[Bombardier]

What I mainly dislike about BB USA is the way the show is put together:

1. There is a cheesy "suspenseful" soundtrack that accompanies everything. It seems Americans need rock guitar in the background of all their entertainment and sports or they get confused and bored. By contrast, BB UK has moments of total silence and pregnant pauses that are quite unusual for TV, sometimes quite artfully done too.

2. In the USA there is a "host" who appears on-screen about every five bloody minutes to explain the technical aspects of the game and summarize EVERYTHING that has happened. It's absolutely unnecessary and quite insulting compared to BB UK, which is something you need to learn how to watch, and something you learn by watching.

3. BB USA seems to be filmed in outer space. The BB USA house doesn't seem to really exist anywhere. It's one great big nowhere. I like the fact that BB UK is very overt about where its house is situated, and uses its physicality to its advantage. Up until this series or the last one there were still lots of overhead shots of the garden with trees in the distance, weather patterns forming, sounds of police sirens going by (and occasionally people shouting things over the fence, depending on whether you liked that or not). I like that the BB UK housemates are isolated but still very much in the world.

4. There is no diary room in the USA version. Instead, "reality-style" talking heads are filmed at some other point and edited in. There is no "8:58 AM, Marcus goes to the diary room." There is none of the dry, funny banter with Big Brother (since he is not a "character" at all in the USA). There is no intrigue over who said what or who overheard what in the diary room. It's just fake and boring and the talking heads look glossy and scripted.

5. Nothing interesting ever happens on BB USA. I have been re-watching highlights from older BB UK series (BB5 and BB6) and even up to now there is still a spirit of social experiment and psychology alive in the show. There some really strange people who are subjected to some strange things, sometimes the results are hilarious. But what I like most is that on BB UK you can still catch people doing stupid, candid, human things. Sometimes NOTHING HAPPENS in an episode of BB UK and that's exactly why I like it. That's exactly what the spirit of the show is: sitting in front of your TV watching a group of strangers cooking, sleeping, playing. There are few television programs out there that make the audience explicitly aware of their mirrored relationship to the spectacle they're partaking in. BB UK is one of them. BB USA is not one of them.

As you can tell I don't really like the BB USA format, in fact I don't really like any USA format. Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares was similarly dumbed down by its American producers (to give you another example). The worst thing that could happen, I think, is for BB UK to try and be brought "into line" with its American counterpart by its producers. That, to me, would be the death of all that is good.