The northlondonhippy

As much as I love Big Brother, I hate it when the series finishes.

I know I’ve joked about it going on for­ever; but in truth a lit­tle part of me really wishes it could.

When a series is cur­rent, it takes up quite a bit of your time.

No, more than that, it becomes part of your life and the house­mates become part of your life too.

Whether you love them or loathe them or some­thing in between; if you’re a com­mit­ted BB viewer then every­one in the house means some­thing to you, in some weird, twisted, post-modernist way.

What does it say about me that every year I let a dozen or more total strangers become my friends, in what is very much a one-sided relationship?

What does it say about all of us?

Our bleak and dreary lives are full of despair, with bit­ter dis­ap­point­ment and untold, immea­sur­able injus­tices lurk­ing around every corner.

If it weren’t for soft drugs and con­sumer pur­chases, my life would be mean­ing­less. I shop; I smoke; there­fore I am.

Oh cheer up you mis­er­able hippy!

Big Brother is a way to escape our own lives by involv­ing our­selves in the lives of oth­ers; many of whom we see as less than our­selves. By judg­ing them neg­a­tively, we can feel bet­ter about who we are.

I don’t have a prob­lem with that.

My prob­lem is that I still become attached to them. I miss them. Some­thing doesn’t feel right when they are all finally out of the house.

I go to E4 and press that red but­ton and god­dammit, noth­ing hap­pens! I can’t see them. I don’t know what they’re doing. They’re not there.

I’ve spent the entire series being highly crit­i­cal of all of them, with my wry obser­va­tions and insult­ing barbs and now I’m pin­ing for them like a loyal dog misses his master.

Sound famil­iar?

Isn’t that what fam­i­lies are like?

The peo­ple you are clos­est to are the ones that drive you the cra­zi­est. The house­mates become part of all of our fam­i­lies dur­ing the entire run of the series.

Like your real life rel­a­tives, I’m sure there are some you like more than oth­ers and oth­ers you pos­i­tively detest.

Per­haps the beauty of our annual, dis­pos­able friend­ships with BB HMs ben­e­fit from being one-sided. They don’t hate us. They can’t. They don’t know us.

Do you feel like you know this year’s HMs well? If you watched the entire series, I bet you do. Me too. I think it is fair to say that we all feel we have a sense of most of them.

The reverse is not true at all. They don’t know any­thing about us, and what they do think they know is prob­a­bly a mix of mis­judge­ment and misunderstanding.

We’re just the gen­eral pub­lic to them, as long we keep pur­chas­ing Heat Mag­a­zine when one of them is on the cover, they’re happy.

Take my beloved Princess Nikki, please. When she stepped out of the house on the night of the final, her reac­tion demon­strated how lit­tle she really under­stands about the audi­ence. The boo’ing and cat­call­ing left her dumb­struck and her inter­view had to be scrapped. They didn’t even bother cut­ting her “best bits” because we’d seen them already, which only per­plexed her even more.

Yet, we as view­ers think we know Nikki, as we think we know all of them. But in real­ity, we don’t know them that well; we only know what we’ve been shown.

Here’s the thing about edit­ing… As much as every­one likes to think that Ende­mol manip­u­late things in the edit suite, they don’t. They can’t. They can only use footage acquired by film­ing the HMs as they do what­ever they do. They don’t use some superduper com­puter to gen­er­ate fake scenes. That’s just silly.

What they do is take 24 hours of mate­r­ial and dis­til it down to around 45 min­utes of tight, fast paced for the MTV gen­er­a­tion, enter­tain­ment. They want to tell the most com­pelling sto­ries from the house in the most enter­tain­ing, emo­tive way possible.

What I don’t think they do is edit for or against any house­mate. I don’t think they are ever really out to get any­one, but they do let peo­ple bring their own “rope” some­times. You know what hap­pens when they give some­one enough rope, don’t you?

Edit­ing, in it’s very nature is the selec­tive inclu­sion and omis­sion of ele­ments that tell a story. It’s meant to focus the story and make it eas­ier and more reward­ing to follow.

For what pos­si­ble pur­pose would Ende­mol want to manip­u­late the edit­ing any more than they try to hide things when they go wrong?

Actu­ally, I think the oppo­site is true; when things go wrong, they make it part of the pro­gramme, as it adds con­tro­versy and ele­ments of sur­prise and spontaneity.

This year, all the scan­dal and alleged scam­ming brought in the pun­ters much more than it turned them away. The tabloid feed­ing frenzy was just as big as it is every year, but then the rat­ings were just as high too.

None of this changes the fact that every­thing we see is fil­tered by Ende­mol, includ­ing what we are allowed to know about the con­tes­tants. So we don’t really know them at all, we only see cer­tain aspects of them.

I’m sure there are sides to every house­mate that remain unseen by us. No, I don’t mean them squat­ting on the bog!

What we’ve seen is just a glimpse into their lives, a mere peek at who they really are. We don’t really know them, can’t really know them, as we are not given the access we think we are.

Yes, it’s all an illu­sion, but then isn’t every­thing we see on tele­vi­sion just the rep­re­sen­ta­tion of real­ity, but not real­ity itself? Is look­ing out the win­dow at peo­ple pass­ing by any dif­fer­ent from watch­ing live stream­ing from the house?

If you look out your win­dow long enough, you will begin to see the same faces pass­ing by. If you did it for months, you would begin to form opin­ions about these peo­ple through your sim­ple obser­va­tions of such things as cloth­ing, hair­style, facial expres­sion and a mil­lion other things. If you sat there for years, you would prob­a­bly feel as if you knew some of these pass­ing strangers, but would you?

BB is like that win­dow, only with the years of observ­ing crammed into a rel­a­tively short span of time. And it’s the same illu­sion that makes you believe that you know the house­mates well.

The same goes for me, I don’t really know them either.

So tell me this, if I don’t really know them, why do I miss them so much?

If they are still only strangers to me, why do I feel so attached to them?

We love BB because it’s like hold­ing a mir­ror up to soci­ety, but it’s a one-way mir­ror, like they have in chang­ing rooms at depart­ment stores. The house­mates only see a reflec­tion, but BB’s cam­eras can see everything.

We’re all voyeurs at heart; we all like to gawk, even if we’d never admit it.

Tell me you can make your­self look away when you drive past a car crash. You can’t, can you?

That’s why it’s some­times referred to as “car crash tele­vi­sion”, because you just can’t look away.

I can’t just look away either which makes it even harder when the series ends, because its not my choice! I’m forced to go with­out my BB fix and no one even asked me how I felt about it!

The swine!

Yes, I’ll miss Rus­sell Brand and BBBM, it was a real high­light to my view­ing this year and I think he was the real star of the whole damn thing. He has a new series on E4 start­ing next month, but with­out the BB aspect, I don’t know if it will be any good. I’ll cer­tainly give it a go with an open mind.

I’ll even miss Der­mot and Davina, though as pre­vi­ously men­tioned, he’s been sleep­walk­ing through BBLB and her inter­view tech­nique and mug­ging for the cam­era a bit too much to take sometimes.

And as for the house­mates, I really will miss them all. Some of them I’ll prob­a­bly never see again, oth­ers all too often, but as BB con­tes­tants, each one will always hold a spe­cial place in my memories.

Shabaz – may you find san­ity, or may san­ity find you.

Dawn – who?

George – enjoy obscurity

Bon­nie – next time order a Chi­nese takeaway!

Sezer – no comment

Sam – best of luck (what else can I say?)

Grace – may the sugar cubes and car­rots always be plentiful!

Lisa – mint? more like morn­ing breath

Jonathan – we hardly knew ya!

Lea – one day, your breasts will have their own postcode

Jayne – have you ever thought of try­ing antacids?

Michael – she’s not amused

Spi­ral – No means no, matey!

Mikey – no one mum­bles quite like you

Susie – I liked you bet­ter with your tits out

Imo­gen – nice, pretty, smiles a lot (it’s what she wanted)

Jen­nie – you’ll be alright when you grow up

Nikki – we haven’t seen the last of you

Richard – I hope your mum is ok

Ais­leyne – you go girl! I think you’ll go far

Glyn – Keep learn­ing, keep expe­ri­enc­ing, keep living

Pete – eeezamana!

Per­fect Pete; the per­fect win­ner. He was the bookie’s favourite right from the start and stayed that way for the entire run. I’m not dis­ap­pointed he won, he’s a win­ner we can all live with, but it still would have been nice to see a shock Ais­leyne win if for no more rea­son than I now can spell her name properly!

There’s one more group of peo­ple I need to thank and that’s all of you who’ve been drop­ping by to read my BB dri­vel. I’ve really enjoyed writ­ing about Big Brother this year and it’s added an extra level of fun for me.

But the northlon­don­hippy doesn’t end just because BB does.

Here at the hippy, we have fun all year long! Now that you’ve dis­cov­ered me and joined the van­guard of the inter­net elite, why not con­tinue feel­ing supe­rior to other mor­tals by con­tin­u­ing your vis­its to this very website.

It’s not that I’m unknown; I pre­fer to see myself as under­ground. Only the really cool, hip, hap­pen­ing peo­ple come to my site and now you can count your­self amongst this select group of fan­tas­tic people.

How lucky are you?

And I make it easy for you to keep up with all things hippy and I per­son­ally invite you to book­mark my page for future reference.

Even bet­ter, if you dig your RSS reader, why not grab one of my many syn­di­ca­tion feeds, that way, you don’t have to come to the hippy, you can make the hippy come to you!

And with that, the northlon­don­hippy BB col­umn fin­ishes for this series, but the northlon­don­hippy blog lives on!

Catch ya later, masturbator!