Starting out as a genuine social experiment but then gradually becoming utterly ridiculous, this television franchise has given rise to some of the most despicable people on the planet, generating massive profits for Channel 4 and Endemol. ALEXANDER BRITTON looks at the show we love to hate.
As Big Ben chimed twelve times to ring in 2010, I felt an acute sadness. It dawned upon me that this year would see the end of Big Brother, and therefore the end of an error. (Era, surely?) To be frank, this trip to the televisual knackers’ yard is overdue – the format is increasingly tiresome, the contestants increasingly desperate and Davina’s enthusiasm increasingly fake. It seems that I am not the only person holding this opinion; Big Brother’s audiences have steadily been falling over the course of years, with many predicting that even re-re-runs of Midsomer Murders will prove entertaining than the last hurrah of ‘odd people in a house doing odd things’, coming to your screens this summer.
The format promised so much back at its inception – the programme was marketed as a psychological insight into the lives of people living at the behest of an omnipresent and omniscient deity of sorts, Big Brother. Yet, it soon descended into a farce of sorts – we sat on a sofa drinking tea watching others sitting on a sofa drinking tea – each person in the house grabbing the 15 minutes in the sun that Warhol had promised them. Some went on to ‘remain in the public eye’ (read: pose for softcore lads magazines), and others faded back into obscurity, the closest thing to an intellectual analysis being confessions of former partners about each contestant’s prowess in the bedroom.
Concerns about mundanity were answered by feeble attempts to ‘spice things up’ that came across as embarrassingly predictable. “What’ll happen if we put a gay man and a homophobe in the same room, or an attractive man and three generic, self-confessed slags? Won’t that make great TV, eh?” It didn’t. Whether they laughed, cried, cross-dressed or did anything that could neatly be filed under the heading of ‘wacky antics’, the format couldn’t draw in the viewers it used to. Channel 4 were left with little choice, the plug had to be pulled.
What will fill this void, however? Channel 4 and its sister channels devoted hours and hours of its airtime to this programme, covering the footage from all angles and allowing the public the slightly creepy possibility of watching people sleeping in night vision, hearing them snoring. It was real, all too real.
But fret not, Channel 4, an idea came to me in a dream, and I think it could work. Get some people from your seemingly endless supply of fame-hungry misfits and put them on a farm. A real one. Let’s call it Manor Farm. In fact, that can be the name of the show too. Each contestant has to pull their weight on the farm; they are entirely self-sufficient, and so one person’s laziness is to the ultimate detriment of the group as a whole. Before long, there will be those who have established themselves as ‘leaders’ of the group, and they convince everyone to follow some arbitrary commandments. Say, “No animal shall drink alcohol”, “No animal shall sleep in a bed” and “All animals are equal”.
However, this gets a little boring after a while, because the leaders like beds, booze and inequality. The rules are surreptitiously modified to suit the pigs, sorry, the leaders, and chaos ensues. This is where the dream, and therefore the idea, took a turn for the bizarre, finishing with the realisation that this has all been heard before, that there was no TV show and that this was actually real life. The contestants, if indeed there were any in the first place, all snuck out quietly through the back door, straight past Davina McCall standing bemused in a field, gesticulating frantically to no-one in particular. Anyway, I trust that the cheque will be in the post should any of these ideas actually get used, right?
Alexander Britton
Tags: big brother, channel 4, endemol, tv
