A Ticking Time-Bomb (Big Brother (TV Series))

Member Name: Jon V

Product:	Big Brother (TV Series)
Date:	27/07/06 (84 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Still hugely entertaining and compelling

Disadvantages: It couldn't be any further from reality

Attention seeking retards or willing participants in a sociological experiment? The fact Big Brother still exists after seven series shows that television has reached an all time low and the British public are overweight illiterates pumping cash into the ever-swelling coffers of Endemol – who must be laughing their socks off at us.

Oxbridge marketing graduates always have the final say from selling hippy wigs in supermarkets in the sixties to rebranding Green Day as Busted/McFly in the present day. Whenever something fresh emerges it is quickly repackaged and sold to the masses so that a couple of besuited toffs can sit smugly lighting 2 foot Cuban cigars with fifty quid notes whilst some ex Hollyoaks slapper rubs Grecian 2000 onto their greying eyebrows.

Of course it’s always been like this, but we all know the feeling of despair when something like this happens to something we love. Nightclubs are a personal pet hate of mine. During the early nineties some fantastic midweek dance nights attended by 50 happy people in a snug edge of town club, would be repackaged and re-opened in the mega-clubs of London and Ibiza, charging you not three but forty quid for the trouble. The marketing machine works, but is it right in this day and age that everything should be subjected to such exploitation? Course it is. Because we’re stupid enough to buy it.

In 2000 mobile phones had become commonplace, the internet a staple of life and DVDs had made VHS obsolete. I recall reading snippets about some live game show where the contestants would be locked in for a period of weeks, in some sort of Orwellian experiment. It passed me by until one contestant was slung out for cheating and then, surely not……..it was on News at Ten! “Bloke Thrown Out Of Game show!” People talked about Big Brother more than England’s humiliation at Euro 2000. A houseful of normal people eating their breakfast was more important than the impending election in the States of a questionable Texan hell-bent of ruining democracy in the free world, but wait for it……………..TOM HAS CUT HIS HAIR!!!

The first Big Brother was compelling because we didn’t know what to expect but more importantly, neither did Craig, Anna, et al. During one task making a newspaper they joked that one headline could be based around people actually watching them. When Craig emerged as the winner he was arguably the most famous Englishman since Gazza and probably the most famous Scouser since the Beatles. This was huge and the one thing we wanted was more of it. All subsequent winners would forever be eclipsed by Craig, but Brian Dowling, Kate Lawler and Jade Goody are still around years later (the latter didn’t even win it) proving that the show was here to stay.

What will become of Big Brother? Remember the film ‘The Running Man’? Yup. Death is the only way. Shabaz came close to capitulating this year and whether he was genuinely suicidal or just a poor man’s Moulin Rouge usher, the bar has been lifted. The massive fight that took place the other year should have made Endemol realise they’re sitting on a time bomb. In the modern digital age people are crying out for the next level and it wouldn’t surprise me if suicide or murder was to take place in the house. Hardly likely to happen here, but a show shamelessly sold to the rest of the world opens the possibilities up in cultures far less conservative and open than our own.

Reality TV so rarely mirrors reality, but by pushing people to greater limits as Endemol has done and continues to do with this year’s contestants, I feel it’s only a matter of time before one gets pushed over the edge.

Then the press will make them into a martyr. God help us all.

Summary: Better to burn out then fade away. Give them all chainsaws.