Photos: Scott Webb
Over the past 20 years there have been more than 500 seasons of your favourite show across the globe. Big Brother Africa is, of course, the ultimate coming together of countries, with up to 17 nations represented in one house.
But at various times in its illustrious history, Big Brother has broken borders. We’ll keep it continental at first: following two successful seasons of Big Brother Angola in 2014 and 2015, Mozambique was added to the mix in 2016, a shared language of Portuguese binding the housemates.
Amongst the intriguing twists, the Head of House was able to evict or bring back housemates, and there were both fake housemates and nominations. We’re sure it’s no mistake that Anderson Mistake won, but it’s worth noting that ex-pats from as far away as Sweden, Canada, and Cape Town were included in the mix.
Here the eventual winner and fellow housemate Matilde get into a heated war of words:
And Mistake’s winning moment:
Sweden was paired with Norway for three seasons from 2006, their languages sharing much in common, and ratings rocketed. Twists included separate households per nation, housemate exchanges, and more returning housemates and fake evictions. Erotic actress Aylar Lie made a name for herself on the show and went on to star in music videos for Basshunter.
While the British version of the franchise previously accepted Irish entrants, they must now reside in the UK, while the Indian version, dubbed Bigg Boss, has multiple versions in various dialects. Meanwhile, the Middle Eastern spin-off included an array of Arabic-speaking countries, including Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Syria, and Tunisia.
Titled Big Brother: The Boss, the plot twist was that the show was shockingly, but perhaps unsurprisingly, called off after 11 days following multiple complaints about the fact that it featured six men and six women living together in one area, which is taboo in Muslim culture.
The fourth season of Big Brother Serbian aka Veliki Brat, in 2011, brought together Balkan nations Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and North Macedonia, at that point the largest number of nations that had participated – of course, Africa then blew them out of the water.
Among the novel features was the ability to field phone calls from outside the house, a lessening of the final prize for infractions and shopping, a “poisonous” arrow that resulted in penalties for the housemate it hit, and “Indecent Proposal”, in which Big Brother offered housemates the chance for one evicted housemate to return in exchange for €35 000 from the prize fund.
With a cross-pollination of countries comes the opportunity to innovate, and it’s one that Biggie’s grabbed with both hands.
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