shortlisted song, Chiropractor emerged from “friendly competition” with a community of creators he came across when he moved into AI, trading feedback and ratings. The genre is Trinibad, which he says there isn’t enough of “in the AI world”, and the track is designed to get people dancing.
“I mainly stick to urban music, but I like writing in a lot of different styles,” he says. “I’ve done house songs, I’ve done UK drill songs, Afrobeats, amapiano. I’m a bit of a vibes man so if it makes me dance and move and smile that’s when I really enjoy it.”
Narcis Marincat, head of AI at Fanvue, says the stories behind the selected songs show a “richness and human emotion” that appealed to him and other judges.
“The impact of AI in music continues to divide opinion,” he says. “But for the first time, via the Future Sound Awards, we’re able to show a different perspective on the positive impact of AI in music – uncovering the real people behind the technology and sharing their stories and music.”
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