Big Brother 2011: Richard Desmond hopes return is more than OK!

The reality show that introduced the nation to the late Jade Goody and featured George Galloway pretending to be a cat is back. Big Brother has been resurrected by Richard Desmond's Channel 5 after it was axed by Channel 4 and will return with the celebrity edition of the show on Thursday.

Desmond, the straight-talking media proprietor whose empire including the Daily Star, Daily Express and OK! has relentlessly hyped Big Brother's return, said he wanted 20 million viewers. "Anything less is, you know, we beat people up," a typically forthright Desmond told journalists at the programme's launch on Monday. "Joke, that was a joke. 20 million is what we are looking for."

In truth Channel 5 will be delighted with a tenth of that after ratings for Big Brother went into decline towards the end of its 10 years and 11 series on Channel 4.

Desmond has been closely involved in the show, regularly meeting producers, and is said to have handpicked several of the celebrity housemates. The lineup will remain a closely guarded secret until the eve of the launch programme but – like its previous incarnations – can be expected to stretch the definition of "celebrity".

Sally Bercow, the outspoken wife of the Commons speaker, has been linked with the show, as have Jedward, the former The X Factor contestants, and Kerry Katona, who former pop star who won ITV1's I'm a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! and is a favourite cover star of another of Desmond's publications, OK! magazine. Pamela Anderson has also been mooted as a possible contestant, as have troubled Hollywood star Charlie Sheen and boxer Mike Tyson, who have both denied they will appear.

The house has been given a makeover, with a larger living area and its biggest-ever swimming pool. A total of 42 cameras will record it in high definition for the first time and the budget has been stretched to include "high definition wallpaper".

Twelve celebrities are expected to enter the house, with the bedroom area comprising eight single beds and three doubles. No area of the house is free from cameras, with the bathroom featuring a double-headed shower which is "made to share", according to the production team.

Any highbrow aspirations the show once had on Channel 4 – the original 2000 series was regarded as a genuine social experiment that caught the public's imagination when "Nasty" Nick Bateman's double dealing was exposed to his housemates – will be dispensed with on Channel 5.

Former series winner Brian Dowling, who will replace Davina McCall as its presenter, said the emphasis in the new show would be on entertainment. "It is not a social experiment any more," said Dowling. "The walls and the barbed wire have come down. There aren't any chickens. It's a prime-time entertainment show."

Channel 4's most successful show of the past decade – both in ratings and commercial terms – Big Brother became a millstone around its neck in the wake of the Shilpa Shetty race row in early 2007 and was broadcast for the final time by the broadcaster last year. By then ratings for the regular edition of the show had fallen to 2.9 million, half the 5.8 million who watched it at its peak during the third series in 2002, which introduced viewers to Goody.

However, the Channel 5 director of programmes, Jeff Ford, said Big Brother remained "arguably the best-known TV format in the world".

Celebrity Big Brother will be shown every night on Channel 5 for the duration its three-week run, followed immediately by the regular edition of the reality show which is likely to last about three months.

Tim Hincks, chief executive of the programme's producer Endemol UK, said its Channel 5 incarnation would be "celebratory, upbeat, entertaining and funny".

"Big Brother has always reserved the right to show young people doing what young people do," he said. "I daresay there will be people of a certain age or a certain view on life who will find it as offensive as they have always found it.

"We are not changing our view on what is good taste and what is not good taste. We are making it for an Ofcom regulated terrestrial broadcaster. We would have only made one series if we were worried about the public perception of Big Brother."

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