[cc100]

[Kaz]

Do you REALLY have to ask?

BB2 by a MILE!!! aul: :helen:

[Maggie]

BY A MILLION MILES aul: :helen:

[LEE]

BB2 is the best by a long long way.

BB1 was OK.
BB2 was brilliant beyond compare.
BB3, well the best thing I have to say about it really is that it is nearly over.

[splodge0]

Of course BB2 was the best to date, but my vote goes to BB1 for several reasons:~

1. Mel's eye. Why? Because they had the soul to use one of the HMs eyes, which some how personified the attitude prevalent at the time. And what an eye! I really cannot understand why they didn't pick one of the BB2 Hms eyes for 2001. Helen or Naz say, or one of the blokes even. ( RoB, Pauls?)

2. BB1 opened my eyes to the reality thing. I must, in all honesty, admit to thinking, as so many non-believers do, "How naff". It wasn't till the live streaming on the Net gave me an excuse to explore the site. Why Oh Why do they charge now. What better advert could they have had! It had ME!.

3. BB1 also had the first real conflict. Now I don't normally like conflict, especially when its contrived by producers trying to make a "Show". When Craig and, gosh who was it, Tom I think rumbled Nick with us watching it LIVE, it all came together.

Is it any wonder I mourn when ever BB finishes. We all loose "friends" never to be re-united. BB2 was even better I know, but it was BB1 that I miss most.

NOTE TO BB Editor: Don't just forget us when it finishes. If it wasn't for us you wouldn't have a job!






:helen:

[Mairi]

BB2 was the best, by far

It was wonderful and I WANT IT BACK!!

aul::helen:

[Amy]

I'm going to have to say that i've liked them all
they've all been different and as long as it's bb i don't care which is better

[Romantic Old Bird]

I was interested in BB1 and liked the housemates. I wanted to see them when it finished, but got over it almost immediately.


I was transfixed by BB2. I was bereft when it ended and I still want it back! It was WONDERFUL! I think this article sums it up for me. I've printed it before, but it is still worth a read now. can you imagine anyone doing this after BB3?

________________________________________________
This house is up my street
Paul and Helen's relationship gave Big Brother a sense of real drama that no soap could match. But that's not the only reason to watch it. This show is simply great TV

Sean O'Hagan
Observer

Sunday July 22, 2001


I have a confession to make: I watch Big Brother. There, I've said it. I'll go even further: I think it is truly great television - of, and for, our time: both blissfully banal in a way that reflects and amplifies a certain kind of everyday, commonplace reality; and, on a whole other level, endlessly, often accidentally, thought-provoking.

Let me just say from the outset that, like the majority of people who watch Big Brother, I am not a fanatic. I don't rush home to see it, nor set the video for it, nor, God forbid, tune into E4 or the website to witness the almost unedited version, nor would it ever cross my mind to lift the phone and vote to evict my least favourite housemate (I mean, who would I possibly choose?). But, if I'm at home, or round at someone else's house when it's that time, I turn on, tune in, and, often against my better nature, find myself quietly, quizzically absorbed in the strange semi-mediated human drama unfolding in front of me.

Two things happen when I tell people that I like Big Brother: They either nod and, with a mixture of relief and barely concealed guilt, agree, or launch into a diatribe, à la Germaine Greer in these pages a few weeks back, about cultural superficiality and creeping mindlessness and cheap voyeurism. Leaving aside the fact that academics in general, and Greer in particular, would not understand a pop cultural moment if it bit them on the arse, the latter response nevertheless baffles me. For a start, I resent people telling me how and why I am responding to a cultural phenomenon. I can make up my own mind, thank you very much, and so, it seems, can the rest of the population. What baffles me most, though, is why these cultural hand-wringers always assume that everyone watches Big Brother at the same level, that the several million regular viewers somehow morph, every night, on cue, into one big amorphous mass of lumpen passivity. (There is, of course, an unspoken class element to this sort of cultural patronisation, but that is a whole other article.)

Now, I happen to be pretty selective in my viewing - The Sopranos, The Simpsons, Channel 4 News, a smattering of documentaries and imported US sitcoms, but no British soaps, game shows or talk shows - and I would go as far as to say that, as a purely televisual experience, if such a thing can be said to exist, Big Brother surprises me more on a regular basis than anything else I watch. And, just for the record, it does not make me, nor anyone else I know who watches it, feel, in Greer's words, 'worse than a voyeur' - whatever that means exactly. Nor does it make me feel cheap, nor guilty, nor angry, nor manipulated in the way that, say, a Springer, or Kilroy show has, on the odd times that I have watched them, made me feel. (Nor, for that matter, does it make me feel spoon-fed and patronised in the way that certain so-called highbrow programmes do - the lazy, long-past-its-sell-by-date South Bank Show springs to mind.)

Sometimes, though, Big Brother makes me laugh out loud; often it makes me cringe; once or twice lately, it has left me feeling strangely warm and benign towards individuals who, only weeks before, I would have crossed the channel(s) to avoid. Mostly, though, it's this sense of low-level fascination, this rekindled curiosity for the foibles of humankind, intriguing and unexpected, that I am left holding on to. And, yes, I know it's a mediated, and manipulated, environment, and that the characters are hand-picked for their ability to perform unselfconsciously for the cameras, and for their mind-boggling degrees of self-absorption and exhibitionism, but, surely, that's the whole point! I want to be entertained, not bored to death. And, as we have seen, via the tears and petty traumas, the occasional bad-mouthing, the back-biting and the shifting loyalties, human nature, in all its perversity and inconsistency, will always out.

I have to come clean about something else as well. I think most of the house guests, even the loose cannons such as the inaptly named Bubble and the spoilt, tantrumy Narinder, as well as the well-meaning, but smug, bores like Elizabeth and Dean, are not exhibitionists at all. In fact, I think they have, given the circumstances, conducted themselves pretty honourably. There has been no actual fighting, no abuse, none of the real nastiness you often get when strangers are thrown together, say, in flatshare arrangements. (Part of Big Brother's attraction is that you can vicariously experience the flatshare scenario without the actual personal trauma. Talk about therapeutic. Talk about healing.)

It may just be worth pointing out that there has been no trace of homophobia nor racism either from the participants or the much maligned Great British public, who regularly vote without regard to race or sexual persuasion. Isn't it intriguing that the two ?dramas of the past month have been the Tory leadership race and Big Brother, and that while Portillo's supposedly passing flirtation with homosexuality was too much for many Conservatives to stomach, a flamboyantly loud, unapologetically camp gay Irishman is the nation's favourite to win Big Brother? If ever one needed an index of just how out of step politicians, and the Tories in particular are with mores, you could worse than analyse the voting patterns of Big Brother's mainly female, constantly progressive constituency.

Perhaps Big Brother's creation of a virtual community - a community we can vicariously experience without the responsibilities/compromises of the real thing - does indeed say something damning about our own lack of community, or, indeed, about the paucity of most people's everyday experience. But, to be honest, I don't watch Big Brother the way I watch a Ken Loach film or a John Pilger documentary - to be provoked or politicised. It's the human chemistry that keeps me glued. Recently, I have been fascinated, like all Big Brother watchers, casual and obsessive, with the unfolding courtship dance of Paul - a slightly dull, semi-regular guy, whose most unappealing traits are a slight mouthiness, and a inability to pass a mirror without checking his hair - and Helen - a strangely infantile but oddly endearing creature whose shrill-going-on-glass-shattering shrieks of delight/despair initially made her seem the prime candidate for early ejection. In the few weeks since the start of their seemingly inexorable mutual attraction, she has changed before our very eyes, growing wide-eyed and aglow in his often provocatively tactile presence.

Their burgeoning romance, complicated by the ever-present cameras and by the looming, invisible presence of her boyfriend on the outside, has made them, and us, uncertain, tentative, confused. This is the stuff of real drama, more uneasy and compelling than the surreal world of the soaps or the unreal universe of Survivor. Of late it seemed that Paul was having second thoughts, that he suddenly sensed what some of us have been saying all along, even as we were willing them together, that this could only end in tears. Or, at the very least, some kind of commonplace, but oddly heightened (as everything, even the ennui, is on Big Brother) catharsis. No surprise then that, the night before he was cast by phone vote into the abyss that is post-Big Brother C-list celebrity, they both lay, limpet-like beneath a blanket - the most recurring and intriguing symbol of a show that actively discourages concealment, and constantly denies the participants the security of a safe future.

I could, in conclusion, intellectualise my relationship with Big Brother, pointing out, for instance, how it is McLuhanesque - the medium as message and massage - and, of course, Warholian - though, as soundbites go, 'in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 weeks' doesn't quite have the same ring to it. But that would be a cop-out. Big Brother is not high - nor even low - art, nor is it the end of civilisation as we know it. It is simply an intriguing pop-cultural moment that, like all pop-cultural moments, be they baffling (Posh and Becks now) or iconoclastic (punk in 1976) or both (Bob Dylan circa 1966), tells us something, usually uncomfortable about ourselves. Perhaps, ultimately, it echoes the words of the poet, John Berryman, who, rejecting the epic for the everyday, wrote: 'Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.' It seems to me, though, that it says this in a strangely beguiling, quietly surprising and oddly contemporary way. The hermetically sealed, constantly mediated world of Big Brother could, on one level, be viewed as a conceptual art installation rather than an experiment in so-called 'reality TV'. It is, of course, both. And, if you wish neither.

To anyone, then, who shrilly insists from the ivory towers of academe, that every society inevitably gets the drama it deserves - the Greeks had Tragedy, we have Big Brother - I would humbly point out that we can have both. That we can, in fact, have it all. Culturally this is where most of us have been living for a long time now, picking and mixing high and low, deep and shallow, serious and trashy. At this late juncture, only the truly square or the seriously snobby have failed to get with the programme. To the latter I would just like to say that whenever I watch Big Brother, I am certain of at least one thing: I am not patronising anyone - least of all - myself.

________________________________________________


I am watching BB3 from behind my hand most of the time. I tolerate it. A lot of it has been very uncomfortable to watch. I keep hoping I will love it, but I think it's too late now.

It doesn't really bear comparison with the others because they have changed the ground rules far too much. It is a very differnt animal.

After watching Kate swaying side to side barely conscious, and precariously close acute alcoholic poisoning on last nights Channel 4 programme, I was aghast. I am seriously concerned about the fact I may be encouraging the programme makers by watching it.


No contest. BB2

[splodge0]

Thank you so much RoB for re-printing this. One question. Is the main body of the text your own or a quote from a journal/newspaper? I will explain why I'm interested when I have read it a few more times. Either way, a truly excellent observation, with more insite than I have found anywhere else.

[WILDCHILD]

ROB - That is a good article. Thanks for putting it up.
But I dont understand what you are saying about Kate getting drunk. All Big Brother contestants get drunk. Remember last year on Brians birthday, Helen was plastered, being sick in the sink.
Big Brother gave the housemates a shopping budget and the housemates decided what to do with it - they spent £200 on alcohol.
I dont think it is fair to blame the producers for Kate getting drunk - they might be providing them with a few bottles but it is up to the housemates to decide what to do with those bottles, they are old enough and mature enough to decide for themselves.

[splodge0]

I agree WILDCHILD, but only up to the point of stopping short of alcohol poisioning. BB2 had limits. BB3 seems to have none. Jade seems to be the only one at Elstree to understand that. JADE?????? I must be dreaming......or BB3 have lost the plot.......................................:colour :

[WILDCHILD]

Did Kate have alcohol poisoning? I didnt know that.
The next day the producers sent them a note 'saying, 'Think before you drink' telling them to drink carefully.
Im not saying the producers are saints but I dont think they would purposedly want the housemates to have alcohol poisoning for the sake of money, they are humans afterall.

[splodge0]

You have more faith in them than I have!!!.......................!!!!!!

It doesn't help when the HM's have become used to being perminently p_ssed through boredom over the four weeks of the divide/bars. Poor Kate is only making up for lost time.............

[James]

Yeah, no one last year got as hammered as Kate was.

If they're are 5 levels of drunkenness, and level 5 is where someone is in need of emergency hospital treatment, Kate was at about level 4 the other night.

As well as less money to spend on booze, last year, there were older, more responsible housemates who had the respect of everyone and kept things in control.

I agree that the producers and the housemates share responsiblity about this. The housemates are old enough to make these decisions for themselves but if only the producers would give them something else to do. Even give them back the reading material, it might not make very good television but at least it won't damage their livers.


Anyway, thankyou ROB so much for putting up that article again - it reminded me of everything about Big Brother 2 that I loved. Not only was BB2, for me, the finest of the three series so far, it was one of the most enjoyable things I've ever seen on TV. Watching BB3 makes me, increasingly, regret that I didn't keep more of BB2 on tape.

I think BB2 was the best because of the thing that nobody, but nobody could have predicted: two very nice young people falling in love in front of our eyes. Mrs Oldgit said it changed me from the cynical Old Git I was.

Had that not happened, would it have been the best? Who knows? In addition to Paul and Helen, they had Dean and Brian. Message for Alex: you'll never be Brian! Message for Sandy: You'll never be Dean.

In Brian they had a housemate who not only made the public laugh, but also made the housemates laugh and didn't annoy them.

In Dean they had a real leader. In BB2 there was plenty of drinking and plenty of capers, but he could keep the housemates entertained with his dry wit so they weren't so bored they had to drink themselves silly.

Those four people plus the situation itself made the difference.

[Romantic Old Bird]

Originally posted by splodge0
One question. Is the main body of the text your own or a quote from a journal/newspaper?

I sincerely wish I could claim it as my own splodge0! If I were similarly talented I would not be a humble health service employee!

Between the lines, the article is a reprint of:

This house is up my street by Sean O'Hagan in the Observer on July 22nd 2001.

I'm glad you enjoyed it.

[BusyBee]

Thanks for posting the article ROB. I felt myself nodding in agreement as I read it.

I enjoyed BB1 especially Nasty Nick - it caught the nation's interest because nothing like it had been seen before.

As for BB2 well that was pure magical tv. Yes I loved the P&H saga, but it had so much going for it. The interaction between all the housemates was fascinating to watch. Brian kept us all in hysterics with his antics and all the others had something individual to offer, Penny with her craziness, Stuart with his posing, Dean with his music etc etc. I would have been quite happy if they had aired the whole series again from start to finish, so we know what happened but we watch good films again and again and I know I could have watched this again.

As for BB3, I have watched it, but feel that these housemates will be forgotten much quicker than the others. Seeing a group of people getting drunk and acting daft once or twice is funny, but when it is continuous then it gets a bit boring.

Does anyone know if the ratings have remained high, or have they dropped off? I've heard so many people say that they only 'dip into it' rather than being glued to the box and that they have been really disappointed. All we can hope is that the powers that be realise that things DID go wrong this year and put things right for next year. THINGS CAN ONLY GET BETTER.

What did the producers expect them to spend £400 on = healthy eating. They have been so bored due to the lack of lengthy tasks that drinking has been an outlet for them.

[cc100]

lets keep this thread going

[WILDCHILD]

Big Brother 2 for me - it was, without a doubt, the best television I have ever seen! But it was mainly Paul & Helen that made it for me.
I remeber the very first epsidoe of Big Brother 2 I watched and Helen dragged Paul into the diary room. I said to my friend, 'Those two are going to get together' and I watched intently wanting some romance between them and I got it!! It happened so slowly, getting more major as time went on and I was captivated, staying up til 2-3 in the morning watching their late night chats. My sister thought I was nuts but it was such good tv - and it was real! Thats why BB2 will not be beaten.
BB1 WAS very good and so is BB3 but BB2 is beyond that - amazing!!

[bananarama]

I didn't see BB1 so I am at a disadvatage at judging the three series. Out of BB2 and BB3 then I would say BB2 to be the best. "Because of the Paul and Helen romance"

Question: What would you have thought about BB2 if there had been no romance between P & H!!!!!! "pretty dull" I suspect. So i think CH4 struck lucky last year. The viewers reaped the reward of that luck.

[finch]

BB1 was classic

We were spoilt by it's brilliance

BB3 was too much on drama, so we missed the ending where they all like each other.


Why is every1 on this board obssessed with BB2?

[bigbrofan]

I think "Big Brother 2" was the best by a mile, what I loved about BB2 was the Helen and Paul relationship and also it was so funny with Brian I just loved it.

And for "Big Brother 1" It was ok but it does not even come near BB2, the only really good thing that happened in BB1 was that thing with Nick and that’s about it really.

And "Big Brother 3" was a state I did no way enjoy it as much as last years(BB2), BB3 really did not get started this year because in my view the people who where in the house did not want to be there and I did not like that they know what they have gone in there for and now that wanted to leave, lets just HOPE BB4 will be good next year.

1st: Big Brother 2 :-)
2nd: Big Brother 1 :-/
3rd: Big Brother 3 :-$

[James]

Big Brother 1 -

Big Brother 2 -

Big Brother 3 -

[Romantic Old Bird]

Originally posted by finch


Why is every1 on this board obssessed with BB2?

Didn't you watch it Finch?


Asking why we love BB2 is like asking why the earth turns, and why the rivers run into the sea.

We just love BB2.

Why?

Cos we do!

Originally posted by James
Big Brother 1 -

Big Brother 2 -

Big Brother 3 -

Love the smilies! Didn't think BB3 was as bad as all that, though not as good as BB2!