Celebrity Big Brother is a British television reality game show based on the Dutch show Big Brother, created by producer John de Mol in 1997. The show follows a number of celebrity contestants, known as housemates, who are isolated from the outside world for an extended period of time in a custom built House. Each week, one of the housemates is evicted by a public vote, with the last housemate named the winner. The series takes its name from the character in George Orwell's 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.