Housemates
In total, 144 housemates have walked through the doors of Big Brother over the past nine years – 66 male and 78 female. With more female housemates it might be expected that more winners would be of the fairer sex but no, only three of the nine winners so far have been girls.
It hasn’t all be plain sailing for the housemates; some even wanted to leave voluntarily. Of the 14 housemates that have left without a public vote half of them have walked out the back door, or, in one case, climbed over the wall (Sandy). The other half were removed for breaking BB rules.
BB8 saw the most housemates ever in one BB household with 23 people all living in the house at some point over the run. With this many people you’d expect more arguments and more annoying housemates than ever but it was BB9 which saw the highest ever public vote to get one of the housemates out. This title goes to Nicole who, with 94.4% of the vote, did herself no favours with her attitude towards boyfriend Rex.
Love
Just call Big Brother ‘Cilla Black’ as there have been 14 relationships in the house over the run… unfortunately only one of these are still together, BB9’s Luke and Rebecca. But the power of BB is still strong with three couples even getting together post BB – some of whom didn’t even share a house with each other. There is also the next generation of BB being born with two BB babies – Tom and Claire (BB1) having the first UK BB baby and Lee and Sophie (BB3) having the second.
Prizes
Big Brother is a generous type, giving away over £793,500 in prize funds – this includes the £100,000 given to Liam in BB8 for just generally being a nice guy and the £50,000 Sara and Lisa split in BB9 for just generally being… nice people. Those in BB5 didn’t get off so lightly though with each task seeing them add or lose to the prize pot. They ended up with the grand total of £63,500 from a £100,000 fund. This wasn’t helped by housemate Kitten who helped the fund decrease even further by refusing to leave the house – for each minute she stayed, the money got lower and lower.
House
The last few series have seen housemates living in the house for anything up to 13 weeks but in total housemates have spent 685 days in the house which adds up to a colossal 16,440 hours.
It’s not just the number of hours or number of housemates that is impressive. Behind the scenes is a whole host of technical aspects that add up to some pretty big figures. Around 382 cameras have been used to keep an eye on the housemates over the past nine years as well as over 340 microphones and 18,000 radio mic batteries. Clearly, there is nowhere to hide in BB. To keep it all up and running over 640km of cable has been used in the set up – that is 80km longer than the English Channel.
