Big Brother is so named because of the evil leader in George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. But not many Aussies seem to know that
September 09, 2014 3:03PM
by: ANTHONY SHARWOOD
WELL that was a surprise. Or maybe it wasn’t. No, come to think of it, that wasn’t much of a surprise at all.
News.com.au just took to the streets of Australia to see if people who watch the TV show Big Brother know why it’s actually called Big Brother.
The response of the random individuals we interviewed? Donut. Bagel. *Frisbee. Zero. Not a single person of the 20 or so we spoke to had the faintest idea of the reason behind the show’s name.
If you’re in that boat too, this story is for you. Read it to the end. Because Big Brother says you should.
The show Big Brother takes its title from the famous novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell.
Big Brother as he was imagined by film-makers in the film of the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, released in 1984. Note the similarities to Stalin and Hitler, the tyrants of Orwell’s day. Source: NewsComAu
Published in 1949, Nineteen Eighty-Four is universally regarded as one of the great novels of the 20th century, not to mention a spookily prescient view of the future.
In Orwell’s imagined dystopian hell, England (now called Airstrip One) is part of a larger geopolitical entity called Oceania which is run by a totalitarian regime. Thinking original thoughts is a crime. Love is a crime. Basically everything worth living for is a crime in a world whose every last corner is surveilled by cameras and spies.
Controlling all this is a figure known only as Big Brother. Think Kim Jong-un without a boyish face, or without any face really, because Big Brother may or may not even exist. The spectre of him, the very idea of Big Brother, is in many ways more frightening than the reality of Big Brother.
The only other thing you need to know, by way of historical reference, is that Orwell wrote the book after witrnessing the tyrannical regimes of Hitler in Germany and Stalin in Russia.
OK, so there’s your background. Now here’s where this gets interesting.
And here are some flamingos at the Big Brother house to lighten the mood a little. Source: Channel 9
In the late 1990s when a bunch of Dutch TV producers conceived the first series of a show which would go on to be franchised in as many as 70 countries, they came up with the name “Big Brother” as a reference to the round-the-clock, round-the-world surveillance of Orwell’s fictional world. The TV character of Big Brother represented the all-seeing eye behind the cameras, and there was a slightly dark, unnerving overtone to that.
These days, things have changed. The character and indeed the concept of TV’s Big Brother has no such negative connotations.
In Orwell’s novel, we cheer for Winston Smith, the staunch individualist who fights Big Brother before ultimately capitulating to him. On the TV show Big Brother, most of us cheer for Big Brother himself as he ritually humiliates the tryhards competing for public profile and future jobs as radio hosts on regional FM stations no one has heard of.
This image of the 2014 Big Brother House is empty and vaccuous, just like the contestants now occupying it. Source: Channel 9
And if you think about it, this shift mirrors a shift in society’s attitude. In the late 1990s, surveillance was still regarded as something a little dark and wrong. Today, surveillance is a readily accepted part of life – from security cameras in the street to the trails we leave online at our every cyberstep.
In other words, Big Brother probably hasn’t changed that much, but our attitude towards him has. Which is kind of interesting when you think about it.
*Anyway, now you know why the show is called Big Brother. Oh, and when we used the image of a frisbee to suggest the number zero, obviously we meant one of those Frisbees with a hole in it.