1) It’s hard to believe it’s been 20 years since Big Brother first landed on UK screens, what do you miss most about presenting it?
DM: I know, god I can’t believe its 20 years. Over the 11 years that I did, it developed a lot and changed a lot. The beginning few years, I loved the anarchy and the fact we didn’t know what was going to happen or how it worked. The first couple of series, we didn’t know how anything would pan out or how people would react. Then in the next few series, people used to say ‘oh it’s a set up’ or ‘the producers are fixing it’ but actually, we never knew what was going to happen. We might have put two people in that we thought ‘they definitely will fancy each other’ and then they don’t fancy each other at all. Free will is such an amazing thing. I remember there was a task where my producer said that we were going to put them all in cardboard boxes. I asked ‘are you sure, that is going to be the most boring bit of telly ever’ and he went, ‘yes, we’re going to do it’. It turned out to be the best thing I’ve ever seen. I’ve never laughed to hard! You just never knew what was going to work or be brilliant!
2) You hosted Big Brother for a total of 11 years, so it must have been a job you loved to do?
DM: Oh my god, I loved it so much, so so much. It is one of those programmes if you invest in it, it gives back. It is like a soap opera, if you invest in a soap opera and you watch it for a week, it will give back to you in so many ways because you get totally engrossed in the plot and the cast – you know everything about it. There was the cult of Big Brother where a certain group of people were as obsessed as me and we could talk about it for ever. The nuances and the little things you would notice. Would the housemates notice that Big Brother had put something in the garden? Had the people at home? It became sort of a clique that we were all a member of. So that’s so nice to be back with the obsessives! Also live television, I LOVE live television. There is no point in filming something live, if there is no danger of something going wrong, which it often did in Big Brother – it was so very exciting – that’s what people were watching for.
Full Interview at
http://www.jonn.co.uk/2020/06/interview-with-davina-mccall-for-big.html
