[Jamie89]

You're absolutely right Kirk. And I think your point is highlighted even more by having a direct comparison coming off the back of BB17.
We had Marco who was an overbearing focus in the beginning, and a lot of people said he was making the show, but his eviction proved that wasn't the case. Look at Laura for example; her only purpose during Marco's stay in the house was as a pawn to his airtime and it was only once he left that the producers allowed us to see her actual personality, and a lot of us (including myself) went from disliking her to absolutely loving her. I don't personally believe that it was simply a case that she didn't show her personality before then. Many of us were shocked that she wasn't nominated in the first week because of the edit we saw of her, but her not being nominated shows that the HM's were seeing something different.
And then Natalie was 'making the show' because she had lots of arguments, but personally I found her one-note, and her arguments dull, and again once she left it opened the show up further and we got to see other housemates flourish. My series favourite was Emma and I doubt that would have been the case had Marco and Natalie stayed because the little moments that made me love her simply wouldn't have been shown. And a show like Big Brother, for me, is more about the little moments and getting to see what makes people tick, rather than it being about watching obnoxious idiots causing faux drama for the sake of it.

A lot of us tend to moan about contrived storylines and producer manipulation, but by buying into the producer driven hype of a single housemate, by making claims that someone like Bear is 'making the show' simply because that's what they're feeding us, we're rewarding the producers and encouraging more of it, so it shouldn't come as a surprise when they bring in other types of manipulation too. The problem I have with situations like this though, is that it's a situation where, like Cherie so shrewdly pointed out in another thread, the producers are manipulating us.

Of course had Bear left early, like you said there's no guarantee that this series would be entertaining. But for me at least, and for what I like to watch in a BB series, it isn't entertaining in the slightest with him in there so I'd have been happy with that risk.