Craig wins Big Brother 1, accompanied by presenter Davina McCall

People-watching TV show Big Brother is back tonight for its 10th anniversary. For the Shropshire man who won the first series, life has never been quite the same, writes Ben Bentley.

He wasn’t a lesbian skateboarding nun. He wasn’t a cross-dressing streaker, or someone so bereft of geographical knowledge they thought East Anglia was abroad.

Shropshire’s Craig Phillips was a builder and property entrepreneur, but mainly he was an ordinary bloke the nation took to its heart and resoundingly voted the winner of the first ever Big Brother.

Why? Because of one of the most memorable television moments in the last 10 years.

That moment, in the summer of 2000, came when Newport-based Craig spoke for the nation by standing up for all things right and proper and confronting ‘Nasty Nick’ over his cheating gameshow tactics.

It was one of those punch-the-air moments where justice was being seen to be done, comparable with seeing someone stand up to a bully and force feed them their own come uppance.

By today’s Big Brother standards, the argument, which was all over Nick passing other housemates notes in a bid to sway their nominations, was nothing. On the other hand, it is a fair measure of how far moral values have slipped on Big Brother, series after series.

Really, the Craig/Nasty Nick spat was the moment Big Brother was born. Until then, it was just another television programme with a cult audience, a bit of light people-watching without having to leave the front door. Housemates were getting along swimmingly and it was like watching a TV documentary on the making of The Archers.

But with tongues forked and daggers out, the UK TV industry came to a virtual standstill. Internet viewing figures hit 10 million and Intel quoted this as “the most traffic ever seen live on one website”. Broadcast magazine voted one of the 50 best ever television moments and the Nasty Nick story was on the front page of every national tabloid newspaper. Producers of the show had struck TV gold; they knew now that confrontation was the ingredient they needed. And plenty of it.

That idea – confrontation as entertainment – spawned Frankenstein’s monster as, in an era of new ambition and the cult of celebrity, housemates were selected by how freakish they were and how, manipulated a touch, they might blow up in each other’s faces.

Two years ago I went along to Big Brother auditions. Queueing around the block at Millennium Point in Birmingham, I found half-human creatures bitching and bickering before any test cameras even rolled.

When I asked why they wanted to go on Big Brother, almost all answered with the line: “I want to be famous.” And then proceeded to do something as daft as anything you’ll see in a pantomime.

Among them were dozens of Shropshire hopefuls. I’m loathe to say it, but I knew there and then that not one of them would make it onto the show: they were simply too nice. Some even reminded me of Craig Phillips.

For which we should be glad. For all his fame, Craig has managed to remain pretty much the person he always was – a successful property entrepreneur, albeit one who has now presented more than 800 different TV shows.

In the millennium he was already doing nicely and says he only went in the house for a holiday. But he admits the BB experience taught him plenty about himself that he didn’t know.

Testing

“There’s not many people who have been in that social environment,” says Craig. “To lose your wallet, your keys, your phone and have all your everyday responsibilities taken away from you, it’s a really testing experience. Left alone, being put in there with people you wouldn’t normally spend time with.”

Reflecting on how the show has changed down the years, he adds: “It’s changed dramatically from when I was on it – our series was a lot more tame and we were a bit more normal in the early days.

“With Nick, he was cheating to win the show like we all wanted to do, only in a cowardly way, but that incident does not touch what goes on in the house now. But it established the show and I felt like I missed out on it because I was in the house and millions of people were watching it all at home on TV.”

Ten years down the line, Big Brother seems to be suffering from the law of diminishing returns. The viewing public is, perhaps, becoming dangerously immune to increasingly outlandish behaviour.

There was the whole bullying and race row on Celebrity BB involving Jade Goody, Danielle Lloyd and Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty. The seventh series sparked debate over whether contestants were psychologically fit to be in the house. Shahbaz threatened to commit suicide, Lea had suffered from body dysmorphia and Nikki had anorexia and had previously been sectioned. And let’s not forget MP George Galloway on all fours, dressed as a cat and pretending to lick milk from actress Rula Lenska’s hands.

Year on year, the housemates’ fame would burn brighter, but fade faster. Who can remember all their names now?

It’s like our brains won’t let us recall such information and has purposely erased all knowledge of Big Brother people in the night.

But despite an apparent drop in viewing figures last year, Craig still thinks it remains a popular format and has no regrets about being a housemate himself.

“It’s been fantastic. I’m still ‘on the tools’ only now I do it television. I never went into the house with the intention of being famous or a celebrity – it came my way and I’ve worked hard to maintain a level of media profile but I was more than happy just living in Newport with my building company.”

Craig is one of the lucky ones to have come through the Big Brother experience unscathed. He hasn’t needed counselling, he hasn’t been attacked in public and he hasn’t been questioned by the police.

With the 10th Big Brother starting tonight you might imagine that the show will finally come of age. Don’t hold your breath.

Because, befitting of a programme which thrives on the dysfunctionality of others, here is a programme with a dysfunctional condition of its own – the older it gets, the more juvenile and uncivilised it becomes.