MrGaryy
06-09-2008, 02:12 AM
Bart Spring in't Veld comes to meet me at Schipol airport, Amersterdam - “I have **** all to do,” he explains. Nobody recognises him as we weave through the crowded concourse towards the station. He attracts no attention as we take the train to the town of Hilversum, near where he lives. He sits undisturbed in the Papillon coffee house, smoking a spliff while we talk. The only flicker of recognition comes from the waiter in the café where we go for lunch, but even he cannot quite place this articulate, good-looking Dutchman with his unshaven face and ragged old T-shirt.
This is astonishing. When I last saw Bart in February 2000 he was the most famous man in the Netherlands, mobbed wherever he went. He had just become the first winner of a revolutionary new television show called Big Brother, and his on-screen romance with a beautiful housemate - consummated in front of three million viewers - had saved the programme from dying in infancy.
Bart, now 31, has spent most of the past eight years trying to recover his privacy and equilibrium, and has suffered five breakdowns in the process. He has grown to detest the vacuous celebrity culture, the adulation of talentless exhibitionists, that Big Brother pioneered. “This is the new opium, the new religion,” he says in an interview before the ninth season of the witless show ends on Channel 4 tonight. “I am not a fan of the programmes, or of people becoming famous for being stupid.” And of his role in the birth of a show that, in his view, led to a dumbing down of television around the world he says: “If it's true that I helped to create that mindless monster, I'm not too proud of it...Big Brother took away the need to make inspiring programmes and replaced them with mindless chatter. It's time to put it in a museum for weird artefacts of television history.” If he knew then what he knows now, Bart declares, “I would never have signed up”.
Bart's story is almost a parable for our times. After leaving school he spent four years in the Dutch Army, including a stint in Bosnia, before quitting in May 1999. He saw an advertisement seeking ten participants for a new show with an £80,000 prize. The challenge was to survive 100 days in a purpose-built “house” without walking out or being evicted. The participants would have no contact with the outside world, and every move would be recorded by 83 cameras and microphones. Bart applied, he says, because he was jobless and needed money. Blonde, muscular and a tad rebellious, he was a natural choice and after extensive psychological and physical tests he and the nine other successful applicants entered the house that September 17.
Endemol, the production company, had bet the bank on the success of the most intimate and exploitative show ever conceived. The concept was so controversial that Big Brother attracted 20 per cent of Dutch viewers on its opening night. But for the next two weeks the housemates did little, critics turned hostile, ratings fell and advertisers steered clear.
Then Bart rode to the rescue. He and another housemate both began courting the beautiful Sabine. Bart's rival sought to sabotage Bart's chances by telling Sabine he was gay. The rival was promptly evicted, leaving the field clear. Suddenly the show had a narrative. Bart and Sabine's romance became front-page news in Dutch tabloids. More and more viewers tuned in to see what would happen next. The ratings began to rise, advertisers poured in and one rival station became so desperate for a slice of the action that it tried to parachute a presenter into the garden. John de Mol, Endemol's founder, suddenly had a hit on his hands. “When the romance between Bart and Sabine happened, it really exploded,” he said later. The drama deepened when the other housemates began to resent Bart's intimacy with Sabine and nominated both of them for eviction, leaving the viewers to decide which should leave.
More than a million votes were cast in that week. On the night before the result was announced the other housemates, feeling guilty, vacated one of the two bedrooms. Bart and Sabine kissed on a sofa. He then led her into the empty bedroom where they undressed in the dark. Big Brother's infra-red cameras recorded them climbing into bed and making love beneath the duvet as a fifth of the Netherlands' 15 million citizens looked on. It was the most public bonk in the history of mankind.
The next day Sabine was evicted. Bart cried and threatened to leave as well. But he was persuaded to stay, went on to win the contest and emerged from the house on the last night of the millennium to find thousands of fans cheering outside. Until that moment he had no inkling of what a star he had become.
On that final night Big Brother achieved a record 74 per cent market share, with a virtual monopoly of viewers under 20, and received 3.5 million calls. In the course of the 100 days nine million votes had been cast and the programme's website received more than 52 million hits. Advertising rates tripled. Veronica, the broadcaster, was transformed from a fringe to a mainstream channel. Endemol's share price rose from €27 to €53, and de Mol sold his company to Telefonica of Spain three months later for a staggering €5.5 billion - or €158 per share.
The rest, as they say, is history. The Big Brother format was sold to scores of countries. It has spawned countless spin-offs, and given rise to a whole new genre of reality television. Its contestants attract more votes than politicians. It has been condemned for its crassness and vulgarity by presidents and prime ministers. It has sparked riots in Bahrain, after two housemates kissed on screen, a constitutional crisis in Malawi after Parliament's attempt to block it, and a diplomatic spat between Britain and India over Jade Goody's racist slurs.
I should confess, at this point, to partial responsibility for Big Brother's arrival in Britain. Shortly after Bart's victory I interviewed him for an article on this new phenomenon. Peter Bazalgette, Endemol's chief creative officer, subsequently wrote a book called Billion Dollar Game in which he recalled: “I opened The Times at breakfast one morning to find a full-page feature about Bart and Sabine. If I did not sell Big Brother now, and quickly, rival formats would get in first. I took The Times article into work and photocopied it four times. I sent it, with a covering letter, to four of the British commercial channels”. Channel 4 snapped it up, and Big Brother has now become as much a part of the British summer as soggy Wimbledons.
For Bart, however, Big Brother's success proved a mixed blessing. He was unprepared for celebrity. Three days after emerging from the house, he had his first breakdown. He spent the next two years in what he calls “oblivion”. He attracted shrieking crowds wherever he went. He was pulled from his car by hysterical women, dragged from stages when he opened clubs or discos. He took on an agent, a manager and a bodyguard. He made an “insane amount of money” from commercials and other promotions.
Bart was embarrassed by a fame he felt was undeserved, and recoiled from the millions who idolised him for no good reason. “I resented being famous just for being famous...I was a false saint,” he says. “I felt the whole country had gone mad. I found the whole country had dumbed down...I had contempt for a society for which fame is an end in itself.” He became reclusive. He had more breakdowns. He sought refuge in drinking, womanising and the soft drugs that he called “my rescue from insanity”.
He has no idea how much money he made, but burnt his way through almost all of it. His relationship with Sabine lasted a month - “we got mobbed by reporters everywhere we went” - but there were no shortage of other women. “Girls would say ‘Can I go with you tonight?'.” He reckons he slept with more than 130. Finally, he came to his senses. He began dabbling in journalism. A friend took him to Baghdad to interview Tariq Aziz, Saddam Hussein's Deputy Prime Minister. He signed up as a reporter in Utrecht, made TV programmes for teens and edited a magazine for singles.
In 2006 he foolishly agreed to participate in a Celebrity Big Brother show set in a hotel. He fled, appalled, after just three weeks. “I spent six years trying to live down Big Brother and then got lured back. It was a big mistake.” Today, finally, he has regained control of his life. While millions of Big Brother wannabes dream of fame and fortune, Bart has sought the opposite. He works about six days a month promoting road safety in schools, which earns him enough to live. He is one of a group of “reliable squatters” who pay a peppercorn rent to live temporarily in flats awaiting refurbishment.
He has few possessions, apart from CDs and books. He has no car - just a bike. On a shelf in his spartan accommodation is a pile of cardboard signs bearing the names of the cities to which he sometimes hitch-hikes.
“In the end I got back to what I was before - just a lot wiser and with some shattered illusions about the way the world works,” he says. “In my terms that's success...I have more fun and I work less than most people. I don't belong to any corporation any more. I have enough money for the stuff I need to do and I have a really, really relaxed life.” He seldom bothers watching Big Brother nowadays. The first series was so innocent, he says. It was an experiment involving people playing themselves. There were no fights, no exhibitionism, no demeaning or degrading tasks. His sex with Sabine, Bart argues, was discreet and entirely natural - not staged.
Today the contestants court celebrity, the producers encourage conflict and the more tantrums, transsexuals and sufferers of Tourette's syndrome the better. Almost nothing is taboo - fights, masturbation, drunkenness, nudity. If the participants do not know who Shakespeare is, believe Cambridge is in London, or think chickpeas come from chickens, no matter.
They should “get a *******ing life, read a book, do some community service,” says Bart. “TV provides us with more and more stupidity. It's dumbing people down...the irony is I hate the way of life I helped to create.”
Long live Big Brother
Every year the doomsayers proclaim the death of Big Brother. And every year this mix of hardy perennial and street-fighter confounds them - quite rightly. It's a brilliant format, and this year its cleverly cast group of dysfunctional squabblers has won a consistent audience of around three million viewers. That's impressive loyalty for a show that has lasted, exhaustingly, for more than 90 days.
Some may say it's the nadir of TV. But Big Brother is about relationships. It is occasionally revealing: this year we watched “the group” fail to deal with sexist bullying. It's not always exciting, the characters are engaging, loathsome and sometimes inert. But for three months the viewer tunes in to watch this addictive piece of contrived theatre.
The typical viewer is a 15-24 female with no religion and little interest in politics, who uses Bebo over Facebook and enjoys Heat magazine - though of course its audience is wider than this. Those who say BB is on the wane don't belong to this group. They were never meant to.
Big Brother alumni rarely go on to amazing things: Jade Goody is the most notorious, Brian Dowling's TV profile has progressed in fits and starts, Nasty Nick will always feature on clips shows. For others, nascent pop or presenting careers inevitably founder, yet still they tumble(optimistically, for the paps) out of nightclubs.
There will be two more seasons of the show at least; the celebrity version is rumoured to be returning next January. As it approaches its tenth birthday, Big Brother isn't dead - it's regaining its stride.
Times Online (http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/celebrity/article4676824.ece)
This is astonishing. When I last saw Bart in February 2000 he was the most famous man in the Netherlands, mobbed wherever he went. He had just become the first winner of a revolutionary new television show called Big Brother, and his on-screen romance with a beautiful housemate - consummated in front of three million viewers - had saved the programme from dying in infancy.
Bart, now 31, has spent most of the past eight years trying to recover his privacy and equilibrium, and has suffered five breakdowns in the process. He has grown to detest the vacuous celebrity culture, the adulation of talentless exhibitionists, that Big Brother pioneered. “This is the new opium, the new religion,” he says in an interview before the ninth season of the witless show ends on Channel 4 tonight. “I am not a fan of the programmes, or of people becoming famous for being stupid.” And of his role in the birth of a show that, in his view, led to a dumbing down of television around the world he says: “If it's true that I helped to create that mindless monster, I'm not too proud of it...Big Brother took away the need to make inspiring programmes and replaced them with mindless chatter. It's time to put it in a museum for weird artefacts of television history.” If he knew then what he knows now, Bart declares, “I would never have signed up”.
Bart's story is almost a parable for our times. After leaving school he spent four years in the Dutch Army, including a stint in Bosnia, before quitting in May 1999. He saw an advertisement seeking ten participants for a new show with an £80,000 prize. The challenge was to survive 100 days in a purpose-built “house” without walking out or being evicted. The participants would have no contact with the outside world, and every move would be recorded by 83 cameras and microphones. Bart applied, he says, because he was jobless and needed money. Blonde, muscular and a tad rebellious, he was a natural choice and after extensive psychological and physical tests he and the nine other successful applicants entered the house that September 17.
Endemol, the production company, had bet the bank on the success of the most intimate and exploitative show ever conceived. The concept was so controversial that Big Brother attracted 20 per cent of Dutch viewers on its opening night. But for the next two weeks the housemates did little, critics turned hostile, ratings fell and advertisers steered clear.
Then Bart rode to the rescue. He and another housemate both began courting the beautiful Sabine. Bart's rival sought to sabotage Bart's chances by telling Sabine he was gay. The rival was promptly evicted, leaving the field clear. Suddenly the show had a narrative. Bart and Sabine's romance became front-page news in Dutch tabloids. More and more viewers tuned in to see what would happen next. The ratings began to rise, advertisers poured in and one rival station became so desperate for a slice of the action that it tried to parachute a presenter into the garden. John de Mol, Endemol's founder, suddenly had a hit on his hands. “When the romance between Bart and Sabine happened, it really exploded,” he said later. The drama deepened when the other housemates began to resent Bart's intimacy with Sabine and nominated both of them for eviction, leaving the viewers to decide which should leave.
More than a million votes were cast in that week. On the night before the result was announced the other housemates, feeling guilty, vacated one of the two bedrooms. Bart and Sabine kissed on a sofa. He then led her into the empty bedroom where they undressed in the dark. Big Brother's infra-red cameras recorded them climbing into bed and making love beneath the duvet as a fifth of the Netherlands' 15 million citizens looked on. It was the most public bonk in the history of mankind.
The next day Sabine was evicted. Bart cried and threatened to leave as well. But he was persuaded to stay, went on to win the contest and emerged from the house on the last night of the millennium to find thousands of fans cheering outside. Until that moment he had no inkling of what a star he had become.
On that final night Big Brother achieved a record 74 per cent market share, with a virtual monopoly of viewers under 20, and received 3.5 million calls. In the course of the 100 days nine million votes had been cast and the programme's website received more than 52 million hits. Advertising rates tripled. Veronica, the broadcaster, was transformed from a fringe to a mainstream channel. Endemol's share price rose from €27 to €53, and de Mol sold his company to Telefonica of Spain three months later for a staggering €5.5 billion - or €158 per share.
The rest, as they say, is history. The Big Brother format was sold to scores of countries. It has spawned countless spin-offs, and given rise to a whole new genre of reality television. Its contestants attract more votes than politicians. It has been condemned for its crassness and vulgarity by presidents and prime ministers. It has sparked riots in Bahrain, after two housemates kissed on screen, a constitutional crisis in Malawi after Parliament's attempt to block it, and a diplomatic spat between Britain and India over Jade Goody's racist slurs.
I should confess, at this point, to partial responsibility for Big Brother's arrival in Britain. Shortly after Bart's victory I interviewed him for an article on this new phenomenon. Peter Bazalgette, Endemol's chief creative officer, subsequently wrote a book called Billion Dollar Game in which he recalled: “I opened The Times at breakfast one morning to find a full-page feature about Bart and Sabine. If I did not sell Big Brother now, and quickly, rival formats would get in first. I took The Times article into work and photocopied it four times. I sent it, with a covering letter, to four of the British commercial channels”. Channel 4 snapped it up, and Big Brother has now become as much a part of the British summer as soggy Wimbledons.
For Bart, however, Big Brother's success proved a mixed blessing. He was unprepared for celebrity. Three days after emerging from the house, he had his first breakdown. He spent the next two years in what he calls “oblivion”. He attracted shrieking crowds wherever he went. He was pulled from his car by hysterical women, dragged from stages when he opened clubs or discos. He took on an agent, a manager and a bodyguard. He made an “insane amount of money” from commercials and other promotions.
Bart was embarrassed by a fame he felt was undeserved, and recoiled from the millions who idolised him for no good reason. “I resented being famous just for being famous...I was a false saint,” he says. “I felt the whole country had gone mad. I found the whole country had dumbed down...I had contempt for a society for which fame is an end in itself.” He became reclusive. He had more breakdowns. He sought refuge in drinking, womanising and the soft drugs that he called “my rescue from insanity”.
He has no idea how much money he made, but burnt his way through almost all of it. His relationship with Sabine lasted a month - “we got mobbed by reporters everywhere we went” - but there were no shortage of other women. “Girls would say ‘Can I go with you tonight?'.” He reckons he slept with more than 130. Finally, he came to his senses. He began dabbling in journalism. A friend took him to Baghdad to interview Tariq Aziz, Saddam Hussein's Deputy Prime Minister. He signed up as a reporter in Utrecht, made TV programmes for teens and edited a magazine for singles.
In 2006 he foolishly agreed to participate in a Celebrity Big Brother show set in a hotel. He fled, appalled, after just three weeks. “I spent six years trying to live down Big Brother and then got lured back. It was a big mistake.” Today, finally, he has regained control of his life. While millions of Big Brother wannabes dream of fame and fortune, Bart has sought the opposite. He works about six days a month promoting road safety in schools, which earns him enough to live. He is one of a group of “reliable squatters” who pay a peppercorn rent to live temporarily in flats awaiting refurbishment.
He has few possessions, apart from CDs and books. He has no car - just a bike. On a shelf in his spartan accommodation is a pile of cardboard signs bearing the names of the cities to which he sometimes hitch-hikes.
“In the end I got back to what I was before - just a lot wiser and with some shattered illusions about the way the world works,” he says. “In my terms that's success...I have more fun and I work less than most people. I don't belong to any corporation any more. I have enough money for the stuff I need to do and I have a really, really relaxed life.” He seldom bothers watching Big Brother nowadays. The first series was so innocent, he says. It was an experiment involving people playing themselves. There were no fights, no exhibitionism, no demeaning or degrading tasks. His sex with Sabine, Bart argues, was discreet and entirely natural - not staged.
Today the contestants court celebrity, the producers encourage conflict and the more tantrums, transsexuals and sufferers of Tourette's syndrome the better. Almost nothing is taboo - fights, masturbation, drunkenness, nudity. If the participants do not know who Shakespeare is, believe Cambridge is in London, or think chickpeas come from chickens, no matter.
They should “get a *******ing life, read a book, do some community service,” says Bart. “TV provides us with more and more stupidity. It's dumbing people down...the irony is I hate the way of life I helped to create.”
Long live Big Brother
Every year the doomsayers proclaim the death of Big Brother. And every year this mix of hardy perennial and street-fighter confounds them - quite rightly. It's a brilliant format, and this year its cleverly cast group of dysfunctional squabblers has won a consistent audience of around three million viewers. That's impressive loyalty for a show that has lasted, exhaustingly, for more than 90 days.
Some may say it's the nadir of TV. But Big Brother is about relationships. It is occasionally revealing: this year we watched “the group” fail to deal with sexist bullying. It's not always exciting, the characters are engaging, loathsome and sometimes inert. But for three months the viewer tunes in to watch this addictive piece of contrived theatre.
The typical viewer is a 15-24 female with no religion and little interest in politics, who uses Bebo over Facebook and enjoys Heat magazine - though of course its audience is wider than this. Those who say BB is on the wane don't belong to this group. They were never meant to.
Big Brother alumni rarely go on to amazing things: Jade Goody is the most notorious, Brian Dowling's TV profile has progressed in fits and starts, Nasty Nick will always feature on clips shows. For others, nascent pop or presenting careers inevitably founder, yet still they tumble(optimistically, for the paps) out of nightclubs.
There will be two more seasons of the show at least; the celebrity version is rumoured to be returning next January. As it approaches its tenth birthday, Big Brother isn't dead - it's regaining its stride.
Times Online (http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/celebrity/article4676824.ece)