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Celebrity Big Brother contestants coached to avoid race row repeat

The stars due to appear on Celebrity Big Brother when it launches this week have been coached about the race row that consumed the show two years ago and warned not to repeat such behaviour.

The reality show, which returns to Channel 4 on Friday after a two-year break because of the row involving Jade Goody and Bollywood actor Shilpa Shetty that prompted the most serious crisis in Channel 4's history, is expected to include celebrities including Ulrika Jonsson, Scottish politician Tommy Sheridan and Austin Powers actor Verne Troyer.

Programme executives said they were confident they have done everything necessary to prevent a repeat of the controversy that consumed the show, prompting more than 50,000 complaints.

Celebrity Big Brother executive producer Sharon Powers said all the celebrities had been spoken to about the 2007 controversy and been sent DVDs of previous series of the show.

"We have spoken to the celebrities. If they have not seen it already we have explained to them the things that happened in the last Celebrity Big Brother and made the rules really clear to them, what sort of language won't be tolerated and unacceptable behaviour," said Powers at the programme's launch yesterday.

"We have spoken to all of them in detail and they are all very clear what the boundaries are. I think they have all seen [the show]. We have told anyone who hasn't seen it to go and look at it on YouTube."

Executive producer Phil Edgar-Jones added: "Frankly they are not stupid. They know if they say anything like that they will be chucked out."

The last series of Celebrity Big Brother, which aired at the beginning of 2007, became the most notorious show in Channel 4's history.

Shetty's treatment by fellow housemates Goody, Danielle Lloyd and Jo O'Meara prompted 54,000 complaints to the station and media regulator Ofcom and led to effigies being burnt on the streets of India. As the row escalated, Gordon Brown was forced to defend Britain as "a country of fairness and tolerance".

Ofcom ruled that Channel 4 had breached the broadcasting code and Channel 4 was also forced to air three apologies ahead of the 2008 Big Brother series.

Powers said: "We don't ever set out to create controversy as such. What we aim to do is get an interesting bunch of famous people who we talk to and meet on an individual basis.

"The truth of it is we don't really know what is going to happen. The first time they meet each other is when they walk through the Big Brother doors. That's the beauty of Big Brother."

Edgar-Jones said a special welfare team would watch the contestants around the clock to spot if anyone was feeling isolated, unhappy, or not unwell.

"We do understand there is a lot of scrutiny of television at the moment. Procedures have been pretty much the same [and] we have tightened them up. If things are getting out of hand we will deal with them," he said.

David Williams, the commissioning editor for Channel 4, said: "From a channel's point of view it has never been a case of sanitising Big Brother. As we do after every year we look at our procedures. We have got procedures in place which are tried and tested so that we can cope with every eventuality."

Celebrity Big Brother was rested at the beginning of 2008 in the wake of last year's race row, but its replacement, Big Brother: Celebrity Hijack, failed to capture viewers' imagination on digital channel E4.

The final of last year's Celebrity Big Brother, won by Shetty, averaged 5.8 million viewers across two hours of television. It peaked with 7.3 million.

But the final of this year's main Big Brother show attracted the lowest audience of any of its nine series' climaxes, with a peak of 5.1 million viewers watching Rachel Rice emerge as the winner, according to unofficial overnight figures.

The show's ratings high-point was series three in 2002, when Kate Lawler's victory attracted an average of 9.4 million viewers to the 10pm final night show – a 50% share of the audience.

The programme was axed in Australia this year because of low ratings.

Source: The Guardian