[DyingClown]

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