[LEE]

The following interview has been sent to me from Endermol, and is not one carried out by me or anyone else at TiBB.

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An interview with Phil Edgar-Jones, Executive Producer of Big Brother and Celebrity Big Brother

Phil Edgar-Jones works at Endemol UK as the Executive Producer of Big Brother, and will perform the same role on the programme’s unmissable celebrity counterpart when it hits the screens in November. This time around, Celebrity Big Brother is longer (ten days compared to seven last time) and on air a whole lot more (live, hour-long programmes every night, regular editions of Big Brother’s Little Brother, and live streaming on E4). “Basically, we’re taking over Channel 4 for ten days.” he says.

When Phil Edgar-Jones talks about the show, it’s unmistakably with the evangelical enthusiasm of a genuine fan. “Oh, I love the programme,” he admits readily. “I’m a huge fan of it, so I love the fact that I can sit there and watch everything happen every single day. And you never know what it is that’s going to happen. The sheer unpredictability, that’s the absolute beauty of it.”

It’s not just the unpredictability on-screen that he’s referring to either. “The viewers take us as much by surprise as the housemates – they vote people out we never expected to be voted out half the time.” Another thing that the viewers did this summer that surprised Phil was tune in to Big Brother in record numbers. “It took us all by surprise – a very pleasant surprise, mind you. We didn’t quite expect it to go through the roof the way it did this year. It’s turned into a real summer event, and there’s a lot of anticipation around before it starts, with people waiting with bated breath to see who the new housemates are.” All the more so, one imagines, for Celebrity Big Brother, when the new housemates are six famous faces.

So how does the selection process for Celebrity Big Brother work? It’s not just a matter of sticking a pin in the showbiz pages, as Phil explains: “We compile a wish-list of who we want in there, sure, but we want people from a variety of different backgrounds in the celebrity world, and we want to choose people who are a bit different from those you’d expect to see in there. We’ve also got to consider how well their characters will work together in the house.”

Of course, there are those who think that the celebrity participants pop in to do a couple of hours filming each day and then go back to their cushy lives – something that the constant streaming on E4 will disprove this time around. Phil is keen to emphasise this: “We want the celebrities to live the Big Brother experience the same way that your normal housemates would live the Big Brother experience. So the show is essentially the same. Of course, the one key difference is that this show will be raising money for charity.”

But the celebrities will be treated exactly the same as normal contestants. They will be completely cut off from the outside world and will have to earn their food budget via tasks, living a back-to-basics existence. And will there be any more surprises in store, like the house being divided into rich and poor sides? “If I told you that, they wouldn’t be surprises,” scolds Phil.

Of course, he recognises, the nature of the programme is subtly different when the people in the house are already famous faces. It’s one of the aspects that fascinates him most about Celebrity Big Brother. “With normal Big Brother, we’re making ordinary people extraordinary. With this, we’re making famous people very, very ordinary, and it’s their ordinariness that’s the most exciting thing.”

Sometimes it’s people’s very ordinariness that leads to the show’s most charming moments. In Big Brother earlier this year, one incident in particular enchanted Phil. “It was the ‘Glorious British Revolution’. Tim got left on the rich side all alone, and was trying to encourage everybody to first of all escape, and when they wouldn’t do that, he encouraged them to come over to his side, and they wouldn’t do that. So he tried to get them to take off their microphones, and they discussed that for a while, and then they came to the diary room and threatened to walk out. Eventually they just had a cup of tea and forgot it all. For me, that just summed up the British way. It tells you more about our national characteristics than thousands of documentaries and news programmes.”

That, in a sense, is the real attraction of Big Brother. It holds up a mirror to modern Britain, warts-and-all, no artifice or spin. And if there’s one thing more exciting than seeing normal people at their most honest and open, it’s seeing celebrities in the same position. That’s why Celebrity Big Brother could have people all over the country completely hooked. And Phil Edgar-Jones will be one of them.