[Amy]

When Davina McCall asked me in her bright, overenthusiastic fashion why I called Big Brother a bully, there was not a hint of irony in the presenter’s intelligent brown eyes.
People who have read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four will already be aware, however, that the whole point of Big Brother is that he is a bully.

They will also know that the language spoken by Big Brother’s “Inner Party” bureaucracy is called Newspeak. In Davina’s Newspeak, Big Brother is a force for good and the abuses that he designs are “challenges” — character-building exercises, not degrading ordeals.

Both Kenzie and Lisa, two of my former housemates, can be heard regularly intoning Big Brother’s mantra, “It’s all good” — which is Newspeak for “It’s all bad (but we musn’t complain).”

The bullying began the day before we entered the Big Brother house, when the eight of us were sequestered overnight in different hotels. To keep secret our identities, our rooms had been booked in the names of employees of Endemol, the company behind Big Brother. My first taste of Big Brother’s incompetence was that I had not been told about this. The hotel denied all knowledge of any reservation and insisted on charging the room to my credit card.

Once I succeeded in getting into a room, gangs from the Endemolian Inner Party arrived to take photographs, ask more and more intrusive questions and to repack my things in my Big Brother suitcase.

One Endemolian held up each item, scrutinised it and described it; another wrote down what she said. The only thing to be confiscated from my bag was my kohl eyebrow pencil, in case I should write with it. I would be eyebrowless for the duration.

Big Brother allowed us to bring in no electrical appliances of any kind. An electric shaver would be supplied for the men, but no hair drier for anyone and no Caprice Ceramic Hair Straightener either — so Caprice, my former housemate, must be hoping to quit before her hair does.

I was the second housemate to arrive, after John McCririck, who had already entertained viewers by bouncing off the walls as he tried to walk through the set. He told me that he was there only because he was a failed punter, failed journalist, failed broadcaster and really needed the money, and my heart went out to him.

I was to become more concerned for him as it became increasingly obvious that he didn’t understand the game and didn’t realise that Big Brother would regularly deceive and disappoint him. And so began his epic battles, all of them misconceived, against the routine ill-treatment of the housemates. Again and again he would ask, “What are they playing at?” Strangely, for an experienced television performer, John didn’t understand just how many cameras and microphones there were around him and just how much editorial control Endemol had over the way that the housemates would appear to the watching millions.

Endemol chose to show footage of John asleep with his hand in his underpants and of him picking large bogies from his nose and eating them. Equally revealing and embarrassing images of other housemates would not have gone to air unless Endemol willed it.

What this means is that Endemol has huge scope for influencing public perception of the housemates, almost to the point of being able to pick its own winner. I would not be at all surprised to find some housemates had caveats in their contracts to protect them against the more humiliating kinds of intrusion. The rest of us had to keep a guard on our behaviour day and night.

The housemate who understands this best is Caprice Bourret, who will never allow herself to be seen sleeping or in any unflattering posture whatsoever. Beneath a soft and yielding exterior lies stern self-discipline and a will of iron.

The tabloids described the work-out routine she did on day three as “raunchy”; in truth, it was gruelling and Caprice didn’t even break sweat. As if. Caprice is in the Big Brother house to advertise her brand of lingerie and swimwear; for her it is a win-win situation. Not only is she getting a few million quids’ worth of free advertising, she is also being handsomely paid for being there.

As we waited for the next housemates to arrive she told me she was afraid of Brigitte Nielsen because she was more like a man than a woman. I was not to see her make such a tactical error again.

Article from The Times

[steve_o]

Stop whinging Germaine, there all adults in there not school kids. They have the ability to tell bb or whoever to ******* O**, without the same consequences that kids at school or people at work, who are stuck there! and being bullied may bring upon themselves.