James
23-05-2004, 12:59 AM
BRIAN MCNAIR
I MUST be getting old, because it hardly feels like any time at all since the weary winner of Big Brother 4 emerged to receive his £70,000 cheque and 15 minutes of fame in the blink-and-you-missed-it world of D-list celebrity. Though it seems like yesterday, can you even remember his name? Don?t worry if you can?t, because Cameron Stout is last year?s news, and this Friday it all starts again. And for the first time since Big Brother exploded into our lives back in May 2000, I?m thinking - is there anything else on the box at that time on a weekday night? I?m bored, bored, bored with Big Brother.
There. I said it, and I suspect I?m not the only one who?s looking forward to the fifth series of the ground-breaking reality TV show with less anticipation than greeted series one to four. Last year?s run was generally accepted to have been so good natured and uneventful that many fans - myself included - deserted the nightly broadcasts in droves, tuning in only for the highlights and the Friday evictions. This year, by way of compensation, we are promised a ?crueller and nastier? Big Brother, with contestants carefully selected to wind each other up, and challenges designed to test tolerance levels to the limit. Think Shattered, Channel 4?s sleep deprivation marathon broadcast last year, meets I?m a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here, where contestants were encouraged to participate in the kind of self-abuse one usually encounters only in the less wholesome regions of the internet.
Good luck to the producers, but I wonder if they aren?t barking up the wrong tree. The problem last year wasn?t that people were too nice, but that there weren?t enough of those entertaining, attention-seeking personalities we had known in previous years - Jade the mouth, Anya the post-feminist lapdancer, Craig the builder, Anna the gay ex-nun, Nasty Nick with his conspiracies and plots.
Our own dear Cameron typified the phenomenon. A true gentleman who wouldn?t look twice at a naked Anoushka in the shower (nor would he get off with the girl in South African Big Brother who was clearly up for it); who was respectful and considerate to all his housemates; who was, all things considered, a bit of a wet fish, with or without the Bible-thumping back-chat. You just wanted someone to come up and slap those ruddy northern cheeks of his, for no reason other than to relieve the monotony.
Don?t get me wrong. I?d rather have a beer with Cameron than most of the wannabes who view the show as their big chance to get a life. But when it comes to chilling out in front of the box on a Friday night, the wannabes have it for sheer desperation and watchability. That said, whether we love to hate them, or hate to love them, it?s their personality we want, and not necessarily their poison. We want the emotional tension and psychic energy generated by spontaneous human interaction, not gratuitous sadism inflicted by producers who have watched too many Japanese game shows at university.
We?ll know soon enough what it?s to be, and whether in the face of a media environment pushing ever more bizarre forms of torture as entertainment, Big Brother will be able to retain the multicultural, socially democratising, essentially human qualities which made it so innovative. Those qualities were on display in series one, when Nasty Nick?s casual equation of homosexuality with paedophilia provoked an angry reaction from the housemates, who included a gay woman among their number.
We have seen them in the way that the Big Brother house has presented a window on multicultural Britain, putting people of different class and regional backgrounds, ethnic origin and sexual orientations together under one roof, and letting them get on with it. Series two coincided with the BNP-provoked ethnic riots in Burnley. Big Brother?s very visible demonstration of the fact that young British citizens could live harmoniously together, regardless of where their parents were born, or their religious affiliation, or who they preferred to sleep with after a good night out, provided a potent message to bigots everywhere, and a quietly optimistic vision of Britain?s multicultural future.
We saw it, too, when Big Brother was exported to the Middle East, via a series produced in Bahrain. The fundamentalists issued their usual fatwas, and Arab Big Brother was taken off the air, but in societies where women are set alight for defying their husbands, and religious dissension is punishable by death, Big Brother?s attempt to show that even under the patriarchal codes of Islam men and women can live as equals was a brave and radical statement.
That failed experiment was Big Brother at its most progressive and noble. Please, Channel 4, don?t let the next 10 weeks show it at its most shallow and demeaning.
Big Brother 5, Channel 4, Friday, 10pm
http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/thereview.cfm?id=585402004
I MUST be getting old, because it hardly feels like any time at all since the weary winner of Big Brother 4 emerged to receive his £70,000 cheque and 15 minutes of fame in the blink-and-you-missed-it world of D-list celebrity. Though it seems like yesterday, can you even remember his name? Don?t worry if you can?t, because Cameron Stout is last year?s news, and this Friday it all starts again. And for the first time since Big Brother exploded into our lives back in May 2000, I?m thinking - is there anything else on the box at that time on a weekday night? I?m bored, bored, bored with Big Brother.
There. I said it, and I suspect I?m not the only one who?s looking forward to the fifth series of the ground-breaking reality TV show with less anticipation than greeted series one to four. Last year?s run was generally accepted to have been so good natured and uneventful that many fans - myself included - deserted the nightly broadcasts in droves, tuning in only for the highlights and the Friday evictions. This year, by way of compensation, we are promised a ?crueller and nastier? Big Brother, with contestants carefully selected to wind each other up, and challenges designed to test tolerance levels to the limit. Think Shattered, Channel 4?s sleep deprivation marathon broadcast last year, meets I?m a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here, where contestants were encouraged to participate in the kind of self-abuse one usually encounters only in the less wholesome regions of the internet.
Good luck to the producers, but I wonder if they aren?t barking up the wrong tree. The problem last year wasn?t that people were too nice, but that there weren?t enough of those entertaining, attention-seeking personalities we had known in previous years - Jade the mouth, Anya the post-feminist lapdancer, Craig the builder, Anna the gay ex-nun, Nasty Nick with his conspiracies and plots.
Our own dear Cameron typified the phenomenon. A true gentleman who wouldn?t look twice at a naked Anoushka in the shower (nor would he get off with the girl in South African Big Brother who was clearly up for it); who was respectful and considerate to all his housemates; who was, all things considered, a bit of a wet fish, with or without the Bible-thumping back-chat. You just wanted someone to come up and slap those ruddy northern cheeks of his, for no reason other than to relieve the monotony.
Don?t get me wrong. I?d rather have a beer with Cameron than most of the wannabes who view the show as their big chance to get a life. But when it comes to chilling out in front of the box on a Friday night, the wannabes have it for sheer desperation and watchability. That said, whether we love to hate them, or hate to love them, it?s their personality we want, and not necessarily their poison. We want the emotional tension and psychic energy generated by spontaneous human interaction, not gratuitous sadism inflicted by producers who have watched too many Japanese game shows at university.
We?ll know soon enough what it?s to be, and whether in the face of a media environment pushing ever more bizarre forms of torture as entertainment, Big Brother will be able to retain the multicultural, socially democratising, essentially human qualities which made it so innovative. Those qualities were on display in series one, when Nasty Nick?s casual equation of homosexuality with paedophilia provoked an angry reaction from the housemates, who included a gay woman among their number.
We have seen them in the way that the Big Brother house has presented a window on multicultural Britain, putting people of different class and regional backgrounds, ethnic origin and sexual orientations together under one roof, and letting them get on with it. Series two coincided with the BNP-provoked ethnic riots in Burnley. Big Brother?s very visible demonstration of the fact that young British citizens could live harmoniously together, regardless of where their parents were born, or their religious affiliation, or who they preferred to sleep with after a good night out, provided a potent message to bigots everywhere, and a quietly optimistic vision of Britain?s multicultural future.
We saw it, too, when Big Brother was exported to the Middle East, via a series produced in Bahrain. The fundamentalists issued their usual fatwas, and Arab Big Brother was taken off the air, but in societies where women are set alight for defying their husbands, and religious dissension is punishable by death, Big Brother?s attempt to show that even under the patriarchal codes of Islam men and women can live as equals was a brave and radical statement.
That failed experiment was Big Brother at its most progressive and noble. Please, Channel 4, don?t let the next 10 weeks show it at its most shallow and demeaning.
Big Brother 5, Channel 4, Friday, 10pm
http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/thereview.cfm?id=585402004