Celebrity Big Brother is airing on ITV 1 and ITVX
Marcus Bentley is knackered.
He’s been the voice of Big Brother and Celebrity Big Brother for 23 years, ever since the first series. But his life isn’t just narrating Love Island contestants flirting in hot tubs: he also earns his keep hosting corporate awards shows who play off the gag of his strong Geordie accent.
“I had a late night,” he tells City A.M., flat cap on. “I was in the West End doing an event for the most boring awards I’ve ever come across: The Air Conditioning Awards. I’m very grateful for work, but a little bit knackered this morning.”
The industry calls Bentley’s type of voiceover work playing ‘the voice of God’, and he clearly loves it. Throughout our conversation he deviates into Big Brother and Celebrity Big Brother impressions off the cuff without being asked. “People love my voice for some reason,” he says, adding in his hammed up Big Brother voice: “People love the shooooooowwwwww.”
Bentley goes to the Celebrity Big Brother studio to record his voice overs even though he doesn’t actually appear on the show. In the run-up to the latest series of Celebrity Big Brother which has just kicked off on ITV1, as ever, he’s had to be especially careful with his voice. If he loses it, how would the show go on?
“I can feel if my voice is really tired and a little bit tight,” he says. “I got a ginger immune boosting shot from Marks & Spencers. I don’t want to get a cold before Big Brother. It would be awful going [and he reverts to that voice again but with a snotty undertone]: ‘Day one in the Big Brother house.’”
Big Brother heralded a new era of reality TV when it launched in the Netherlands in 1999 and then the UK in 2000. The nation became obsessed with watching strangers eat their cornflakes in the morning, coexisting with people they’d never met before for a period of months in one house. There are cameras everywhere except in the bathrooms. In 2018 Channel 5 dropped the brand but its appeal still resonated. In 2021 30 Big Brother productions aired over 25 different international markets.
In 2022 ITV2 announced its comeback would feel “refreshed” and “contemporary”, with “familiar format points…but a brand new look and some additional twists that speak to today’s audience.”
“We’re all curtain twitchers and we all like to gossip, no matter what people say, we’re all people watchers and this is the ultimate people watching show,” says Bentley. “It’s very organic, Big Brother. We put these housemates in and of course, Big Brother manipulates the situations with tasks but invariably it’s these people, how they interact, relationships forming and you know, we’re all very complicated people. It’s just human interaction. I think we love seeing it and with our show it’s organic and I think that’s what people miss. They miss the organicness, the growth.”
Bentley believes that the magic of the Celebrity Big Brother formula is that no one can lie or present a fake version of themselves for the whole length of the show – at some point that facade is going to get shattered, but the show reveals the ways in which we all protect ourselves with different or “fake” versions of ourselves depending on who we’re with.
“It’s what I would do,” says Bentley, if he were ever a contestant. “I’m going to be on my best behaviour. I want people to like me, I want to put this persona over, we do it, I’m doing it now. We all do it in interactions but you can’t keep that up, you can’t keep it up for even a couple of days. And then your true self starts coming up and those cameras will not lie, they will pick up those little facial expressions that will reveal the truth of what someone feels.”
Bentley studied acting at the East 15 Acting School in Essex before working opposite Liz Hurley on ITV’s London Burning and on the 1995 drama Mad Dogs and Englishmen, before focusing on voice acting when the Big Brother job came up.
Of his favourite Big Brother and Celebrity Big Brother moments over the years, Bentley says “loads of things” come up. “Things like Jade [Goody] and her verruca in Big Brother 3. Of course my favourite housemate would probably be Vicky Grahame and her outlandish ‘Who is she?!’ The legendary Verne Troyer crashing his mobility scooter a little bit worse for wear into the dining room door at quite a high speed, that was quite a funny moment. When Angie was told of the demise of her superstar ex husband David Bowie and it was a complete misunderstanding that one of the housemates Dave Guest had died, and he just so happened to be lying in bed having a rest with, weirdly enough, the duvet over his head.
“It was just this really terrible misunderstanding…”
Some viewers praised the “chaos” of the new set of contestants on last year’s new series, and with Sharon Osbourne, Louis Walsh and Kate Middleton’s uncle locked in together for the next few weeks, Bentley’s bound to have the opportunity to splash that big Geordie accent around reacting to some absolutely ridiculous moments.
Celebrity Big Brother continues on ITV1 and ITVX
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