More than 20 years on from one of the most chaotic nights in history, the Daily Mail's Tales from the Celebrity Trenches has reunited key players from Big Brother 5 to reveal what really sparked the show's infamous Fight Night.
Showbiz
Big Brother Director Exposes 2004 Fight Night Blunder
More than 20 years on from one of the most chaotic nights in reality TV history, the Daily Mail's Tales from the Celebrity Trenches has reunited key players fro...
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Series winner Nadia Almada, fan favourite Victor Ebuwa, longtime narrator Marcus Bentley and former director Ben Hardy joined host Jamie East to relive a bust up so explosive that viewers called police on the show.
It was the early hours of 17 June 2004, Day 20 of the fifth series of Big Brother. For the first time in the show's history, two housemates, Emma Greenwood and Michelle Bass, were shockingly reintroduced to the house after a fake eviction the week prior.
To , Big Brother had laid on a fancy dress party for the housemates, with alcohol flowing freely.
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More than 20 years on from one of the most chaotic nights in reality TV history, the Daily Mail's Tales from the Celebrity Trenches has reunited key players from Big Brother 5
What began as a food fight between Victor and Emma Greenwood quickly escalated when Emma screamed 'I'll f***ing kill you' and the pair began hurling trays at each other
Ben Hardy, who was directing Big Brother that day, told Tales from the Celebrity Trenches that cutting the video created the media storm that followed
What began as a food fight and war of words between Victor and Emma quickly escalated when Emma screamed 'I'll f***ing kill you' and the pair began hurling metal trays at each other. As chaos engulfed the dining area, Jason Cowan confronted fellow housemate Marco Sabba in another room after he refused to help clear up the mess.
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Other housemates piled in to break up the fights and pulled the live video feed from the main areas of the house. But the audio kept running. Viewers were left listening to screaming, smashing furniture and a barrage of insults over a static shot of the empty garden.
'. Emma was ejected from the Big Brother house three days later.
Hardy revealed that following Fight Night, the show tightened its rules on alcohol, with housemates no longer able to buy booze freely as part of their weekly shopping budget.
'It was front page news on every newspaper, we had to react to it,' he told the podcast.
'It would have been completely irresponsible to carry on and allow the same sort of thing to happen again.
'We looked at how much alcohol was in there that night because we still wanted to do things like fake evictions. All these new reality shows do the same sort of things now.'
Nadia Almada, who went on to win Big Brother 5, praised the series as 'the blueprint' for the reality shows that followed, despite the Fight Night furore.
She said: 'We cemented a new genre of reality TV. This was the birth of shows like The Traitors. The blueprint.'
Listen to Nadia, Victor, Marcus and Ben tell their sides of the story by searching Tales from the Celebrity Trenches, wherever you get your podcasts, or on YouTube.
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