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Big Brother: Big Brother House
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Big Brother is a reality television format. In each series, which lasts for around three months, a number of people (normally fewer than fifteen at any one time) live together full-time in a "Big Brother House", isolated from the outside world but under the continuous gaze of television cameras. The housemates try to win a cash prize by avoiding periodic, usually publicly-voted, evictions from the house. The "real life soap" was invented by the Dutchman John de Mol and developed by his production company, Endemol. It has been a prime-time hit in almost 70 different countries. The show's name comes from George Orwell's 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which Big Brother is the all-seeing leader of the dystopian Oceania.
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Big Brother is akin to a real-life soap opera in which contestants try to avoid periodic publicly voted evictions from a communal dwelling. The housemates, as they are known, are confined inside a specially designed building and forbidden from communicating with the outside world. They do not have access to writing materials, let alone such luxuries as the internet, radio and television. The only people to whom they can speak are their fellow competitors and some of the show's staff. The public watches daily highlights packages and evicts entrants at regular intervals. The last person to leave the house wins the prize.
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Saturdays (8:00-9:00 PM, ET/PT) - Nominations', ' Big Brother , which began in 2000, has become an annual tradition for fans; every summer they are treated to new houseguests, new challenges, and new evictions! Here\'s how the game works: each week, there is a Head of Household challenge, where all of the players compete for the power in the house. The HoH then nominates two other houseguests for eviction. Several days later, a Power of...');">Full Summary [+]
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Big Brother USA currently uses a different set of rules that began with the second season (the first season used the traditional format). Nominations are done by one houseguest, the Head of Household (HoH) and the houseguests vote for which nominee to evict, not the viewers. The third season introduced the Power of Veto, where a houseguest can save a nominee causing the Head of Household to name a replacement nominee. It's been adapted in Brazil and Africa and since then some countries modified their nominations rules.
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Big Brother was developed by John de Mol and was first aired in the Netherlands in 1999. The concept was rather simple but ... rather revolutionary: twelve people volunteered to be locked in a specially built house full of cameras, and they were filmed 24 hours a day. Their activities could be followed 24/7 through the internet, and fragments of the day were shown each night in a television show. To make this all a bit more exciting, viewers could periodically vote for one person to leave the house. The person remaining in the house until the end would win a large prize in cash.
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The Big Brother format has been adapted in some countries in that the housemates are locally known celebrities. These shows are called Celebrity Big Brother or Big Brother VIP, depending on where the series is. In some countries, the prize money normally awarded to the winning housemate is donated to a charity, and all celebrities are paid to appear in the show as long as they do not voluntarily leave before their eviction or the end of the series. The rest of the format rules are almost the same as the ones from the original version, although in many occasions they are not so strict due to the exceptional character of the program. The series has been a prime-time hit in many countries and was aired for the first time in 2000, in the Netherlands.
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Big Brother House