Hi everyone
This is my first post here, but I have been a huge fan of the show since the first series.
I am a writer, and later this year my first novel will be published, and I freely admit that
Big Brother has been a huge influence on my writing. Good writing is really about finding little bits of real life and snippets of human behaviour, just like
BB, and incorporating them into the text.
My novel is called
Death and Mr Pickwick, and it is about the origins and afterlife of Charles Dickens's first novel,
The Pickwick Papers. (If you are interested, you can find out more at
www.deathandmrpickwick.com.) But let me say that I regard
The Pickwick Papers as a nineteenth-century forerunner of
Big Brother: just like
BB,
Pickwick has a rambling, plotless structure, and many episodes are fuelled by alcohol. And observation of life is central to Dickens's novel: the main character, Mr Pickwick, goes on a mission to observe, and in turn the readers observe Mr Pickwick at ordinary tasks like eating and drinking. (One academic commentator in fact noticed how many times the word "eye" appears in
Pickwick, and wrote a book about the importance of observation in the novel.) Also, it's worth noting that I first decided to read
The Pickwick Papers when I heard the comedian Griff Rhys Jones choose it as his novel on
Desert Island Discs, and he described it as "so full of life". Which indeed it is. Just like
BB.
And as part of my novel is set in modern times, towards the end I even have the narrator mention that he has frequently watched
Big Brother, and that he sees something of the spirit of
The Pickwick Papers alive in the show.
Best wishes
Stephen Jarvis