[Red Moon]

Who cares what the critics say? I love BB

Channel 4's most watched programme last week was not Lost, the heavily hyped plane crash drama from America. Instead the ratings laurels went to a comparative old-timer, the much reviled, much written off but defiantly indestructible Big Brother.

The reality contest's climax on Friday night pulled in 6.7 million viewers, peaking at 7.8 million, compared to the average for Lost of 6.1 million. It is safe to assume that audience did not include longstanding critics such as Desmond Morris and John Humphrys, unless they were gathering more evidence against what the BBC news presenter last year condemned as TV which 'turns human beings into freaks for us to gawp at'.

Nor, more surprisingly, did the viewing public include Peter Bazalgette, who introduced Big Brother to Britain and has taken on with apparent relish the role of a flamboyant, verbal gunslinging defence lawyer in the court of media opinion. The 52-year-old multi-millionaire is in Tuscany and had to rely on his mobile for text message updates on the final twists and turns, culminating in triumph and £50,000 for Seventies disco dancer Anthony Hutton.

'Anthony's victory was part of a classic Big Brother phenomenon,' Bazalgette said. 'The winners are normally people who are perceived by the audience, rightly or wrongly, as honest and straightforward because they clearly have no particular game plan for winning. It's not that they wouldn't like the money, but they are not seen as deceptive people who will bend the rules and fight each other and backstab. Rather like Craig in series one, Brian in series two, Nadia in series five, Anthony is a classic Big Brother winner.'

After a summer in which contestants' sexual antics have been pushed aside by grim headlines on terrorism, normal service was resumed last week when the Sun roared: 'Big Brother housemate Makosi is really an actress' Makosi, 24, is on the books of a talent agency said to have invoiced the makers of the show makers for £609.68. The bill is thought to have bought a slick audition video which won her a place in the house.'

Given that the series is supposed to feature 'ordinary folk', it was news that would supposedly rock Big Brother and its production company, Endemol. But Bazalgette, who is chairman of Endemol UK and chief creative officer of the group worldwide, laughed it off. 'That was obviously nonsense. What amused me was that it was a pretty good deal if we'd been able to do it. Was it £609.68 for 10 weeks? Some actress! That's something like £8 a day - not quite Equity rates. It's absolute rubbish but they have to print something, I guess. One is flattered that they think they have to keep on digging for stories around a programme that's now been on air for six years.'

The former Cambridge University union president believes Big Brother achieved mass appeal via the internet, not the redtop newspapers which covet its young audience, and praises other papers' 'egghead coverage' of Big Brother as 'an excellent part of the debate about television culture' - perhaps not least because he enjoys the knockabout.

Dr Desmond Morris, the 77-year-old zoologist, wrote last week in the Daily Mail: 'This year Big Brother has sunk so low that it is almost outside the realm of normal criticism,' and attacked the housemates for their 'lack of warmth and kindness'. Bazalgette responded: 'Is a man of his age going to find people of that age group appealing? Of course not - he should mix with his own kind. To extrapolate from 10 or 12 people and say an entire generation is ghastly just shows you don't like people of that age group.

'If people live that closely together then from time to time they get on each other's tits. Why do so many murders happen at Christmas? Because families get together for Christmas and forget how much they dislike each other when they're living on top of each other.'

Mark Lawson, the BBC arts presenter and Guardian critic, wrote: 'Day 67 of the sixth series of Big Brother will go down in the history of reality TV for the sight of a pissed young woman masturbating with a wine bottle,' and opined that it might be time to put a cork in it.

Bazalgette hit back: 'Old Nanny Lawson, as I call him now, was wheeled out as part of the debate because he's now on a one-man crusade that Big Brother should come to an end, although he was its biggest fan in series one. He suffers from Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto syndrome, which is, "If everybody likes it, it can't be any good": it's fine for intellectuals to discover something and go on about it, but the moment everybody likes it and watches it, it loses its allure.'

But Julie Burchill, the author and Times columnist, proclaimed her love for the show and said 'Why do people hate reality TV, and Big Brother in particular? I believe it is mainly because they hate the human race in general and the working class specifically.' Bazalgette said: 'People who don't like it nearly always turn out to be middle aged to elderly men, whether Desmond Morris, John Humphrys, Mark Lawson or whoever.

'They're just people who don't like humanity in its fullest breadth. You could have found people like the guys we had in the house this year 10 years ago, 40 years ago, 100 years ago, but there wasn't TV 100 years ago. If people like Humphrys and Morris think these people should be going around making donations to charity and discussing Proust, I'm not sure what sort of people they mix with. I don't quite recognise that as humanity.'

Endemol has a new game show, Deal or No Deal, which has been bought by 30 countries, making it the fastest selling format since Who Wants to be a Millionaire? It will arrive in Britain in the autumn.

But Big Brother is guaranteed at least two more summers on Channel 4, and Bazalgette insists that, although its audience was slightly down on last year because of early competition from ITV1's Celebrity Love Island, it is still a 'massive hit'.

He added that with recent series in Russia and Thailand, a launch in the Philippines and an imminent return to its birthplace, the Netherlands, 'Big Brother is in better health now worldwide than it was two years ago'. News that is likely to cause sinking hearts among Morris, Humphrys and the rest.

Source: The Observer

[James]

Another article about Julie Burchill's programme about reality shows on Sky One on Sunday. Saskia and Jade are interviewed apparently.

Julie Burchill: I'm Julie get me out of here!

From 'Big Brother' to 'Wife Swap', Julie Burchill loves trash TV - and she wants to tell you why. John Walsh sits down with Britain's proudest couch potato

Published: 01 September 2005

It was a red-letter evening in Julie Burchill's house on Monday. There was, she says, "great excitement" in the air. Why? Because it was the final of America's Next Top Model, a reality TV show on the Living channel. "Did you see it?" she asks excitedly. No, I said, I'm bitterly sorry to have missed it. Later she asked, "You did watch Celebrity Love Island, didn't you?" Nope, I confessed, that passed me by as well. "For heaven's sake," she says, with a look of withering scorn, "What do you do in the evenings? Read improving books all night?"

Throughout her career, Ms Burchill has displayed great skill in suggesting that the personal and the universal are the same. If she likes (say) walnuts, she will argue that there is only one nut worth eating. If she leaves London to live in the provinces, she'll explain that only a madman would stay a minute longer in the metropolis. Now, if she spends every evening slumped in front of Big Brother or I'm a Celebrity..., then anyone who doesn't must be a snob or a plank. But it's still embarrassing to have to confess one's ignorance to the nation's most devoted "intellectual couch potato" as she describes herself in Reality TV Is Good For You, the first of four documentaries she's made for Sky One.

Her debut is a ringing defence of the genre that has spread like poison ivy over the television schedules in the last six years, bringing controversy, obloquy and delight in about equal measure. She is a passionately OTT advocate. "I believe opponents of reality TV are against life itself," she says, declaring that "TV snobs" attack the genre simply as a way of "sneering at the working class without voting Tory."

She wheels on John Humphrys to say that reality TV is "dishonest, demeaning and deeply and profoundly boring", and Andrew O'Hagan to describe Celebrity Love Island as "the lowest point in Hell", before advancing her counter-proposals. They are very simple. She likes reality TV because a) it makes working class people into stars, b) transforms the participants' lives, c) takes the wind out of celebrity sails and d) teaches you to be tolerant of people like Kemal and Derek on Big Brother 6.

Why did she feel it needed defending? "I just caught several little digs in the papers about Big Brother, and it got my goat because I knew they wanted to have a dig at the working class but couldn't. I'm not being chippy. I know that's what they meant."

But surely the tabloid papers are the forefront of the attack - aren't they're the voice of the Tory working class? "If you meet these boys from the tabloids," Julie says, "they're public schoolboys, like Kelvin MacKenzie. It doesn't matter what the paper is they're working for."

In the documentary she meets Jade Goody from Big Brother 2, the plump, soi-disante minger with the rudimentary grasp of geography, who represented a low point in public reaction. Objecting to her porcine features, her fleshiness, her loudness or all three, the press as good as called for her execution. She received death threats and police protection. Burchill confronts one of the scribes who wrote the incendiary pieces. "There seemed to be a kind of sexual loathing in the articles," says Burchill. "When I met Kevin O'Sullivan from the Mirror, he was sweating like a pig, and when he talked about Jade, it was like he was expressing sexual disgust for a woman. I said, 'You fancied her really, didn't you?', and he went, 'No, I was so repulsed by her', but as he said 'repulsed', he jerked his groin a bit, and I thought, repulsed, yeah..."

Ms Burchill is a very unfair arguer. If she can short-circuit an argument with imputations of lust, she will. To all my objections about reality TV - that it uses dim and vainglorious human beings as lab-rats - she argues that the participants enjoy a kind of working-class gap year. "I spoke to Saskia from Big Brother 6. She was immensely sensible. She said, 'I knew when I came out of the house there wouldn't be a limo waiting to whisk me off to Hollywood. I got some nice clothes, a couple of nice holidays. I've already got a nice boyfriend out of it. And soon I'm going to get back to work'. They're very sensible people."

Did she think the more attention-seeking housemates in BB demeaned themselves? Or did she think that there should be more entertainment involving vaginal wine-bottle insertion?

"Oh come on, John," says Ms Burchill. "I don't think that was demeaning, I thought she was a sweet girl. I got friends who behave like that. Haven't you?"

No I haven't. "You should get up here more often. I'm sorry, but I don't find it very unusual"........

............'Reality TV Is Good For You' will be shown on Sky One on Sunday 4 September

Rest of article - http://news.independent.co.uk/people...icle309531.ece