Let Us Revisit The Empty, Rotting Carcass Of The Iconic ‘Big Brother’ House

It’s been five years since Channel 9’s not-so-successful Big Brother reboot went off the air, and it looks like the house has both metaphorically and literally been left to rot. A video of a YouTuber exploring the dilapidated set has revealed it to be in worse nick than someone’s brain cells after sitting through all of The Up-Late Game Show With Hotdogs.

Uploaded this weekend by abandoned-location explorer MuiTube, the fourteen-minute video walks through the Big Brother house/set, located on the Gold Coast, in a compound off the Dreamworld theme park. The house has been left to nature and vandals — shattered glass, overturned furniture and an overgrown ‘Rewards Room’ await.

In case you don’t remember the show’s final year, MuiTube has edited the video with comparison footage. It’s all well worth a watch, especially if you’re interested in the behind-the-scenes mechanics of the house, as Mubi takes the time to explain how the cameras would have worked. Mostly though, it’s a fascinating relic of reality TV long-gone.

While the whole thing’s pretty bleak, we’re going to have to give a special shout out to both the ‘Kony lives’ graffiti — and whoever just spray-painted a sad face on the walk up to the destroyed Diary Room, and then wrote the word ‘sad’ underneath it. Too true.

The video — an exercise in hauntology — quickly gained 300,000+ views on the weekend, as it turns out nostalgia, cultural cringe and a vague eeriness are all you need to go viral. In one moment, all three merge when the YouTuber discovers a flyer advertising your ability to ‘rent out’ the house for private parties with DJs and a Big Brother voiceover, all for $3000.

One small downside to going viral: on Sunday afternoon, the house was lit on fire. Queensland fire services says the house was not damaged, and had the fire under control within 10 minutes of arriving.

While the fire services say the cause is currently unknown, the owners of the property — the government-owned Queensland Investment Corporation — telling 7News.com.au they believed it was ‘deliberately lit’.

Junkee has reached out to Dreamworld, QIC and Big Brother production company Endemol for more information on the abandoned set. In the meantime, revisit the house below.