Big Brother (Euro Republics)

Big Brother Euro Republics (also known as Big Brother ER or BBER) is a Euro Republican-Dutch reality competition series for Three and began airing on January 2, 2001. It was one of the channel's first HD programmes.

History
The idea for the show is said to come during a brainstorm session at the production house of John de Mol Produkties (an independent part of Endemol) on 4 September 1997. The first Big Brother broadcast was in the Netherlands in 1999 on the Veronica TV channel. It was picked up by Germany, Portugal, USA, UK, Euro Republics, El Kadsre, Spain, Belgium, Sweden, Switzerland and Italy the following year and became a worldwide sensation. Since then it has been a prime-time hit in almost 70 countries. The show's name comes from George Orwell's 1948 dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The series was initally due to broadcast in October 2000 but for unknown reasons, the series was pushed to the start of the next year. The UK version had aired to fill the void on TV3 and FOX to great success.