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When TV sex is 'educational'

Teen Big Brother starts tonight and, yes, there's bonking. Channel 4's head of Learning Heather Rabbatts tells John Plunkett why it's worth it

Monday October 13, 2003
The Guardian

They were the sort of headlines likely to delight the publicity machine at Channel 4, but may have had their colleagues in the station's education department nervously biting the ends off their pencils.

"Horny Teens Show Big Bruv Way To Go," declared the Daily Star. "Bonk on Big Bruv," screamed the Sun. Three years after the first Big Brother, the tabloids finally got what they wanted. Except it came in the unlikely guise of a specially tailored teenage version of the show commissioned by Channel 4's educational division, 4 Learning, for a schools and college audience.

"You could predict what the headlines were going to be as soon as it happened," says 4 Learning managing director Heather Rabbatts.

"On one level you wish that wasn't the case because they won't see some of the really important things going on in the programme. But at the same time, these are 18-year-olds and it is part of the fabric of their lives. It happened, it's part of their life, their parents know about it so what's the big deal?"

Teen Big Brother features eight 18-year-olds, four men and four women, who spend 10 days in the Big Brother house. Unlike its grown-up equivalent, the show has already been recorded and there is no public voting. There is also only one bedroom.

The daily tasks are more rigorous (from fixing a toilet to simulating a flight from London to Birmingham), and the accent is on dialogue and co-operation rather than getting drunk. In a remarkable show of restraint, cigarettes and alcohol are barred.

"The biggest difference was not doing it live," explains Rabbatts, ex-chief executive of Lambeth Council and a former governor of the BBC.

"Although 18-year-olds are incredibly savvy, they are also quite vulnerable and the pressure on them [during a live show] would be huge. It can be a tough world out there."

Indeed it can, as one of the two housemates who shared rather more than the Big Brother bed found out.

"I was a bit overwhelmed that [the media] found out as soon as they did, before the programme went out or anything," said Jade, a barmaid from Lowestoft in Suffolk. "It depends - when it actually goes out on TV I'll probably be completely different, but now it doesn't bother me that much."

The incident will be included in a post-watershed version of the show, which begins on Channel 4 tonight. A cleaned-up version for schools and colleges will air in the channel's morning schedule in the new year.

So what can we expect to learn from the teenage Big Brother house?

"We had a real mixture of young people from all parts of the country at different stages of their life," says Rabbatts. "One is going to university, one has dropped out of school and one is very career minded."

Another housemate, Hasan, is a Muslim, while Belfast hairdresser Paul is gay. "The question is can they can get on together, complete their tasks, take responsibility for making decisions and live with the consequences?"

The housemates' discussion is certainly frank. Within hours of meeting they have already covered teenage pregnancy, losing their virginity, and the strangest places they have had sex.

Racism and homophobia are also debated. It's enough to make the playground flirting of, say, Helen Adams and Paul Clarke from the second Big Brother, look positively immature...

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