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Reality TV show Big Brother is 20 years old. A whole generation of young people will not remember a life before reality television, but those who do will tell you it was different. Private and public were defined spaces. We did not “share” with strangers. Emotion was not a form of currency.

These days we associate those behaviours with social media but reality TV paved the way and normalised it all. It’s not often you can point to a single moment which changes culture and society. But at 11pm on 18 July 2000, that’s exactly what happened. Ten strangers went into a house, lived under constant camera surveillance, and performed for us.

Gemma Newby, producer of Radio 4’s series Watching Us examines the reality TV phenomenon and its impact on society, not least in helping propel a faltering New York property tycoon to the most powerful job on the planet.

Those first Big Brother house inmates were like astronauts, experiencing something for the first time that no-one else had. If they had any pretentions to “acting”, they fell away within a week.

The world was starting to resemble one huge reality TV show.

What was also new was the technology. Cheaper ways of filming loads of material, plus somewhere to put it all – the internet – meant that those who watched the live stream could view hours of unedited content, in all its glory… and mundanity.

It was both, at times, and that’s what made it exciting. That first series was probably the first and last time on UK reality TV that we saw contestants being themselves because they didn’t know what it meant to “act” differently, and they soon forgot they were being watched. Compare this with reality shows such as Love Island today, where cast members already have agents and huge Instagram followings before they even enter the house.

And it genuinely felt different for television as a medium: ordinary people, from ordinary backgrounds, got to have their voices heard for the first time, unmediated by documentary makers or news producers. People got to represent themselves, warts and all. And they were just like us. They were us.

For a whole generation of people, especially younger people, reality TV took a strange idea – share your life with strangers if you want to be successful and want to be your best self – and made it seem completely normal.

And for viewers in the early noughties your “best” self often meant the middle class idea that people, especially working class people, should strive to improve themselves, becoming more productive, more future-orientated: always “on a journey”, always growing; don’t look back at where you’ve come from, but think of where you want to get to instead. It chimed so well with the new meritocratic society espoused by Tony Blair, the first Labour prime minister to take power in my lifetime.

Digital democratisation

Digital media – at least, the form that was envisioned in the late ‘90s – was meant to be democratising. Everyone was going to be a creator. And that’s one of the trends that Big Brother tapped into. But we were too busy being amused to notice reality TV was a Trojan horse for a new kind of deal between us and the screen. Surveillance – the very thing that George Orwell’s Big Brother had warned us against – was being reframed as entertainment.

And the participants’ willing submission to being monitored all the time was being reframed as a form of self-expression, a form of participation that was then harnessed, commodified and sold to viewers as reality. And then sold back to them.

By enlisting us as free workers, we viewers were part of the show. Millions of us were suddenly deciding what happened on TV every week. We had a stake. We became the producers and the contestants. Big Brother tore down the barrier between us and the screen, and we stepped through the television. Ten years on, Big Brother had started to get dull. Contestants had learned how to perform for the cameras. To keep the show interesting, the producers had to keep making the show weirder and more unnatural, always upping the ante – hence the creation of Celebrity Big Brother. Soon, TV execs were hunting around for the next big trend in reality TV – one that reflected the 2010s just as Big Brother had reflected the noughties.

And that’s when they invented “structured reality”. The Only Way Is Essex, or TOWIE for short, was at the vanguard of this new genre. Imagine real life but with professionally lit, exaggerated performances, and skilfully edited plot lines. Cast members with great hair and perfect teeth who knew instantly how to turn themselves into brands. Because something else had also happened in the intervening years since Big Brother had hit our screens – social media. Much like I could watch the live stream of Big Brother ten years before now fans of TOWIE or Made in Chelsea could follow the cast in real time through social media – a feedback loop between contestants and fans was created. The barriers between them and us, performer and consumer, were further dissolved.

The cast of these shows were normal people, but looked like extras from a soap. The scenes were constructed, but the emotion was real. The lines between truth and fiction were starting to blur...

By now more than a decade of ubiquitous reality TV – from Big Brother to Pop Idol to the Apprentice to TOWIE – was starting to mess with our collective sense of what reality actually was. It was no longer some objective truth, mined by journalists and documentary makers, separate from drama. Reality was on TV every day and night, performed and edited for entertainment. And emotion was becoming the main currency for authentic representations of that reality.

Just as fame was seeming more achievable and the stars more normal, social media and smart phones finally took off. Suddenly we had a camera and a TV channel of our own – complete with ratings and an audience.

But how should we behave now that we had our own reality shows? Like our favourite stars, of course. Be emotional. Create drama. Turn every mundane act into a form of self-expression to be shared with the world. Flatter, filter and edit ourselves constantly. Perform a version of ourselves even if it’s not quite real. And crucially, keep on sharing.

Now we’re all reality TV stars, we compare ourselves daily to other people’s carefully edited reality, and they compare theirs to ours. And we all worry: are we keeping up?

Thanks to the growing dominance of the tech giants by the mid-2010s, the world was starting to resemble one huge reality TV show. Millions of us performing, curating and sharing our lives with the world. And all of it was being collected and analysed to increase engagement. No-one realised all these trends – emotion as truth, performance, and mass data collection – were about to propel a reality TV star to the most powerful office in the world.

The Apprentice took a struggling businessman and edited into existence a self-made billionaire. A man who spoke his mind and cut through the crap to get things done – qualities teased out, encouraged, and amplified by TV producers.

It doesn’t matter that Donald Trump lies because everyone is lying. Nothing is real. Everyone is editing, everyone is tricking you. Everything is “fake news”. And in the world created by reality TV, emotion and spontaneity is truth.

Twenty years ago, who could have guessed, sitting on a sofa at one in the morning watching 20-year-olds get drunk and flirt on camera, that this documentary-cum-game show would revolutionise TV, transform our ideas about truth, surveillance, technology, and in the end, even politics?

But it did. And it changed history.