[James]

Put me to sleep, now
By Caitlin Moran
Reality TV show Shattered proves to be a dismal re-run of Big Brother - without any kip


APPLE LAUNCHES the new MiniPod this spring – smaller and cheaper than the original iPod, it comes in five different colours (pink, blue, green, silver and gold) and holds a dinky 1,000 tunes for £137.

How very Big Brother. Having, like Apple, come up with a winning formula, Channel 4 is also relaunching the same idea over and over again, each time smaller and cheaper than the last.

First there was Big Brother, then Teen Big Brother, and now Shattered — Big Brother, but without the sleep. Given this list, it’s fairly clear that, on the horizon, we can look forward to One-Handed Big Brother, Dog Big Brother and *h N*! Big Brother, but where no one is allowed to use vowels.

The only difference between Apple and Channel 4, however, is that while everyone I know wants a pink iPod, only 1.8 million people tuned in for the first episode of Shattered on Sunday.

Obviously I was one of them. I’m a long-term defender of the Big Brother format — I hear what people say about voyeurism, fast-food television and the Big Brother psychologist, Linda “I think the group feel exposed in this house with two cameras hard-wired to E4 in the toilet” Papadopoulos, but I felt that Big Brother, the first two series in particular, sparked pub debates on day-to-day morality that neither the Moral Maze nor even an EastEnders where Mo gets raped again, has managed.

How should you treat someone the morning after a one-night stand? Is cheating in a game inexcusable? Are there any other benders as likeable as Brian? As an added bonus, I think it’s important that we have an influx of thick-skinned imbeciles to distract the paparazzi, leaving genuinely talented famous people a little more privacy to get on with their lives. If it takes a year of Jade Goody to let Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow have a lunch in peace, then so be it.

That’s a cultural deal I’m willing to strike. However, even I believe Shattered to be a reformat too far.

For starters, as a viewer, finding yourself back in the Big Brother house for the third time in a year makes you feel wearily institutionalised. The hospital-bright lights, the shiny white floors, the edgy people in tracksuit-bottoms throwing the furniture around to amuse themselves — it’s like forever being in A&E at 2am on a Friday.

Of course, some changes have been rung: there are no bedrooms for a start, and there’s a new presenter, Dermot O’Leary. Promoted from E4’s Big Brother’s Little Brother to his first high-profile vehicle, O’Leary shapes up, on a good day, as the next Jonathan Ross.

But here he has nothing to get his teeth into. The truth is that people who haven’t slept for seven days aren’t inherently interesting. Yes, they might hallucinate a great deal, but the problem with hallucinations is they happen inside people’s heads. It’s like an episode of Casualty in which the biggest injury is a mild stomach ulcer, which Baz decides not to operate on. There’s nothing for us to gawp at.

Channel 4 should have been tipped off that sleep deprivation is fairly low-key, visually, by “SAS expert” Ken Hames, who claimed he’d stayed awake for eight days while on operations in the Falklands conflict.

“Towards the end, I hallucinated a pint of beer,” he revealed in the first episode. If someone explains that, when, in enemy territory, without sleep, being shot at and surrounded by penguins, the most extreme thing that happened was he imagined a pint, it’s probably wise to cancel your week-long sleep-deprivation show right there.

On top of this, the contestants are the usual dreary bunch (media-studies students and body-builders) who have nothing to do but muck around, sleepily, all day. If someone had given them a couple of engaging tasks — driving a large oil-tanker around Alaska, say — then, maybe, Shattered would have found some impetus. But when seven sleepy people sit around, trying to be just wacky and likeable enough to go on to a presenting job, like Kate Lawler from Big Brother, the effect is rather like being coshed to death with Timmy Mallet’s inflatable Wacaday mallet.

Their collective attitude was exemplified at 1am on Sunday night, on the live feed on E4. O’Leary popped into their studio to have a chat with them about the show.

“This might sound presumptuous,” said Chris, the media-studies student, leaning across the table. “But have the tabloids given any of us a nickname yet?” Ironically, I’m sure Chris will find it very easy to lie awake at night when he finds out that the tabloids have given it slightly less space than the news that stilettos are good for you. Air-hostess Ellen — the first to be evicted from “The Lab” — also showed a wearying familiarity with the catchphrases of previous Big Brothers.

“I’m still a winner, anyway,” she kept saying, as E4 showed her being escorted from the set to a medical unit. “I’m still a winner, just for being on the show.”

There aren’t many times I feel, as a viewer, like pulling rank on someone stupid enough to want to be on television in the first place but, really, how could someone who was the first to be evicted from a flop Channel 4 sub-Big Brother rip-off show, and currently having her urine tested live on air, conceivably be a winner? If she is a winner, then that makes me, sitting on the sofa, eating a Cadbury’s MiniRoll and able to urinate in private, Bob Champion.

Of course, Channel 4 knew charges of moral exploitation might be levelled at it for encouraging behaviour that can result, as Shattered’s opening credits remind us every night, in side-effects as extreme as “irritability!” “heightened libido!” and “spots!”

Similarly, it was also aware that charges of cultural bankruptcy might be levelled at it for peddling this stuff as good telly. This was why, every so often, the word “experiment” was bandied about. The contestants were pointedly subjected to a battery of tests, the psychologist was wheeled in at the first sign of conflict, and there was lots of footage of previous sleep-deprivation experiments, as if to suggest that Channel 4 was the newest in a long line of behavioural- science pioneers, and so on top of its game that it could have a pop at the Nobel and broadcast the new series of Friends, all at the same time.

There was also, within this suggestion, an even more deeply codified message: Shattered is not just an experiment on the contestants — it’s also an experiment on the viewers.

We’re not sleeping watching them not sleeping. We’re happy to subject people to medium amounts of mental disturbance in the name of light entertainment. Ultimately, who isn’t sleeping at night? But there really does come a point where an act becomes so imbued with different meanings that it turns itself inside out, and simply reverts to the thing that it is again.

So, ultimately Shattered is a programme about people staying awake for cash — They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? in pyjamas, and nothing worth losing sleep over.

Shattered is on Channel 4 at 10pm tonight and 9pm tomorrow

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article...955951,00.html

[Romantic Old Bird]

Personally, I quite like it!

There is a real comraderie between the participants, and we get to see Dermot so often we can literally see his hair grow!

It does make me a little uncomfortable to see them struggle so, but it is voluntary and it will soon be over.

Glad this reporter acknowledges the way BB1 and 2 utterly outshadowed everything that followed, although I am not too sure how politically correct that comment about Brian was! A bit offensive I feel.

Dermot the next Jonathon Ross?

Oh, no! As popular and omniprescent - yes please!
Any other likeness? NO! I certainly don't look at JR in anything like the same way...

[BusyBee]

There is a real comraderie between the participants

I quite agree let's hope they pick a collection like this for the next BB. Though I must admit they are very media conscious, ie. how many people are watching them, have they been given nicknames etc. etc.

As for Dermot being the next Jonathon Ross - well the main difference (apart from looks) is that Jonathan tries to be clever whilst Dermot is clever and funny without even trying. Let him be the first Dermot.