Who broke Britain? Welcome to The i Paper’s opinion series in which our range of experts tackle this question and identify the individuals whose decisions caused the country’s biggest problems. • David Cameron: The unlikely villain who casually killed the Conservative Party• Tony Blair: A sincere deceiver who broke Britain’s trust on migration• Ed Miliband: the man to blame for the wreckage of this Labour Government• Denise Coates: The queen of a 24/7 gambling culture that ‘destroys families’• Steve Jobs: The twisted genius who turned us all into lonely, anxious addicts• The historic blunder of one ‘Tory toff’ that means your council is utterly useless• The man who buried students under a Himalayan mountain of debt• William Beveridge: the man to blame for Britain’s disastrous benefits system

Who broke Britain? Welcome to The i Paper’s opinion series in which our range of experts tackle this question and identify the individuals whose decisions caused the country’s biggest problems.

• David Cameron: The unlikely villain who casually killed the Conservative Party• Tony Blair: A sincere deceiver who broke Britain’s trust on migration• Ed Miliband: the man to blame for the wreckage of this Labour Government• Denise Coates: The queen of a 24/7 gambling culture that ‘destroys families’• Steve Jobs: The twisted genius who turned us all into lonely, anxious addicts• The historic blunder of one ‘Tory toff’ that means your council is utterly useless• The man who buried students under a Himalayan mountain of debt• William Beveridge: the man to blame for Britain’s disastrous benefits system

Peter Bazalgette, the TV producer and executive who has spent a considerable chunk of his life as the most important man in British television, will always be best known as the person who brought Big Brother to the UK.

Which he probably finds at least a little bit tiring, now he is 72 and given his other successes as a defender of public service broadcasting, a champion of the creative industries, the former chair of Arts Council England, English National Opera and ITV.

But he has never been ashamed of it. No matter how many credited him with the degradation of popular culture, or blamed him for the debasement of standards and social mores, he has only ever revelled in criticism, amused (he once described Rebecca Loos’s unsavoury pig incident on his Channel 5 show The Farm as “charming”, and a “serious exploration of animal husbandry”). Bazalgette has made a career by provoking a reaction. And as the godfather of reality TV, he has transformed society as we know it.

Bazalgette grew up – without a television – in London, the son of a stockbroker and a pianist and the grandson of the Victorian civil engineer Joseph Bazalgette, who created London’s sewage system (something his detractors found ironic, given what they thought of his programmes).

He went to the public school Dulwich College, then devoted most of his time at Cambridge to his presidency of the Union Society and writing a gossip column for the student magazine, rather than his law degree. His father had described journalists as “ghastly types who hung around in pubs”, which he quite liked the sound of, so after graduating he started as a BBC News trainee before being poached by Esther Rantzen to work as a researcher on That’s Life. He claims to have learnt his trade “at Esther’s knee”.

In the late 1980s, Margaret Thatcher had shaken up the TV industry, demanding that the BBC and ITV must end their monopoly and commission at least 25 per cent of their programming from independent production companies. So he founded one, Bazal, and developed Ready Steady Cook and Changing Rooms. Those shows, for the BBC, demonstrated there was an enormous public demand for fun, lifestyle formats that brought ordinary people in. It was his first revolution and proved stars and scripts are unnecessary: good stories would write themselves.

That was something he would prove again on an even grander scale with Big Brother. In 1998, Bazal was bought out by the Dutch media company Endemol (Bazalgette made an estimated £4.6m) and he was the driving force behind bringing its Big Brother format to a British audience. After a bit of a revamp – new music, new house design, new logo – it launched in July 2000. This wasn’t simply no script and no stars, this was also TV featuring no talent, no skill, no expertise at all. Just 11 ordinary strangers in a confined space, 24/7 surveillance, telephone voting, and live evictions.

This was his second revolution, and well, you know how it turned out. It was an abomination; it was a phenomenon. It was a platform for classism, racism, homophobia, conflict of every kind and sexualised and trivialised everyone; it was the most diverse casting on screen. It was mindless, tribalist, trash TV; it was a social experiment. It was the death knell of public propriety; it was every shade of real life reflected back at us, and just as compelling.

Its legacy is much greater than its litany of controversies, from the Jade Goody racism row to Kinga’s bottle in the garden, to the explosive outbursts of Nikki Grahame. Greater than its infamy for the irresponsible casting of the unstable and fame-hungry, or its encouragement of extreme behaviour and subsequent poor welfare.

It is even greater than the infinite copycats it spawned and the reign of reality TV that continues, decades later. No, its real legacy – its most damaging, lasting impact – is its toxic message that everyone and everything is interesting, no matter how bad or banal. Dumbing down television was a lesser crime compared to this.

Yes, I’m afraid that in democratising television and bringing the British public in to just be themselves and talk about themselves Big Brother opened Pandora’s Box. It confirmed that talent really had become redundant. People will watch you do anything no matter how much it rots their brains and not only this, but you have a chance at becoming rich and famous in the process.

Now, I’m not here to get high and mighty and repeat the usual complaints about reality TV. Everyone knows all of them already and besides, I’d be a hypocrite because I watched a hell of a lot of Big Brother when I was a teenager and absolutely loved it, especially in its water-cooler years (I even watched the live footage for hours on end). Same goes for Love Island, same goes for Made in Chelsea, and in fact those are the classy ones. I have mainlined reality TV that was inappropriate, unethical and probably straight-up evil – and still enjoyed it. I’m not a complete snob about it, nor am I immune to its temptations.

I do however believe that reality TV, and its fusion with nascent social media in the 2010s, led to a culture in this country in which we absorb everyone else’s lives and personalities so continuously, passively and pervasively that we fail to sufficiently establish our own.

It is almost unfathomable that Big Brother’s original concept – watching ordinary (ish) people exist – could have been considered radical or risky given we now spend hours every day doing exactly that. Modern celebrity is dominated by vloggers and influencers and ex-reality stars, unremarkable people telling us – and especially younger, impressionable generations who have known nothing else – “what I eat in a day” and inviting us to “get ready with me”. They are leveraging capital and power with exposure alone.

It was Bazalgette who made this possible by doing away entirely with the assumption that television needed to be good quality, respectable, high-concept, educational or challenging at all and in fact proved that delivering the opposite would be a hit.

He did not serve a fantasy audience, with a desire for self-improvement, education, discovery and discerning taste. He served the real one, who turned out to be a lot less discerning than anyone might have liked to admit. Maybe the British public wasn’t as intelligent or classy as previously thought? Maybe an awful lot of us were among the “lowest common denominator”? Because make no mistake, reality TV’s audience is the mass public.

The continued influence of all this is not limited to reality TV. It is everywhere in the media, an industry in which talent is no longer enough.

Actors are more likely to be cast if they are big on social media and willing to gurn at a front-facing camera eight times a day and let the masses into their “real” lives. Radio jobs increasingly demand existing audiences more than broadcasting experience. Fewer new presenters are rising the ranks to follow in Graham Norton or Claudia Winkleman’s footsteps, as “personalities” with big followings get the opportunities instead.

Even worse is how all this – reality TV, social media, personal branding, the endless documenting of everything and the pressure to self-promote at any cost – has poisoned our real lives. We have now come to expect we should know everything about everyone. We feel a pressure to surrender our privacy in order to prove we aren’t boring.

In this era of oversharing, we assume everybody is interested in us and indeed that we are fundamentally interesting. Despite most of us having fewer interests than ever, because we are so busy insulting our intelligence by bingeing on everyone else’s lives. It’s made us selfish. It’s made us apathetic. It’s made us insincere. We strive for less because we assume “personality” is enough.

Peter Bazalgette didn’t cause all that, of course. He just made a programme that exposed everyone at their ugliest, and there was no going back from there.

The mark of a good TV producer is being able to detach one’s own tastes and ego from the audience’s. To have an instinct for what people really like, no matter if it is “low-brow” or just not very good.

Bazalgette, who claims to be “no-brow”, who describes himself as a “fishwife at heart… Like Les Dawson in a hairnet gossiping over the fence”, understands this innately. He didn’t try to dictate what other people should find interesting or entertaining, instead simply revealed the chasm between what people say they enjoy, and what they actually do.

It was a genius move, and a diabolical one, and we are all the worse off.

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