“…CBB UK began in 2001 as a one-off series capitalising on the success of Big Brother, and it has historically included international/ national film, TV and music stars (albeit it those who are past their 'prime'), alongside British and American reality TV contestants (Bleakly, 2016: 421). The programme received a clear spike in academic and popular visibility following the notorious 'race row' in 2007 -when Jade Goody, Danielle Lloyd and Jo O-Meara were widely seen as having expressed racist attitudes toward the Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty (see summary in Palasinski et al, 2011). However, outside of this, and despite the programme's history of igniting debates about misogyny, sexism, racism and homophobia (Lovelock, 2015), there has been little research analysing the programme's significance as a 'trigger of everyday political talk' (Graham and Hajru, 2011: 24) -an omission that this article seeks to address.…”