[dinallt]

Article in Scottish Sunday Mail about BB3
and Fridays reunion by liz

I DON'T LIKE HER SCREAMED HELEN AT KATE

Sunday Mail Big Brother correspondent Elizabeth Woodcock made it to the final four on Big Brother 2. On Friday, she met up again with her old housemates to run a critical eye over the BB3 wannabes.

EVEN if you've been on the show, it doesn't stop accusations flying.

<continues at url>

http://www.sundaymail.co.uk/news/

[LEE]

Hi dinalt

Welcome to the board.

That was an interesting read. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised that Helen liked Jade but I'm certainly glad she's in the minority.

[dinallt]

By the way I havent seen this on the site

It's a Times article from last week liz
had published www.timesonline.co.uk

You'll have to subscribe to the site to find it so I have copied it here.


May 19, 2002

Column: Diary: Elizabeth Woodcock
I’m glad to be a bystander for Big Brother’s return



Lights, camera, action

ANOTHER group of people are throwing themselves, willingly, into the clutches of the Big Brother machine. This time 12 people will enter the new, swish and bigger house on May 24. I hope it works better then last year.

The location has moved to the “internationally renowned” Elstree Studios. We are told this with great pride, as though the impressive history will somehow rub off on this programme as it is welcomed into the fold of the film greats.

The format that has been devised will be “bigger and badder, tougher and meaner”. No longer will the 12 be able to break the rules (did we?). If they do, they’ll have three warnings and then they are out. They also won’t be able to give “dippy excuses” when it comes to nominating who will be evicted.

This is going to be a hard one as I believe people aren’t, by nature, overtly bitchy. It’s easier to nominate the first few, but the last six or seven merge, as living together with little stimulation makes you realise some people really aren’t that bad.




A tighter squish

It’ll be interesting to see the new bunch of contestants: maybe they’ll be more extreme. However, with a hexagonal pool provided, there might be more fights and duckings than sensuous scenes as the tensions rise. And the tensions may well rise. Although the house is 15% larger this year, the two extra people will mean an even tighter squish than last time. The dining room table looks particularly small — even we had elbow room for arguments involving 10 people.

We danced awkwardly around each other in the kitchen, squeezed intimately together on the sofas and could only swing the imaginary cat in the garden. With five or six it was pleasant.




Meaner and leaner

Apparently, you, the viewer, want it meaner and leaner. You want the extremes of emotions, the allies and enemies, the dynamic divides, the betrayals — well, Big Brother wasn’t exactly known for its subtlety. This rawness and urge for rage or raciness will now be compounded by an even greater sense of boredom, as fewer belongings are to be allowed. No magazines, books or games. Instead, these will be used as rewards in the form of treats if the contestants “behave” — which is to say, obey the controlling forces as they creep around the clan, and reality TV becomes unreality TV.



Ratings game

They’re probably reverting to these extremes because our Big Brother was “the friendly Big Brother”, as a few people have said to me. We’re still in touch and are all meeting up soon for a reunion. We were “too nice”, with only one fight a week, on average, and I wonder if bitchiness makes the ratings soar. Looking at other reality TV shows it doesn’t always work that way. Model Behaviour was an assortment of bitches that just became tiring, and the schemers on Survivor were shoved out on a not-so-successful show that seems to have passed without a ripple. However, the pally Pop Idol had the nation on its knees.




Satisfying those urges

But reality TV is here to stay — at least until the next formula knocks it off its perch — and Big Brother is the master of them all; championing the divisiveness, control, manipulation and hype that is necessary for its success. It has triumphed for a number of reasons, which can be divided into the motivations of those taking part and of those watching.

We like reality TV because our community and gossip networks have broken down. Many decades ago our great grannies swapped stories over the garden fence while the neighbours twitched their curtains. Today we have no time to stand at the garden fence, even if we know the neighbour. But we still have this urge for gossip. Now we satisfy our hunger from a different source and on a national scale. We love personalities and their lives. This is where Big Brother excels. We get to see the intimate details of people’s lives. And because all our friends know them too, we can have a good chin wag.


Cash cow

Psychologists are calling for studies to be carried out on the effects that reality TV has on the participants. The Experiment, being screened on BBC2, seems a dangerously extreme version of Big Brother, taking 15 people and splitting the group into guards and prisoners. The series, it is claimed, had to be stopped early because of the apparently detrimental psychological effects on some of the participants. The website for this show is uncannily like that of Big Brother, but uses the label of science to justify itself.

Maybe this show is even more exploitative, then, as all reality TV boils down to the same thing: making loads of cash for the television companies and boosting the careers of a few select producers.



Elizabeth Woodcock was a contestant on Big Brother 2

[dinallt]

The sunday mail and sunday mirror are sister newspapers both with common ownership. its strange that liz gets slagged off by the Sunday Mirror with

"Elizabeth Woodcock, 27, has disappeared back to Scotland to continue her life of nudity with her old man boyfriend. Highlight of the year appears to have been meeting Darius at the recent Great Scot Awards."

well I quess she didn't grant them an interview.

and yet is the Sunday Mail's BB correspondent with presumably weekly reports on the house.

[Kaz]

Welcome to the forum dina.

We really haven't heard a lot about Elizabeth since BB2 ended - she was the one who seemed to disappear back to 'normailty' the quickest.

Her articles are very interesting, and to me show that she still feels very aggrieved at how her character was portrayed during BB2. Also her feeling that the BB2 contestants were left to fend for themselves after the show finished. I tend to agree with this comment.

Her point about BB2 being portrayed as the 'friendly' Big Brother is spot on. There were genuine and lasting friendships forged on the show, and that went a long way to making BB2 to special for me.

It's early days yet on BB3, but I'm not sure that the same will happen this year. Time will tell.

Thanks again for telling us about these articles, dina - they are fascinating reading.

[dinallt]

!'ve see the odd article she's written for Scottish newspapers and magazines. The Scotsman, Daily Record, and their Sunday equivalents. They are mainly travel and heritage type pieces. There have been 5 or 6 this year. The one thing BB seems to have brought her is a step up the journalism ladder. She wasn't even on the bottom rung before BB last year.

[BigSister]

Hi dina welcome

We have not seen a lot of Elizabeth so thanks 4 that