The Chapman brothers, still the art world’s enfants terriblesafter all these years, are coming to prime time. Along with Jimmy Carr and Matt Lucas, Jake and Dinos (born in 1966 and 1962 respectively) will set tasks on Big Brother Celebrity Hijack for a BB house populated by a bunch of “talented”, rather than famous, people (among them a fashion designer, a brother and sister circus act, a boxer and a politician). It would have been great to see the Chapmans in the house itself and fend off, as they have done for years, personal questions about themselves. One journalist was told to “f*** off” and escorted from their studio after offending them.

The brothers grew up in Cheltenham and Hastings. After attending state schools they studied at the Royal College of Art (“a complete waste of time”), graduating in 1990.

They began as assistants to another noted duo, Gilbert and George, and became collaborators in 1992. The Chapmans first came to public attention with the naked and brutalised dolls that were exhibited at Sensationat the Royal Academy in 1997, the show that bought the YBA (Young British Artists) generation to the attention of the tabloids. In 2000 they created Hell, 30,000 miniature Nazi soldiers in tableaux arranged in the shape of a swastika, which was bought by Charles Saatchi for £500,000 and destroyed in a warehouse fire in 2004. The brothers have created a new version of it and it is “even more horrible” than the original, says Dinos. Of the mutilation that figures throughout their critically hailed work, Jake has said: “It’s about petrified death and dead religion. We’ve always been religiously childish. We still are.” They recast Goya’s Disasters of War as hand-painted etchings, and returned to it as inspiration for a piece in a retrospective of their work last year at Tate Liverpool.

Are they as scary as their art? “People sometimes confuse us with the work, but no work of art has ever been personal,” says Jake, who is more loquacious than Dinos. In interviews they speak opaquely about art and don’t care how lofty they sound. (“I’m a f***ing artist! I speak in the jargon!” – Jake). Jake married the model Rosemary Ferguson in 2004 and has two children. Dinos is married to Tiphaine de Lussy, who runs a knitwear label, and has two daughters.

“We’re not joined at the hip,” Jake has said. “Our lives are very different. We didn’t merge our work because we were brothers. We did it because our ideas converged.” At last year’s Frieze Art Fair they turned the Queen’s nose on a banknote into male genitalia, seemingly unaware of the Currency and Bank Notes Act 1928, which makes this an offence. Dinos claimed: “We weren’t defacing the notes, we were embellishing them.”

An artist taking part in Hijack may well outdo them at courting controversy. A fine-art student, Amy from Leeds, wants to turn her experience into a Turner Prize entry. Beat that, boys.

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