It is the most unlikely U-turn since the Sun dumped Page 3 – the Daily Star has turned its back on Big Brother.
The paper, Big Brother’s most consistent fan since it returned to TV on Channel 5, tells its readers the show is “in crisis” after half a million fans switched off.
The Star says viewers are “moaning it was ‘full of wannabes’ and not real people” (although how that differentiates this version from previous series is not clear).
But perhaps the paper’s change of heart should not be so unexpected – until last year both Channel 5 and the Daily Star were owned by Richard Desmond, before he sold the channel to MTV owner Viacom for £450m in a deal completed last September.
This is the first run of Big Brother since then (although there was a celebrity edition at the beginning of the year).
Ratings for Big Brother’s opening night audience this week were down 300,000 on last year, to 1.8 million. Its second episode ratings fell to 1.3 million, said the Star.
A TV insider told the paper it is just a “watered down version of the celebrity version. There’s just as much egotism and attention-seeking but we don’t know who any of these people are – so why should we care about them?”
We may see an echo of the media coverage of the show when it first aired on Channel 5 in 2011 after it was axed by Channel 4, when it was largely ignored by all the other papers apart from Desmond’s Star (and Daily Express).
Eventually the other papers, including the Sun and the Mirror, gave more coverage to Big Brother. It remains to be seen if the Daily Star does the same. Or if this time round, viewers really are fed up with Big Brother.