[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

[Mokka]

I read the Pickwick Papers long before BB was a twinkle in our eyes, so I had never thought of the analogy you have drawn here.

I may just reread it now with this idea, and the concept of modern day life applied to it.
Thanks for the commentary, and good luck with your book.

[DyingClown]

Funnily enough, when I mentioned the BB-Pickwick analogy on a Dickens fansite, many Dickensians were appalled, and it became a banned topic. But I would vigorously defend my views. And indeed, if Dickens were alive today, I think he would watch BB. He was fascinated by human behaviour.

[Mokka]

I can see why they may run you out. There was a running theory in my last book club that reality TV is what is killing education, and literacy among youth. We are in a culture of declining literacy and an up swing of cheaply scripted reality tv. I think the original concept of what BB was meant to be, a social experiment concept originating from one of the best novels ever written, fits perfectly into the analogy you have drawn. It is definitely worth a ponder!

[DyingClown]

Another thing to consider is that the two are analogous in terms of their success. The Pickwick Papers was, quite simply, the greatest literary phenomenon in history. That may seem hard to believe nowadays, when it is one of Dickens's least-read novels, but for almost a hundred years, until about 1930, it was the most popular novel in the world. Equally, Big Brother is one of the most successful TV franchises ever.

[Mokka]

I remember picking it up for the first time. It was after I read Little Women, and I thought that if Joe and the girls loved this book, I would too. I was 11, and couldn't have been more wrong. But even when I went back to it around 19 years of age, much of it seemed unrelatable to me. I think I am due for a reread seeing as my life perspectives have significantly altered with time (not age )

[DyingClown]

I think one of Pickwick's great joys is that you feel you are on a very long journey, and you don't know what will happen next. Similarly with BB. In order to give the readers of my novel a similar sense of a journey, I made the novel the same length as Pickwick - so it is 800 pages long - and there are many interpolated episodes, just like in Pickwick. But I keenly wanted to "update" Pickwick - and I hope that the readers of my novel (which, as I said, is partly set in modern times) will try out Pickwick, after reading my novel.

[Mokka]

800 pgs ,

I really do hope for your sake that it is compelling enough for people to want to stick with. I am no stranger to the 1000 pg read, but when you have already admitted that of all his works, the Pickwick Papers is the least read today, I worry for you from a marketing and promotion stand point. It's a tough business to be a writer in these days, especially of a novel.

good luck again to you

[DyingClown]

The key point is that, although The Pickwick Papers isn't widely-read these days, it has the most extraordinary backstory of any work of fiction I have encountered. And my novel is about that backstory - and it requires no previous knowledge of The Pickwick Papers.