In the Observer, Barbara Ellen writes that BIG BROTHER needs a break.
In past weeks [the crowd] booed and waved placards for unpopular evictees Adele ('Bitch') and Tim ('Ginger Minger'). It was as if the Big Brother house had just been exposed as a paedophile hide-out. Somehow, it sounded like exactly the same noise on Friday, but then subtlety was never the byword of Big Brother. Over the past weeks there have been scenes of mass hysteria outside the house on Friday evenings that make the wholesale 'grief' at the death of Diana resemble a one-tissue snivel. Not that anyone minded. You gotta over-react at times like this. It's all part of the BB experience.
Great as she is, Barbara has forgotten one thing. BB is escapist entertainment. It is complete escapism, something that we might or might not aspire to emulate. In many ways, the show allows the rest of us to set our lives in perspective. Are we worried about our looks? Maybe, but we can laugh along with (or at) Tim. Concerned that we're not going to join the high-IQ club Ultra? Neither will Jade. Fun loving but can't hold your drink? Kate is like you. Well-meaning but grumpy? There's a soul mate in Alex. Almost all the audience will have recognised something of themself in at least one of the fourteen contestants. Most of us saw ourselves in more than one.
Why berate the clowns, or the audience, when all the time the ringmaster (desperate, grasping Channel 4), was to blame? This year, more than any other, Big Brother exposed itself as a franchise, arguably one of the sourest examples of corporate Mc-Programming ever seen on British TV. Whereas with previous Big Brothers it was all about the tedium and the glory, this one was just about tedium.
There was a lot of tedium in BB, this is true. Yet if we were to film anyone for nine weeks on end, most of their life would be humdrum stuff. "10:07am. Frustrated by the callers, Weaver goes to the coffee machine and gets a drink." "10:12am. This is the manager's sixteenth inane question in the 47 minutes since she arrived."
Even the rich-poor gimmick, which started out as an experiment in psychological violence and divisiveness, soon turned into a yobbish one-note drone ('Oi'm gonna get you, oi am.').
Eh? The division into two sides brought us rebellion from Spencer, near rebellion from Tim, cemented Alex's position as The Provider and leader of The Harem, and showed that Kate could survive better than just about anyone else. Where was this yobbishness of which thou speakest? Sure, the divide perhaps went on for one week too long, and I don't think that it's worth repeating next year. As the defining idea of this year's contest, though, it did its job.
It's significant with this Big Brother that when evictees were vilified it was for things that didn't matter (Tim's ginger hair) rather than things that did (his alleged 'Paki' joke, which, if it happened, should have resulted in Channel 4's automatic eviction of the little snot. 'Comprendez?', as Tim would have said).
Pray tell, why should Tim be pulled for telling a piss-poor, allegedly racist, approximation to a joke? If he's that much of an unthinking racist, then he's going to be thrown out by the public at the first opportunity. And, hey, that's what happened. Had C4 or E4 broadcast it, they would have had the book thrown at them by the ITC. This is why the friggin' 15 minute delay was brought in.
Telling racist jokes is not an offence in itself. It's amazingly offensive, and Tim was a complete dimwit for forgetting the constant surveillance, but it doesn't break the rules of the game or of the land. It strikes me that our commentator wants to be more of a bleeding heart liberal than thou.
Similarly, it's significant that it didn't matter who won. The contestants ended the series as they began - virtually indistinguishable from each other. No sweetness, no diversity, no Brian versus Helen, no Anna versus Craig. They were representative of nothing and no one. Just an interchangeable gormless scrum, the kind you get when a provincial nightclub empties out in the early hours.
There's sense in this statement, the contestants did lack individuality and difference. There was the thick one, the posh one, the preening one, the mad Scottish one, the big entertainer, and half a dozen identikit twentysomethings, one of whom won. On the other hand, take twelve viewers, and you'll get a similar mix. I'm not a huge proponent of the argument that BB is a microcosm of life, but snooty liberal commentators need to look down their nose at the rest of us, and remember that it's true. In the group, there will be a thick one, one who can't hold their drink, one who tells jokes that are not politically correct, and half a dozen who look interchangeable at first glance.
Precisely because the 2002 contestants were so interchangeable, however many millions voted, it said nothing about 'society', though it did say rather a lot about how nifty tweenies were getting at text-voting. Indeed, Big Brother's so-called record figures were the biggest con of all, as were the late-ish transmission times.
However many elderly saddos (like moi) were watching, this was kids' TV, pure and simple. Nothing wrong with that. It just wasn't, as billed, commitment-event TV for an young-adult audience. Post-modern? Not any more. For the core audience it was probably more a case of post-bedtime.
Again, I say, wha'? 10pm for the uncensored feed, 7pm for edited highlights in a studio setting, live coverage around the clock on E4. This was a show aimed at people who could aspire to be in the house, maybe next year, maybe in a few years. Mid-teenagers to thirtysomethings. Peak age around 25. The sort of people who couldn't give a flying stuff about the news bulletins on the other two channels, and want some sort of fun at the end of their day.
The paradox is that Reality TV has moved on (some of it is even rather good now) but Big Brother seems to have moved backwards. Its only real chance is to go away for a couple of seasons, then return, picking people at random off the census and talking them into it. That, at least, would solve the problem of self-selecting idiots who prove themselves to have personality disorders simply by applying.
Constructedreality shows have moved on. SURVIVOR was a class act, and in spite of being on the bigger ITV didn't get the audiences of BB. Yet BB has adapted. This year introduced the division. Next year, there are plenty of other ideas - the Head of Household, anyone?
As for the selection, I really don't think that Endemol got that quite correct this year. Last year was a blast from the drop, this year didn't really roll till a month in. But when it got going, it really got going. The highs were better than anything from the previous two series.
There I was on Thursday, watching again as moody model Alex issued a quasi-Shakespearean speech from the bottom of the Big Brother staircase. Priceless.
It was all about his regrets: Regretting coming in, regretting staying in, regretting everything. A broken man apologising to himself and the nation, a bit like Hamlet with designer face fuzz and hair gel. Watching him, swaying about in self-pitying grandeur, you couldn't help but think: Excuse me, you have regrets? How do you think I feel? How do you think any viewers feel? After all, we're not going to rake in a cool quarter of a million because we were stupid enough to watch Big Brother.
Yet we've escaped from our lives, we've seen other people's attempts to cope with a scenario in which we wouldn't, and we can discuss the whole thing in the office tomorrow. BB brings people together by showing up the flaws in the collective psyche. In that way, it is nothing more, and nothing less, than a soap opera. With the added advantage that all the people in it are not players, they are themselves. Adele really is that two-faced; we've got the evidence. Lee really is that vain; examine the footage. Spencer really is that enigmatic; you get the drift. Kate really is popular; we've got 3 million records that say so.
There's a bit of everyone in Kate. Cool without being standoffish, nice without being obsequious, pretty without being vain, popular and insecure combined. Kate embodies qualities we want to have, and qualities we don't want to have. I've yet to see anyone suggest that Kate should not have won; she seems to be the most common psychological archetype this year, perhaps more than camp Irishmen and lazy Scousers were in the previous years.
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