Ecosse: Celebrity big daddy

Edgar-Jones is creative director of Big Brother, or Celebrity Big Brother as the show becomes every January, the man who selects the contestants and courts them into taking part, something not so difficult when persuading the quasi-forgotten thespians such as Rula Lenska, but the work of several years if you’re after disgraced comic Michael Barrymore.

Since starting life as a spoof for 2001’s Comic Relief show, Celebrity Big Brother has taken on a life of its own and this year’s show has been of a different order altogether. Edgar-Jones proudly dubs it the “dinner party from hell”. The past fortnight has seen Celebrity Big Brother ascend to a new realm of horrid compulsiveness. Producing more water-cooler moments per episode than any of its predecessors, the show has never been a hotter potato.

Partly this has derived from the slow unravelling of Barrymore, the revelation of the mental fragility he sustained during his downfall and ostracisation following the mysterious death of Stuart Lubbock in his swimming pool. Partly it has stemmed from the catty freakishness of the transvestite pop star Pete Burns, the communal persecution of the dismal glamour model Jodie Marsh and the inclusion of Chantelle, a non-celebrity lobbed in by Edgar-Jones as a post-modern satire on the flimsiness of contemporary fame. More than anything, though, and as its maker readily admits, this year’s Celebrity Big Brother has caught fire for one compelling reason in particular: the participation of George Galloway MP.

There is no denying the grisly compulsion of Galloway’s recent voyage through the looking glass.

While his constituents claimed that Galloway had missed Commons debates on vital local issues and websites appeared encouraging his return to work, the MP for Bethnal Green and Bow could be seen on all fours imitating a cat, dressed as a vampire, haranguing Marsh for being a “wicked, wicked girl” and nurturing a curiously butch comradeship with Barrymore.
By the end of week two, Galloway’s stated reason for participating in Celebrity Big Brother — to give politics a better-rounded, more youth-friendly face — had been crowded out by the man’s titanic hubris and vanity.

And it’s all down to the lurid imaginings of a 43-year-old father from West Kilbride. Edgar-Jones is pretty much the image of the modern television executive inasmuch as he would pass unnoticed at a Coldplay concert, his Merrell training shoes and expensively-comfy jumper rendering him indistinguishable from his staff. His early years seem as unremarkable. When he was eight the family moved to Barnton in Edinburgh, where his father was in the civil service, and young Philip went to Cramond primary school and then to Royal High. Thrown off his English degree course at Edinburgh University, he went on to study communications at Napier University, before moving to London where he dabbled on the lower foothills of television production, working with Chris Evans on The Big Breakfast and briefly hosting Moviewatch.

After more than a decade he was headhunted to become head of entertainment and features at Endemol, perhaps the most fearsome beast in the jungle of modern independent television-making and certainly the biggest in the United Kingdom. His success there, producing such shows as Big Brother, Space Cadets, Ready Steady Cook and Fame Academy, has been rewarded with control of his own division, Brighter Pictures, which will produce more of the same under Edgar-Jones’s banner.
But this week in the tatty old office block and the various Portakabins next to the George Lucas stage from where Big Brother is produced the only word that seems to matter is Galloway.

“You judge a programme by how many texts you get on your phone afterwards,” says Edgar-Jones. “The night Galloway was revealed as the last guest, I got more than for any programme I’d ever done, all about George, asking how the hell we got him, people telling me they’d fallen off their chairs when George got out of the car. George has helped make this the most interesting Celebrity Big Brother yet, definitely.

“Last year we got Germaine Greer and we thought that was an incredible coup because she is so anti-reality television. We needed to top that. Alistair Campbell — he politely declined. Maybe next year. The logical choice was a sitting MP. Every single one we approached said no except George, who invited us over to the House of Commons. I think in a strange way we made a little connection because we’re both Scottish.

“We shared a culture and a set of experiences in very subtle ways. We had a great chat and it was clear that he knew what he was doing, he knew he’d be battered for it. He made it clear he wanted to reach a generation of voters who don’t vote, though whether he’s succeeded in doing that I don’t know. And obviously, like all people in the public eye, he wants a bit of attention too. For my part I just wanted to know what it’s like to meet a dictator.”

And now you do, I say.

“No,” says Edgar-Jones. “I meant what it’s like to meet Saddam Hussein.”
He adds that he gives every Big Brother contestant, celebrity or otherwise, what he calls the Talk of Doom, where he outlines all the very salient reasons not to appear on the show, including press intrusion, the feeling of worthlessness that follows eviction and the lurking possibility of being petted by Rula Lenska.

Even so, when a contestant abases themselves as definitively as Galloway has done, Edgar-Jones must as producer experience a thrilling surge of joy, a delirious gratitude for the fathomless depths of human idiocy. “Nothing you plan on a show like Big Brother ever quite works as you expect,” Jones says “When you work on Big Brother, you react exactly as a viewer would, you get so caught up in it.

“When George was pretending to be a cat, we stood there watching him, saying to ourselves, ‘My God, what’s he doing?’ You don’t watch it as a television executive. It always staggers me when these things take on these weird momentums. Should what George does on Celebrity Big Brother turn up on the rolling news? Probably not. All sense of perspective seems to disappear. It does get very silly sometimes.”

The Big Brother set is built on the spot where once stood the studios in which The Dambusters was filmed, and next to the lot where The Shining was made, an appropriate pairing given CBB’s combination of group fortitude and degenerating paranoia. We’re still circling the perimeter and searching for housemates, all of whom must be crammed in a corner on the far side of the set, when Edgar-Jones pulls back a curtain to reveal the American basketball star Dennis Rodman just inches away in the house gym, stretching his leg muscles with some complex rope-based contraption.
If we were to move too close to the glass Rodman would see on the gym mirror the outlines of our shadows so we must keep well back, talking in whispers. A few feet along, a cameraman is poised at another curtained aperture, trained on Rodman from a different angle. Oblivious to us all, Rodman strains and stretches in his silent world of self-absorption and unnatural light. There may well hundreds of thousands others with us, watching via the continual live coverage that runs on Channel 4’s supplementary stations. It is a profoundly strange feeling to watch somebody through a two-way mirror. Their ignorance of your presence provokes a kind of pity, something even odder when the someone in question is a 6ft 7in athlete with a faceful of ironmongery.

Stumbling over cables in the darkness, we move around the house. In one room Pete Burns, quite amazingly burly in the flesh, is applying eye make-up to Chantelle and Traci Bingham, who used to be in Baywatch. Vague and distracted, Michael Barrymore drifts from room to room like a wraith searching for its body. We pass the diary room, in which the housemates confess to Big Brother (or Katy) their innermost thoughts and fears; on television it looks sharply technological but through the mirror it seems to be have been assembled from blue eggboxes. The final stop is the living room where Galloway, his ever-present cigar puttering away, holds court for his small coterie of admirers, one of whom is named Maggot. “I have to confess,” Edgar-Jones whispers, “I really, really like George. He’s a great guy.”

Few television shows have had their ethics debated as energetically as Big Brother. Depending on your viewpoint, its amalgam of voyeurism and manipulation either holds a mirror to reality or mangles it into a sensationalist pulp where what seems like a new species of person battles to plumb fresh depths. As head of entertainment and features at Endemol, a spectacularly successful maker of reality television worldwide, Edgar-Jones is at the pointy end of the debate and has shaped a robust defence, particularly to the argument that Endemol in particular preys on Britain’s new breed of credulous misfit wannabes.

“This is an accusation levelled typically by middle-aged, middle-class men, who have this real snobbishness about who should be allowed on television,” Edgar-Jones says. “Nobody had ever seen someone like Jade Goody before Big Brother III but there are hundreds of thousands of Jade Goodys in Britain. They don’t normally get access to TV and with us they do.

“Rather than say, ‘isn’t it outrageous how young people behave these days’, we should accept that this is what they’re like. Incidentally, I have exactly the same psychometric profile as the typical Big Brother housemate, so I could be one, and I’m a property-owning father in his forties.”

But why does it all have to be so relentlessly vulgar, with contestants simulating sex acts with wine bottles in gardens, as happened on Big Brother IV? If you go on a holiday in southern Spain with British people, Edgar-Jones argues, you’ll see the same thing every night. “It happens, it’s probably always happened. Fundamentally, though, everyone I put in the house has something about them I like and whose story I think I can bring out. They’re not the scum of the Earth. People have always done mad, foolish things. They’re not common for doing so. Posh people do mad, foolish things. Everybody’s done something they wish they hadn’t done. ”

We wait to discover whether such will prove to be the case with the increasingly bizarre Galloway but if it does, the fiendishly mischievous mind of Edgar-Jones will be heavily implicated, having finetuned a format that no participant can get the better of, despite their initial certainty that they can.

Populist and proud to be so, Edgar-Jones considers himself a storyteller first and foremost, in a medium that feasts on the telling moment of horror, the split-second that ends careers. He’s at the top of a strange tree.

“There’s a terrible cliché about television,” he says, “that it isn’t as glamorous as it looks, that behind the scenes it’s quite run-of-the-mill. The truth is, actually, that it’s 100% as glamorous as it looks. It’s fantastic. I mean, the other day I was in a meeting room with Jimmy Saville. It doesn’t get any better than that.”