Diamond's Geezers and Goldie's Girls (Celebrity Big Brother)

Member Name: stoffy

Product:	Celebrity Big Brother
Date:	22/11/02 (232 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: very surreal and watchable TV

Disadvantages: Anne Diamond's feet being analysed

There’s something very surreal about a foot analyst dissecting Anne Diamond’s personality by looking at her pinkies whilst Dermot O’Leary looks on. However, thanks to Celebrity Big Brother, we are currently being treated to some very bizarre and watchable TV…

Last year’s Celebrity Big Brother (a venture for Comic Relief) gave an opportunity for some of the most disliked famous people in the UK to thrust themselves into the limelight. Whilst Vanessa Feltz came across as being mentally unhinged and discovered that Chris Eubank’s eccentric Englishman persona was actually for real, it also had the effect of raising half a million pounds for charity and making Claire Sweeney a household name. Er, thanks for that.

Having decided to ditch the BBC and set up their own charitable venture, Channel 4’s flagship show features 6 more celebrities eager to show the general public just how normal they are with the omnipresent Davina McCall holding the whole live show together by a thread.

After several tabloids let the cat out of the bag about who was going to be in the house days before the show was launched on Wednesday, it wasn’t so much of a shock that Goldie (jungle DJ pioneer, not to be confused with Tony Blackburn), Anne ‘my dirty linen has been aired in public more times that I’ve had hot dinners’ Diamond, Sue ‘voice of Kingsmill bread’ Perkins, Melinda ‘Breasts’ Messenger, Mark ‘flop solo-album’ Owen and Les ‘we asked our audience how many times they’d slept with my wife’ Dennis were announced as the plucky sextet willing to spend 10 days under 24-hour surveillance. Contrary to earlier reports, Caprice, Dawn French, Linford Christie and Esther Rantzen either weren’t asked or declined to take part.

The format of the show is pretty similar to the last one. Running until the 29th of November when the winner wil
l be announced, the housemates will complete tasks and be subjected to trials and tribulations whilst they are locked up in the same house that the BB3 contestants lived in over this Summer. The first set of nominations will be tonight (Friday), with the first eviction being announced on Sunday. Two more evictions will follow next week, with next Friday seeing the last three battle it out to become the latest celebrity superchamp after Jack Dee and Tony Blackburn.

Unlike the last series, Sky Digital viewers can see interactive coverage (complete with 4 different view-screens) 24 hours a day on E4, whilst those with access to E4 via other cable networks can tune in for around 20 hours a day for both live action and Dermot O’Leary’s ‘Little Brother’ analysis show. Those without digital or cable can still see daily highlights on Channel 4, whilst also seeing a bit of Dermot too.

Bookie William Hill states Melinda as being favourite, closely followed by ‘Family Fortunes’ host Les Dennis. Anne Diamond, labelled as the super-bitch already by many tabloids, is the rank outsider.

You can raise money for charity by voting for who you want to be evicted (25p per text, a fraction less for a call), and phonelines will be open from tonight… not trying to influence people in any way, but anyone who thinks that novelty wigs are that hilarious must surely go out on their ear…

So far the highlights of the show have included that hilarious awkward silence between Ms Diamond, who introduced to us coverage of miner strikes and hostage situations on TV-AM wearing pastel-shaded polo-neck jumpers and dangly earrings, and self-confessed gangster Goldie. We have also seen the aforementioned Goldie attempted to drop leeks onto a small patch of grass using a mechanised digger whilst Les Dennis shouts words of encouragement. You couldn’t really make it up, could you?

Although the whole ce
lebrity culture of programmes is wearing extremely thin, with the jaw-droppingly awful ‘Russian Roulette’ show being a great example of how not to make compulsive viewing, ‘Celebrity Big Brother’ remains great TV, purely because there is no stop and rewind button. We see them as being vulnerable and manipulated rather than acting as superior prima-donnas. So in fact, it’s actually the antidote to programmes which heap praise on overpaid non-entities who’s only claim to fame is a few photo-shoots in Heat magazine.

It will be interesting to see how the celebs come out of this run. Claire Sweeney can thank the show for giving her a career. Vanessa Feltz can thank it for ruining hers. The smart money’s on Melinda to be overall victor – naturally warm and bubbly, as well as inevitably having the tabloid support behind her (although let’s not forget about the early-losers of previous years, Bubble and Spencer, who were both on the front-page of ‘The Sun’ all Summer before being voted out).

Although most celebrity shows of nowadays will inevitably die out due to lack of interest (there’s only so many times that people will give a damn about one pleb sleeping with another behind another’s back), I think that using almost-household names in the BB environment shows both the reality and celebrity TV genres at there very best. Maybe for the best to cut out that feet analysis though…

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