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Channel 4 and Endemol have declared war on “wannabe” Big Brother contestants and are promising a “funny but evil” ninth series.


This year, a record 16 contestants will enter the house during the launch night’s 100-minute show, four more than usual. C4 has again committed to a 13 week-run, despite calls for a shorter series to avoid interest waning as it did in last year’s under-performing series, which plumbed record low average ratings of 3.9 million.

We’ve been very careful with casting this year and there are some characters of the like you’ve never seen before.

In an echo of series 3 and 5, when BB turned “bad” and divided the house into rich and poor halves, executive producer Phil Edgar-Jones told Broadcast Magazine that the new series would be “funny but evil”.

“We’ve told the housemates it will be full-on and there will be no leeway,” he said. “We’re getting tougher on wannabes and on the causes of wannabes. We’ve been very careful with casting this year and there are some characters of the like you’ve never seen before. These are not your typical screaming wannabes but people with a bit of depth, from different backgrounds. We want conflict but we don’t want endless shouting.”

E4 head and Big Brother commissioning editor Angela Jain said that Celebrity Hijack, the E4 spin-off that replaced Celebrity Big Brother in January and featured contestants with individual talents, had reminded the producers of the need for diverse housemates and to refresh the show as often as possible during its run.

“BB has the capacity to reinvent itself time after time and it isn’t in our interests to just churn it out. People are self-selecting and think we want a particular kind of person [as a housemate]. Our producers have to find the real person underneath,” she said.

The latest series will air as C4 attempts to emphasise its public service credentials to secure £150m a year from the public purse. BB has been the whipping boy for critics of C4’s output, but Jain stressed that the show reflected the broadcaster’s creative risk-taking, while Edgar-Jones repeated Peter Bazalgette’s earlier claims that the flexible format can confront social issues, “almost by accident”.

The commercial pressure on the show is also intense. Simon Bevan, head of TV at media agency Vizeum, said: “It’s been more under wraps than usual to build anticipation, and C4 needs it to do well this year. Without it, we’d see significant inflation [in ad prices], which will be tough in the current economic climate.”

Mindshare head of audio-visual Paul Rowlinson was pessimistic about its prospects: “Big Brother is mass-market and the only thing that helps C4 to rival ITV1, but there’s less of a feeling of an event each year. If it performs as well as last year that would be fine, but the feeling is that ratings will probably be down.”

SOURCE : IBB
LINK:http://www.insidebigbrother.net/news...r-wannabes.php