[Hooly One]

Last year it was a virtual non-event but this year the brawls, the "evil" games - and of course the sex has saved Big Brother from near-oblivion.
Ratings are up to about 5 million viewers a night and Carphone Warehouse is pleased with the success of its sponsorship, with 100,000 new customers signing up to its Talk Talk landline service since the beginning of June.

But there is one cloud for Channel 4 - voting in this year's Big Brother appears unlikely to match the halcyon days of 2002, when Jade Goody's lack of general knowledge and the excitable Kate Lawler whipped the nation into a telephone and text voting frenzy.

So far this year there have been more than 8.4m votes for the seven evictions - already surpassing last year's 7.6m - but well behind 2002's bumper 14.2m as the show went into its final week.

Big Brother 3's final eviction poll that saw Kate Lawler beat fellow contestants Jade Goody, Alex Sibley and Jonny Regan to win the show's £70,000 prize was a huge 8.5m - the show's biggest single vote.

The total number of votes for the third series reached 22.7m, a figure that station insiders attributed to the novelty of text voting. Voting has already been hit by the absence of evictions in two episodes. One week nominations were cancelled to bring much-needed calm into the house after an alcohol-fuelled brawl.

This week the show's producers are scheduling two votes in an attempt to boost interactive revenues, which have so far reached £2.1m.


But unless tonight's eviction show and Friday night's finale generate an average audience of around 7 million each, the total number of votes will be much lower than the record numbers of 2002.

Then, the series generated £5m in phone and text message votes, with advertising revenue during the show topping £5m.

Tonight's show will see the exit of another housemate, leaving four fighting it out for the series' £63,500 prize on Friday evening.

Guardian