Red Moon
20-08-2006, 10:14 AM
Warm humanity that is Big Brother
Andrew Anthony
Since it's inception six years ago Big Brother has been assigned the weighty role of a giant mirror held up to society. What does it say about us, our mores and morals, and in particular our attitudes to Portuguese transsexuals? But if it started out as one mirror, it's since become a whole hall full.
For what does it say about us that we watch such a programme? What does it say about the participants that they are prepared to be watched? And what does it say about us, in turn, that we want to watch people who want to be watched? And so on and on and on.
And it did go on. Apart from the many hours of live coverage on E4, there were also Big Brother's Little Brother, Big Brother's Big Mouth and Big Brother's Big Brain - all there to cater for and stimulate our need for further reflections on what it all means. The irony, of course, is that the more you watch, the more society recedes until such point, somewhere on the event horizon of reality, that it is completely absorbed by what takes place in the house. Big Brother then fulfils its Orwellian promise: it is society.
Given the current state of the world outside, you have to wonder if that's such a bad thing. It certainly seems to have been beneficial for the housemates. All who survived until the last week, with the exception of the winner Pete, appeared to become nicer, or at least less aggressive, people during their stay in the house.
In Pete's case the last couple of weeks, during which he announced his love for Nikki, saw an anxious and competitive side of his character that had not previously surfaced. He really wanted to win, so much so that for a moment it seemed as if he might lose. Each time he canoodled with the brittle child-woman that outcome loomed ever larger.
Up until Nikki's controversial return, he had registered levels of niceness that few mortals could hope to match. Not only was he kind to humans but to animals too, including a rat. And also, no less impressively, to Lea. In a year in which the programme fell victim to a bizarre outbreak of false mammary syndrome, Lea, the sometime porn actress, stood two clear breasts in front of the other silicon sisters. Alas, both of them went beyond the cartoonishly comic to the borderline of tragic, like some cosmetic buffer zone between the woman and the world, a no-man's-land of damaged personal space.
But Pete got through. As Lea herself phrased it, 'Pete's the dog's' - her uncharacteristically delicate abbreviation for 'dog's bollocks'. He disarmed her, as he disarmed us all, with the type of innocence which is often and wrongly called childlike. In fact his uncorrupted state was quite knowing. Without wishing to audition for Big Brother's Big Brain, I'd say that while Pete's Tourette's distanced him from what passes for normal, he was active in maintaining the arrangement.
Almost every woman in the house, and some would say Richard, too, developed a crush on Pete - literally, when it came to Lea's embrace. It's hard to say whether it was his jovial spirit, a sort of benign Puckishness, that won their hearts, or the irresistible call of his human beatbox - one of the most richly percussive vocal displays heard since Mungo Jerry recorded 'In the Summertime'. Or perhaps it was the knowledge that there was no risk of their advances being reciprocated. Not, at least, until Nikki returned to the house.
It was once reported that Nasty Nick, the half-cocked Machiavellian from the show's first series, was seen dating wonderful Edie Falco, Carmela in The Sopranos. Not wishing to relinquish my last vestiges of belief in natural justice, I've never been prepared to accept the story. But if it was true, then it now takes second place in the list of least-likely Big Brother romances.
In another highly competitive field that featured Shahbaz, Lea and Sam, Nikki was arguably the housemate least wedded to sane behaviour. If there is such a category as volcanic neurosis, Nikki was a walking Krakatoa. There was nothing so trivial that couldn't trigger an eruption in the misleadingly diminutive blonde. She didn't need a psychiatrist so much as a seismologist.
Instead she got Pete, and she got him because Big Brother changed its own rules. There isn't space here to explore the many ramifications of bringing back contestants who had already been voted out.
And that decision may yet be the subject of litigation relating to phone charges allegedly made under false pretences. But it's fair to say that it broke the quarantine that isolated the housemates from the real world.
There is an argument to say that Nikki was in no danger of encountering the real world either in or out of the house. Yet the vital membrane of the original idea was torn, its purity contaminated by the apparent need for a commercial gimmick, even if that meant undermining its main selling-point.
What is most compelling about Big Brother, both as entertainment and as a social experiment, is the manner in which it strips away the distractions that protect us from each other. With no work, no books, no television and nowhere else to go, there is only interaction. Every comment and every gesture is magnified by the relentless intimacy of the setting.
Hence the hysterical readiness to take offence that would embarrass even the most grievance-ridden fundamentalist. In this climate of lachrymose down-pours the shoulder that was cried upon tended to be connected to an arm stirring a vat full of excrement. And usually that arm belonged to Richard. No wonder the guy had such pumped-up biceps.
Though Nikki's return marked the point at which the show's innovations really backfired, it was not the first deviation that went wrong. There were the late arrivals of Aisleyne, Sam, the obligatory transvestite, and the curiously pneumatic Susie. And also the parallel, and not very well soundproofed, house, in which a subset of housemates were temporarily domiciled.
Of those add-ons only Aisleyne brought anything memorable to the proceedings. More than Pete and Nikki, Aisleyne was the defining story of Big Brother 7. She arrived in the house a strutting ghetto bitch and left a sensitive sweetheart, albeit dressed like a rap video floosie. She blushed and sobbed when shown a tape of herself before she entered the house. It was as if Jekyll had been given a video of the nocturnal activities of Hyde. She genuinely seemed not to like what she had been only 11 weeks before.
As she put it, 'I never want to go back to being that person, Big Bruvva.' With its gynaecological incidents involving wine bottles and filmed fumblings under the duvet, Big Brother has been accused of having a dehumanising effect on the nation's youth. Here, though, was persuasive evidence of the opposite.
You can take your pick of great TV moments but the one that seemed to sum up this series took place when Pete was interviewed in Welsh in the diary room. His nonsense response was a brilliant piece of looking-glass surrealism that should be entered for, and ought to win, the Turner Prize. When he finally emerged, in a state of deranged jubilation, he seemed lost in a riot of touretic tics. Let's hope Pete can adjust to the strange ways of the real world.
Reality TV may be escapism from reality but reality still manages to find its way on to TV. It was there in vivid grey in Pram-Face, a tender documentary that followed a couple of young single mothers living on council estates in the outskirts of Exeter. 'Because you're young and coz you have a child automatically they assume you are a slut,' explained one of the women. The film set out to counter that image and did so comprehensively. But it wasn't quite sure where else to go.
Ala, a 20-year-old with two toddlers, was the daughter of an alcoholic ex-junkie and a man whose identity she has never known. Brought up mostly in care, she was determined to make sure that her own children, abandoned by their father, never suffered the same fate.
You could only admire her stoicism. And that was the problem: that's all you could do. She didn't have any spare money and life was clearly a struggle, but then in such circumstances it was unlikely to be anything else. She had a flat and income support and little more. And there appeared no obvious answer as to how that would change.
Society did what was necessary and stepped well back. There was no mirror held up here. It was just a brief look into one of the countless windows that normally we don't even offer a glance.
Voodoo Chiles
People say it was with The Apprentice that Adrian Chiles set his stall out as the coming man at the BBC. But for me his moment came during the World Cup when he recited a self-penned poetic epic in the voice of Berlin's Olympic stadium.
Whatever its artistic merits, the poem seemed to confirm Chiles as the man who could do anything. But the temptation for such versatile talents is to do everything. Thus The One Show, the latest bid to revamp the old Nationwide format of 'topical' reports from across the country; topical, as in stories with no discernible news value. So a lot rests on the presenter's appeal. What Chiles lacks in physical beauty he makes up for in, well, Brummy charm. The joke that he could be the new Frank Bough is surely one line that's not to be snorted at.
Source: The Observer (http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1853913,00.html)
Andrew Anthony
Since it's inception six years ago Big Brother has been assigned the weighty role of a giant mirror held up to society. What does it say about us, our mores and morals, and in particular our attitudes to Portuguese transsexuals? But if it started out as one mirror, it's since become a whole hall full.
For what does it say about us that we watch such a programme? What does it say about the participants that they are prepared to be watched? And what does it say about us, in turn, that we want to watch people who want to be watched? And so on and on and on.
And it did go on. Apart from the many hours of live coverage on E4, there were also Big Brother's Little Brother, Big Brother's Big Mouth and Big Brother's Big Brain - all there to cater for and stimulate our need for further reflections on what it all means. The irony, of course, is that the more you watch, the more society recedes until such point, somewhere on the event horizon of reality, that it is completely absorbed by what takes place in the house. Big Brother then fulfils its Orwellian promise: it is society.
Given the current state of the world outside, you have to wonder if that's such a bad thing. It certainly seems to have been beneficial for the housemates. All who survived until the last week, with the exception of the winner Pete, appeared to become nicer, or at least less aggressive, people during their stay in the house.
In Pete's case the last couple of weeks, during which he announced his love for Nikki, saw an anxious and competitive side of his character that had not previously surfaced. He really wanted to win, so much so that for a moment it seemed as if he might lose. Each time he canoodled with the brittle child-woman that outcome loomed ever larger.
Up until Nikki's controversial return, he had registered levels of niceness that few mortals could hope to match. Not only was he kind to humans but to animals too, including a rat. And also, no less impressively, to Lea. In a year in which the programme fell victim to a bizarre outbreak of false mammary syndrome, Lea, the sometime porn actress, stood two clear breasts in front of the other silicon sisters. Alas, both of them went beyond the cartoonishly comic to the borderline of tragic, like some cosmetic buffer zone between the woman and the world, a no-man's-land of damaged personal space.
But Pete got through. As Lea herself phrased it, 'Pete's the dog's' - her uncharacteristically delicate abbreviation for 'dog's bollocks'. He disarmed her, as he disarmed us all, with the type of innocence which is often and wrongly called childlike. In fact his uncorrupted state was quite knowing. Without wishing to audition for Big Brother's Big Brain, I'd say that while Pete's Tourette's distanced him from what passes for normal, he was active in maintaining the arrangement.
Almost every woman in the house, and some would say Richard, too, developed a crush on Pete - literally, when it came to Lea's embrace. It's hard to say whether it was his jovial spirit, a sort of benign Puckishness, that won their hearts, or the irresistible call of his human beatbox - one of the most richly percussive vocal displays heard since Mungo Jerry recorded 'In the Summertime'. Or perhaps it was the knowledge that there was no risk of their advances being reciprocated. Not, at least, until Nikki returned to the house.
It was once reported that Nasty Nick, the half-cocked Machiavellian from the show's first series, was seen dating wonderful Edie Falco, Carmela in The Sopranos. Not wishing to relinquish my last vestiges of belief in natural justice, I've never been prepared to accept the story. But if it was true, then it now takes second place in the list of least-likely Big Brother romances.
In another highly competitive field that featured Shahbaz, Lea and Sam, Nikki was arguably the housemate least wedded to sane behaviour. If there is such a category as volcanic neurosis, Nikki was a walking Krakatoa. There was nothing so trivial that couldn't trigger an eruption in the misleadingly diminutive blonde. She didn't need a psychiatrist so much as a seismologist.
Instead she got Pete, and she got him because Big Brother changed its own rules. There isn't space here to explore the many ramifications of bringing back contestants who had already been voted out.
And that decision may yet be the subject of litigation relating to phone charges allegedly made under false pretences. But it's fair to say that it broke the quarantine that isolated the housemates from the real world.
There is an argument to say that Nikki was in no danger of encountering the real world either in or out of the house. Yet the vital membrane of the original idea was torn, its purity contaminated by the apparent need for a commercial gimmick, even if that meant undermining its main selling-point.
What is most compelling about Big Brother, both as entertainment and as a social experiment, is the manner in which it strips away the distractions that protect us from each other. With no work, no books, no television and nowhere else to go, there is only interaction. Every comment and every gesture is magnified by the relentless intimacy of the setting.
Hence the hysterical readiness to take offence that would embarrass even the most grievance-ridden fundamentalist. In this climate of lachrymose down-pours the shoulder that was cried upon tended to be connected to an arm stirring a vat full of excrement. And usually that arm belonged to Richard. No wonder the guy had such pumped-up biceps.
Though Nikki's return marked the point at which the show's innovations really backfired, it was not the first deviation that went wrong. There were the late arrivals of Aisleyne, Sam, the obligatory transvestite, and the curiously pneumatic Susie. And also the parallel, and not very well soundproofed, house, in which a subset of housemates were temporarily domiciled.
Of those add-ons only Aisleyne brought anything memorable to the proceedings. More than Pete and Nikki, Aisleyne was the defining story of Big Brother 7. She arrived in the house a strutting ghetto bitch and left a sensitive sweetheart, albeit dressed like a rap video floosie. She blushed and sobbed when shown a tape of herself before she entered the house. It was as if Jekyll had been given a video of the nocturnal activities of Hyde. She genuinely seemed not to like what she had been only 11 weeks before.
As she put it, 'I never want to go back to being that person, Big Bruvva.' With its gynaecological incidents involving wine bottles and filmed fumblings under the duvet, Big Brother has been accused of having a dehumanising effect on the nation's youth. Here, though, was persuasive evidence of the opposite.
You can take your pick of great TV moments but the one that seemed to sum up this series took place when Pete was interviewed in Welsh in the diary room. His nonsense response was a brilliant piece of looking-glass surrealism that should be entered for, and ought to win, the Turner Prize. When he finally emerged, in a state of deranged jubilation, he seemed lost in a riot of touretic tics. Let's hope Pete can adjust to the strange ways of the real world.
Reality TV may be escapism from reality but reality still manages to find its way on to TV. It was there in vivid grey in Pram-Face, a tender documentary that followed a couple of young single mothers living on council estates in the outskirts of Exeter. 'Because you're young and coz you have a child automatically they assume you are a slut,' explained one of the women. The film set out to counter that image and did so comprehensively. But it wasn't quite sure where else to go.
Ala, a 20-year-old with two toddlers, was the daughter of an alcoholic ex-junkie and a man whose identity she has never known. Brought up mostly in care, she was determined to make sure that her own children, abandoned by their father, never suffered the same fate.
You could only admire her stoicism. And that was the problem: that's all you could do. She didn't have any spare money and life was clearly a struggle, but then in such circumstances it was unlikely to be anything else. She had a flat and income support and little more. And there appeared no obvious answer as to how that would change.
Society did what was necessary and stepped well back. There was no mirror held up here. It was just a brief look into one of the countless windows that normally we don't even offer a glance.
Voodoo Chiles
People say it was with The Apprentice that Adrian Chiles set his stall out as the coming man at the BBC. But for me his moment came during the World Cup when he recited a self-penned poetic epic in the voice of Berlin's Olympic stadium.
Whatever its artistic merits, the poem seemed to confirm Chiles as the man who could do anything. But the temptation for such versatile talents is to do everything. Thus The One Show, the latest bid to revamp the old Nationwide format of 'topical' reports from across the country; topical, as in stories with no discernible news value. So a lot rests on the presenter's appeal. What Chiles lacks in physical beauty he makes up for in, well, Brummy charm. The joke that he could be the new Frank Bough is surely one line that's not to be snorted at.
Source: The Observer (http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1853913,00.html)