The northlondonhippy

Archive for June, 2007

I can’t believe that Tony Blair’s been Prime Min­is­ter for over ten years.

Of course, I do believe it; I’m not in denial or any­thing. If I am in denial about any­thing, it would be just how quickly time passes. Ten years, it seems, can dis­ap­pear in the blink of an eye. He’s step­ping down today, but if you get so much of any news today, it would be hard to miss. We don’t get a new Prime Min­is­ter that often, these days!
It does feel like it was only yes­ter­day that Blair won his first elec­tion. I was work­ing in a tv news­room, all night, that night, right through to the morning.

I remem­ber watch­ing a live feed from, I think it was the South Bank, where Tony was hav­ing his vic­tory cel­e­bra­tions. The crowd was as big, as it was jubi­lant. He got a wel­come nor­mally reserved for sport­ing heroes and rock stars.

I can remem­ber that song, too; his cam­paign theme song – D-REAM – Things can only get better…

They didn’t; at least, not from where I’m sitting.

Crime rates are up, taxes are up, the NHS is worse, most gov­ern­ment ser­vices are lack­ing, civil rights eroded, house prices sky­rock­et­ing, and we’re still knee-deep in a point­less war that seems to have no end in sight.

Job well done, Mr. B!

Good luck solv­ing all the prob­lems in the MidEast next. With your track record, I’m sure it will be sorted within weeks of your appoint­ment as the new “peace envoy” to the region.

It’s easy to be crit­i­cal with hindsight.

But back in 1997, we were all just so happy to put the Iron Lady and then the Grey Man behind us, that we would have cel­e­brated any­one else’s elec­tion. Tony was that anyone.

The day after the elec­tion, I remem­ber it seemed like the mood in the entire coun­try just lifted. Strangers smiled at you on the streets, chil­dren held doors open for old ladies and that hot chick a few houses down the road from me finally relented and gave me a world class BJ.

OK, I made that last bit up, but that’s how it felt; like all of your dreams were pos­si­ble and maybe that next knock on the front door might really be that hotty from 2 doors down, offer­ing to plea­sure me in return for a bor­rowed cup of sugar.

Now, that’s what I call neighbourly!

If I knew then, what I know now…

I wouldn’t have been so happy.

None of us would have even come close.

And what really bugs me about Tony Blair is that he’s not stu­pid. And I think his inten­tions to do “good” were genuine.

He just cocked it up. He got it wrong. Or worse, he allowed com­mer­cial and polit­i­cal com­pro­mises to dom­i­nate his policy.

Do you really think sit­ting at the big table with George W doesn’t come with a price?

Do you really think any alleged exchange of cash for peer­ages, didn’t include some strings that might lead back to some pos­si­ble, dodgier busi­ness deals?

I don’t think we’ve really scratched the sur­face on any of this just yet. There’s plenty of dig­ging yet to be done. It will be. Dirt always finds a way out.

Ten years is a long time. Let’s see what Tony’s up to in ten more years.

Will be seen as an elder states­man, con­tin­u­ing to per­form on the world’s polit­i­cal stage?

Will he still be on the lec­ture cir­cuit, com­mand­ing large speak­ing fees and pub­lish­ing bor­ing, yet wor­thy books?

Or will he be locked in Slo­bo­dan Milosevic’s old cell at the War Crimes Tri­bunal in The Hague, await­ing trial over his role in the Iraq war?

Or a cell in Bel­marsh, await­ing trial for some as of yet dis­cover cor­rup­tion allegation?

I wouldn’t want to spec­u­late, espe­cially as I got it so very wrong ten years ago. Let’s just say if I were Mr. Blair, I’d avoid any stopovers in Hol­land for a while and get a good lawyer!

Oh wait, he’s got his wife! She could be his mouth­piece, although from what I hear, she ain’t cheap either! He can afford it.

See ya, Tony! Your ten years sure went quick! Time really does fly when you’re watch­ing soci­ety crum­ble before your eyes!

Hands up if you’ve ever thought about being a house­mate on Big Brother…

Go on, admit it, you’ve won­dered what it would be like to be a con­tes­tant on BB. You’ve con­sid­ered how you would deal with the sit­u­a­tions. You’ve started a sen­tence with “Well, if I was in the house…”

I have too. Only, there is no way in hell I would actu­ally con­tem­plate audi­tion­ing for the pro­gramme. No way. I don’t want that sort of atten­tion; I don’t want the press on my ass. I don’t want to ever be famous.

Except, of course, here on the internet.

As much as we may all imag­ine liv­ing in that lit­tle mul­ti­coloured house in Elstree, in real­ity we don’t have a clue what its like to be trapped in that camera-coated pres­sure cooker, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for a poten­tial 13 weeks.

It all sounds beyond hor­ri­ble to me.

Yet, I sit here, slack-jawed and wide-eyed, watch­ing the high­lights show, not believ­ing what I’m see­ing and think­ing, “well, if I was in the house, I would never say/do/touch/eat…”; to what­ever I was react­ing to at the moment.

Talk about bullshit!

The truth is most of us would come apart at the seams under that sort of pres­sure and scrutiny. I also think a great num­ber of us wouldn’t get beyond the psy­cho­log­i­cal screen­ing and I’d put myself in that group too. I’d crum­ble like a rag doll in days; or worse, snap, in a big, bad scary way by snap­ping a few annoy­ing necks with a swift, deft, unex­pected jerk of my arm.

I’m not fuck­ing joking!

You wouldn’t want to see me in the house, any­way. Lim­ited cig­a­rettes, no dope, poten­tially naked and/or erect plus homi­ci­dal? Let’s leave all that to your furtive imag­i­na­tions and not mine, because it is all far too foul for me to contemplate.

Please try to remem­ber, we’re not in there. They are. We don’t know what it’s like for them, because we’ve never been in an envi­ron­ment like that.

But then, again, we don’t know any of them that well either.

We’ve got to be around day 21 now, which means we’ve really only had 19 days of high­lights pro­grammes (day 20 should be tonight – Tuesday).

If you’re like me, you watch the prime time, Chan­nel 4 daily high­lights pro­gramme. Its where I get most of my BB info because it is the offi­cial record of that day as put together by the producers.

To date, I’ve seen 19 evening high­lights pro­grammes, less 3 Fri­day night evic­tions shows and the Weds — £100,000 spe­cial. That means I’ve actu­ally seen 16 nor­mal high­light shows, 3 Fri­day night ½ hour/ one hour com­bos, and the one hour Weds big-money extravaganza.

Here comes the science:

16 high­lights x 45 mins = 720
3 Fri­days x 45 mins = 135
1 x Weds x 23 mins = 23
Total = 878 minutes

(all times are less com­mer­cials, Fri­day and Weds tim­ings also allow for live inter­views and Davina links, as well as adverts)

I can’t be both­ered to work out the aver­age num­ber of peo­ple in the house over the course of those days, so I am going to pull a num­ber out of my ass: 13.5 house­mates on aver­age per day over 19 days. If some­one wants to be more accu­rate, I wel­come your correction.

If we divide the num­ber of min­utes of actual house cov­er­age by the num­ber of aver­age house­mates, we come up with the aver­age num­ber of min­utes we’ve seen of each house­mate since the series started.

65 min­utes.

That’s how much time, on aver­age we have seen each house­mate featured.

If you really think about it, the Ziggy/Chanelle romance tips the scales heav­ily in their favour, thus reduc­ing the aver­age for other housemates.

And if you then add Charley to the mix with the amount of screen time her tirades take up, you dis­cover just how lit­tle you really know most of them.

Don’t worry, I’ll return to Charley shortly, but first I want to men­tion a cou­ple of the nearly invis­i­ble people.

Wangers.

I just like the word. It makes me laugh. Say it out loud; it will make you laugh too.

Wangers.

Unfor­tu­nately for all of us, the per­son who owns that nick­name isn’t as amus­ing. I can’t be the only one who finds her a com­plete mis­ery guts? She never has any­thing nice to say about any­thing or any­one. She’s one big, blimp-chested bum­mer, man.

Maybe that’s just the bits they’re show­ing, maybe the footage of her turn­ing cart­wheels and telling funny sto­ries is strewn across the (vir­tual) cut­ting room floor? Maybe, she’s the real enter­tainer of the house and they are hid­ing it away with the editing?

Nah!

And speak­ing of non-entities, how about Tracey?

Tracey fea­tures in the high­lights so infre­quently that one night I actu­ally started to won­der if she qui­etly went out the back­door and I some­how missed it. I’m not joking!

“Bring it on”.

“Well up for it”.

“Deal with it”

“’ave it”.

I’ve just saved you the trou­ble of watch­ing her best bits, because they are her only bits!

For fuck’s sake woman! Do something!

I don’t think Tracey is stu­pid, I actu­ally think she’s try­ing to be clever. She’s put a lot of thought into her behav­iour in the house and arrived with a very sim­ple game plan.

Tracey’s aim is to stay off everyone’s radar and coast as close to the final as she get, pos­si­bly even reach­ing it. And then, once that final hur­dle is in sight, we’ll finally get to see a more life-like ver­sion of the real Tracey, though again fil­tered through her long-term game plan.

If Tracey can pull this off, it will be impres­sive, but I think there’s a good chance the rest of them are going to get sick of the catch­phrases and she’ll be nom­i­nated again soon.

I think one of the weird­est aspects of this year’s series is the total lack of groups. In this house, it’s every man and woman for himself!

They all have allies and ene­mies, but it is far from tribal. Each and every one of them has a dif­fer­ent friends and ene­mies list, with over­laps hap­pen­ing all over the place.

Zak and Chanelle are the clos­est to any sort of real alle­giance at the moment, even if only based upon lust and yet they typ­ify this weird dynamic. They both have dif­fer­ent peo­ple they like and dif­fer­ent peo­ple they hate and nei­ther one of them really blinks any eye at the other over this.

Ok, Ziggy’s reac­tion to the Billi/Chanelle rumours not with­stand­ing, but I think we’d all agree that roman­tic jeal­ousy should be an excep­tion to the hypoth­e­sis. The green-eyed mon­ster can only fuck you up!

The best exam­ple of this “every man for your­self” phe­nom­e­non is Charley. See, I told you I’d come back to her.

Charley will claim to love each and every one of them, while telling them that that, “she’s not being funny, right, but…” insert insult­ing, profanity-laden shrieks at any­one else.

Charley is nice to peo­ple when it suits her and hor­ri­ble to them when it amuses her. Just look at how she enjoyed humil­i­at­ing poor Brian when he showed her his erec­tion, which she knew she inspired. Then, com­ment­ing on his maybe-wank, with glee­ful spite, while know­ing the guy is 18 years old and her dirty, sug­ges­tive talk got his hopes up. Urghhh!

Or worse, tak­ing the piss out of him because he pissed the bed. Not nice!

And by the way, can Brian really be that stu­pid? I can’t imag­ine any­one over the age of, oh I don’t know, birth…not know­ing who Romeo, Juli­ette or Shake­speare is!

Was he putting it on? Was it an act, meant to make him popular?

If it was an act, it didn’t work.

If it was gen­uine, then oh my god, the future is fucked! Thank­fully, cli­mate change and global warm­ing will mean that it won’t mat­ter how stu­pid tomorrow’s gen­er­a­tion is, because they’ll all be too busy killing each other over the last few drops of drink­ing water.

Ah, happy days.

The rea­son I’ve titled this abor­tion of a BB col­umn “The Char­lie Show” is sim­ple, that’s what I’ve been watching.

You’ve been watch­ing it too, only I bet you’re reluc­tant to admit it.

I was the same, but then I thought about how lit­tle we actu­ally see and how much she dom­i­nates every­thing. I don’t like her, but I like watch­ing her.

Think about it.

Really, take a moment, and pon­der what I am sub­mit­ting for your consideration.

Charley has been the star of the show. She’s the wannabe it-girl, you love to hate!

Check out my friends, the tabloid news­pa­pers. She fea­tures promi­nently almost every damn day. The red tops are usu­ally a good barom­e­ter for pub­lic opin­ion and on that basis, we are all enjoy­ing watch­ing Charley. We just wouldn’t want to invite her ‘round for a cup of tea.

That’s so cool with me.

The kind of peo­ple I’d invite over for a cuppa (wink – you know what *I* really – an exotic ciggy), are not the kind of peo­ple I’d want to watch on BB. My mates are all fairly well adjusted, sorted, nor­mal types.

You know, like me!

Ha!

I think there’s a very good chance our girl, Charley, is going to be up for evic­tion this week and dammit all to hell, its too soon for her to go!

It’s week three and there are ten more weeks remain­ing. It is way too early for Charley to go. I’m not say­ing she has to win; I’m not even say­ing she has to make the final, but for the love of god, can we please not be stu­pid and vote her out too early?

Please?

PLEASE?

We’ve made this mis­take in pre­vi­ous series, get­ting rid of the mad, crazy, (un)likeable ones first, only to com­plain it’s become bor­ing a week or two later. Let’s just avoid this sce­nario, ok?

There will be other chances to get rid of Charley, I promise you.

Let’s all agree to leave Charley alone this week.

I will, if you will?

I know it’s the sum­mer and I do give a lot of space to Big Brother, but that’s not the only thing I do here on my web­site. I’m all about a whole lot more!

Pol­i­tics, soci­ety, drugs, phi­los­o­phy, and con­sumer elec­tron­ics are among the sub­jects I spew dri­vel on; there’s a lit­tle some­thing for every­one. Well, almost every­one. I’m sure there are some peo­ple who don’t find me to their par­tic­u­lar liking.

They can fuck right off. It’s the rest of you, I’m inter­ested in and more impor­tantly, that should be inter­ested in me!

This is going be one of those ram­bling, unfo­cused posts. I thought I should warn you right now, up front, so you’re not sur­prised when you work it out for yourself.

I’m start­ing a long run of nights at work this evening, so I thought I should pop around and do some­thing. Any­thing is bet­ter than noth­ing, or is that just with sex?

It’s actu­ally been a rough cou­ple of weeks around my place; we had to put one of my cats down. He had can­cer in a big, nasty way and there was noth­ing they could do for him. Well, they tried what they could, but when they opened up his lit­tle cat belly, it was filled to the brim with tumours. To spare him any fur­ther suf­fer­ing, we had the vet put the lit­tle guy to sleep. Mrs. H was there when they did it; I couldn’t face it.

My poor dead cat was one of the nicest, friend­liest, coolest cats I ever had the priv­i­lege to know and I am miss­ing him terribly.

He wasn’t that old, only around 13 or 14 years and his ill­ness was as sud­den as it was unex­pected. I rushed him to the vet’s on a Sat­ur­day after­noon and he was gone the fol­low­ing Tuesday.

Now, if he were a human, it wouldn’t have been as swift or mer­ci­ful because we don’t like to spare peo­ple from suf­fer­ing. Just ask my Dad, who from diag­no­sis to demise, had around a year of treat­ments and set­backs before expe­ri­enc­ing a rather drawn out and unpleas­ant death. Oh wait, you can’t ask him, can you?

We treat our pets with more dig­nity than we do each other. Where’s the sense in that? When my time comes, and I do hope it is later rather than sooner, per­haps we’ll have seen sense and legalised euthana­sia. If it’s good enough for the Swiss, why can’t it be OK for the rest of us? Oth­er­wise, I’m going to have to start a spe­cial con­tin­gency fund, for one final trip to Geneva or Zurich, for when my time does come…closer. It seems like the only sane response to an oth­er­wise insane world!

Have I brought you down with all this talk of death and such? Sorry, but now you know where my head’s been for the last cou­ple of weeks. Thank god for soft drugs. If there were a god, or soft drugs.

But hippy, there are soft drugs and you are puff­ing on them right now.

Oh, yeah.

So besides miss­ing my dead cat, watch­ing BB and work­ing, what else have I been up to?

Not too much. I had a drug-hell expe­ri­ence with some legal highs I’ve been get­ting online. I’m not going to tell you what they are or where you can get them, because I don’t want to see them banned. I’ve even debated men­tion­ing this at all, but as the expe­ri­ence swal­lowed sev­eral days of my life, I thought it would be a fun story to relate.

I dis­cov­ered a new range of legal highs a few months ago, though I’ve been aware of their exis­tence for ages. After read­ing many favourable reviews of this line of pills, I decided to take a chance and placed an order.

I tried them, I liked them and I ordered more. And then I ordered even more.

And then, I had my drug hell with them. I took around a dozen of the lit­tle suck­ers in a con­tin­u­ous 30-hour hedo­nis­tic binge and drug orgy, before col­laps­ing into sleep for around 6 hours.

That’s a day and a half.

When I woke up, I was down, aching and still exhausted and I was greeted with loads of text mes­sages, voice­mails, emails and other assorted forms of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, ask­ing if I was lying dead in a pud­dle of my own sick.

Thank­fully, on this occa­sion, I wasn’t.

I then had a few days of feel­ing quite low and run down. It was totally self-inflicted, so I’m not ask­ing for anyone’s sym­pa­thy or pity. This is who I am; this is what I do. Sometimes.

Rarely, actu­ally. I haven’t had a drug-hell in ages.

The thing with these par­tic­u­lar pills is they are very fuck­ing good. They are the clos­est I’ve had that approach an E-like high. Taken in mod­er­a­tion, there is no real come­down or other side effect. Taken in large quan­ti­ties, like a total twat, will not end well.

Yes, I was a total twat.

No one is cer­tain what the magic ingre­di­ents are in these pills, but those who have tried them, love them. Maybe a lit­tle too much as I think they are seri­ously addic­tive. Think cocaine-addictive!

I haven’t had any since my last expe­ri­ence and I can’t say I have any defin­i­tive plan to try them again any time soon, but never say never. I still have some and at some point, I might recon­sider, but I will not over do it. Mod­er­a­tion is indeed, the key.

Again, sorry I’m not telling you exactly what I took, but the less atten­tion these pills get, the longer peo­ple will be able to enjoy them. Just because I went a bit crazy with them, doesn’t mean oth­ers shouldn’t be able to have the choice to enjoy them too.

I finally broke down and ordered a new lap­top last week and guess what? It’s an Apple!

I hemmed and hawed for months on which model to get, and wait­ing for the next big update, and blah, blah, blah and quite frankly I just got tired of not hav­ing one. My writ­ing has been suf­fer­ing because of this gap in my com­puter arse­nal and I finally decided, fuck it, now is as good a time as any.

Both lines, the Mac­Book and the Mac­Book Pro were recently updated, and the myth­i­cal ultra portable doesn’t seem to be com­ing any­time soon (although now that I’ve bought one, it is prob­a­bly a week away), so I went for it and placed my order last Wednes­day and it already shipped on Friday.

I chose the black Mac­Book, with the only build to order option being extra RAM, I’ve dou­bled it to 2 gigs. I’ve gone with the stock 160gb 5400rpm hard drive, because I decided the extra speed was bet­ter than 40 extra gigs of stor­age – the 200gb model is only 4200rpm. It’s a Core2Duo, 2.16 and I topped it up with Apple Care.

I’m look­ing for­ward to its arrival, which should be in the next week, or less. They ship them from Shang­hai, which is a long way from north Lon­don, but it’s still fairly impressive.

Once I get it, I’m going to carry it with me every­where. If you invite me over, I’d bring it along, as long as you’ll let me access the inter­net on your wi-fi net­work! You see, it’s not just those lit­tle pills I’m addicted to, I’m hooked on the inter­net as well.

I did con­sider the Mac­Book Pro, but the sig­nif­i­cant addi­tional cost was not jus­ti­fied by the “pro” fea­tures, in terms of my rather mod­est needs. Also, the 15.4 inch model is fairly big, in my opin­ion, to be lug­ging around, where the MacBook’s 13.3 size adds to it’s portability.

So that’s the last fort­night or so this hippy’s life. Wow, what a whirl­wind of drama, emo­tion and big ticket pur­chases! I bet you can’t wait to see what hap­pens to me next!

I’ll be back later in the week, with more BB bull­shit, plus I’m going to start deal­ing with some of the requests you’ve all sent me. One sub­ject has been most pop­u­lar with all of you and…I’ll let you all know what is in my next entry!

I inad­ver­tently hit upon some­thing in my last BB piece, which is indica­tive of the cast­ing of the entire series. The more I’ve watched, the more this fact has stood out:

Every­one in there is very media savvy; they are very aware of the process and the part they are play­ing in it.

My first clue to this was when Emily Parr men­tioned sev­eral cor­po­rate brand names, right after her racist slip of the tongue. She was hop­ing that they would dip the sound and spare her fur­ther embar­rass­ment – well, we all know how that turned out!

The point is, Emily was very hip to the game, even if she was too pig igno­rant to apply her knowl­edge with any great effect. Emily’s not the only one.

Let’s take everyone’s favourite housemate…to hate, young Charley Uchea. She’s appar­ently worked a pole dancer, that’s a form of enter­tainer; she had to deal with pubic, er pub­lic atten­tion. I’m sure she knows what pole danc­ing audi­ence wants to see. She’s also got a cousin who plays Pre­mier­ship foot­ball, hangs out in all the “hot clubs” and has had sex with other “celebs”, at least that’s what the papers say. She’s more clued up than you might realise at first and she knows how to use it all to her advan­tage. If it wasn’t for her sour face and ugly per­son­al­ity, she might be a threat!

First evictee, Shab­nam Paryani is another great exam­ple of this media aware­ness. On day 3, when she was con­sid­er­ing a walk out the back door, did she ask about how quickly she could see her fam­ily? Did she ask if there would be men­tal health sup­port? Did she even ask if she could have a hot meal once she got out­side? Nope, all she was inter­ested in was her “pack­age”. No, that is not some vague ref­er­ence to the rumour that Shabs is a pre-op trans­sex­ual. Shab­nam wanted to know if she could still sell her story to a tabloid or glossy mag­a­zine. She wanted to know if she would get to appear on BBLB and BBBM. She wanted to know if her bra and knick­ers pics would be in a Sun­day tabloid news­pa­per, with rev­e­la­tions of her secret love ses­sions with men AND women.

Shab­nam didn’t walk, but her desire to dis­close her sex­ual his­tory while pos­ing in her undies did appear in yesterday’s News of the World. So you see girls, being stu­pid and doing noth­ing doesn’t mean you can’t have your dreams come true! Who needs an edu­ca­tion or skills?

And while I’m on the scary sub­ject of Shabs, how about that ass-crack of an evic­tion rou­tine! If that didn’t con­firm how sub­nor­mally intel­li­gent she is, what else would? How about the shrink on Sunday’s BBLB telling Der­mot that her IQ was under 70? Yikes!

Yes, I know I’m being harsh, but that’s my point. Those who live by the media, die by the media and I should know, because I’m the media whore you all love to adore! But you won’t see me skulk­ing around Bou­jis hop­ing to get papped!

This is by far the most self-aware group of house­mates ever. They know the fourth wall is there and they are play­ing to it with reck­less aban­don, because they know if they can paint the right pic­ture of them­selves to the out­side world, great riches await.

I’ll just throw some ran­dom obser­va­tions out there, hap­haz­ardly drawn together from my own per­sonal media monitoring:

- Seány O’Kane – trav­elled to the states to fol­low the Michael Jack­son trial, was inter­viewed repeat­edly by British TV crews, as the lone, crazy from back home, Report­edly audi­tioned for Bad Lad’s Army, was rejected for not being “men­tally sta­ble” enough.

- Shab­nam Paryani – Appeared on Britain’s Got (no) Tal­ent and some pro­gramme about embar­rass­ing illnesses.

- Billi Bhatti – one of the new guys, a model who has done print work and, if what I read on forums is true, snogged a trans­sex­ual in a music video. Does any­one know if it was Shabnam?

- Jonathan Dur­den – mil­lion­aire, media company-owner and for­mer com­men­ta­tor for the Guardian on adver­tis­ing. Sound like a real media insider to me. What’s he doing in the house? Ladies and gen­tle­men, start your con­spir­acy theories!

- Chanelle Hayes – a posh spice look-a-like, mak­ing per­sonal appear­ances as Vic­to­ria Beckham.

- Zak “Ziggy” Lich­man – for­mer boy­band mem­ber, model and music producer.

I could go on, and on and fre­quently do, but you get the idea. This year, it is an open secret that fame and for­tune is what they all crave. They all think that just on their looks and per­son­al­ity alone, we should love them and give them lots of money and ado­ra­tion, but we know better.

I like the fact that they are all unashamed, wannabes. It brings an ele­ment of hon­esty to BB this year that we’ve not seen before. It’s a know­ing wink from the pro­duc­ers, that they know that we know that the house­mates know just what is await­ing them after a stay in that house.

In the first series, win­ner Craig Phillips wanted to win the sev­enty grand so he could pay for an oper­a­tion for a young woman with Down’s Syn­drome, which at the time, moved most of us to tears. Craig’s gen­eros­ity was touch­ing and genuine.

In this series, they all want to win so bad they can taste it. Then they’ll have the money to shop for cloth­ing and sun­glasses, so they can look nice on hol­i­day in the Mal­dives where they get snapped, sun­bathing top­less “in the secret pho­tos they didn’t want you to see”, which paid for the trip, plus a lit­tle extra for a pair or two of Manolo Blahniks.

Isn’t that what we all dream of?

I’m not the only one who sees a wor­ry­ing pat­tern devel­op­ing with weed scare sto­ries pop­ping up in the media more fre­quently. My friends at The Guardian news­pa­per have also clocked this rather dis­turb­ing trend.

Check out this com­ment piece from Fran­cis Sedge­more in today’s edi­tion: CLICK HERE, CLICK NOW.

You see, there’s a rea­son why The Guardian is my favourite news­pa­per. Like me, they make an effort to tell the truth.

I was really expect­ing not to like this year’s BB. I’d already set myself up for bit­ter dis­ap­point­ment at what was going to be a dull series. So far, it’s been any­thing but dull and I’m lov­ing it, already!

It doesn’t take much to draw me in; just a bunch of fit, but stu­pid young girlies and other assorted human odd­i­ties, a small, enclosed space and lots of cam­eras. I’m a sucker, what can I say?

There were rumours of an all-female house, but I didn’t buy into them. I thought it was a risk the pro­duc­tion team wouldn’t be will­ing to take. How wrong was I?

As I watched the house­mates enter­ing the shiny new house, for the first time, I felt pity for many of them. They all just seemed so small, so lim­ited and so myopic with their sim­ple goals of fame and for­tune, for doing sweet FA. The best exam­ple of this is 19 year old Chanelle Hayes, the Posh Spice wannabe.

Chanelle comes from a small vil­lage out­side Leeds and lit­er­ally aspires to be Vic­to­ria Beck­man. I find that very sad, for as role mod­els go, VB cer­tainly shouldn’t be one, unless you value stu­pid­ity, van­ity and under-eating to nearly star­va­tion as some­thing to be cel­e­brated. Appar­ently, the news­pa­pers do, for this if the woman some much as farts (as if!), it is splat­tered on the front pages.

Chanelle is much bet­ter look­ing than ol’ Posh Pish­face and can prob­a­bly sing bet­ter too.

The first thing I thought when I saw the ini­tial 11 women in the house is that there wouldn’t be enough Page 3’s to go around. Most of them are going to want to don a thong, fold their arms artis­ti­cally across their as-of-yet un-surgically enhanced bosoms and smile pretty for the cam­eras, with an accom­pa­ny­ing inter­view detail­ing their Big Brother hell! Ok, maybe not Car­ole, but then again you never know.

Car­ole Vin­cent was an early favourite of mine, with her left lean­ing pol­i­tics and bisex­u­al­ity, what was not to love? But has she put any creepy moves on any of the other women? Has she done any­thing other than clean the house and act as a ser­vant to the rest of them? Big dis­ap­point­ment so far, but it is early days.

And speak­ing of crotch­ety old broads, how about that Les­ley Brain, appro­pri­ately named because of her enor­mous intel­lect. She really fan­cied her­self as so much bet­ter than the rest of her house­mates. She’s used to get her own way, and walk­ing all over any­one who impeded her. I can’t say I was dis­ap­pointed when she walked out on Sat­ur­day. Small loss, she didn’t con­tribute much more than snarky com­ments and dis­ap­prov­ing looks. Yawn.

The twins, Sam and Amanda Archant, fall into the pity cat­e­gory. They’re ever so cute and ever so dim, but their Page 3 pho­to­shoot will be a double-spread. Every­one will buy a copy of what­ever red­top is lucky enough to print the pics that day!

And stay­ing with the pity party, may I draw your atten­tion to the deluded Shab­nam Paryani, who won’t be appear­ing on Page 3 any­time soon, though in her mind she is wor­thy of that, and more. She’s weird look­ing, obnox­ious and thick, which makes her a triple threat in BB terms. If the evic­tion hadn’t been can­celled, she’d be mak­ing a pub­lic appear­ance right now at the open­ing of a Pound Shop on my High Street.

And speak­ing of can­celled evic­tions, I couldn’t believe the bloody stu­pid­ity of that ultra-dim Emily Parr. She was des­tined for Page 3, but not any­more, unless the BNP newslet­ter has such a fea­ture. I wouldn’t know, I don’t sub­scribe and nei­ther do you, if you’re a proper hippyfan!

What was Emily think­ing? Was she even think­ing? Did she really know what the word meant as it passed through her lips?

I bet she sure as shit does now! This is girl who thinks indy music is brand new and sweep­ing the nation! She has the men­tal age of 7.

But Emily wasn’t com­pletely stu­pid, as right after she uttered the offend­ing word, she quickly men­tioned sev­eral cor­po­rate brand names. Why? So they would dip the sound on the live feed? Clever, eh? She might not know any­thing about race rela­tions, but damn, if she ain’t media savvy! Shame it wasn’t enough to keep it out of the prime time high­light show or keep her in the house, but you can’t blame a gal for trying!

Were they right to boot her out? After Shilpa-gate, they didn’t really have a choice. They had to be seen to be doing some­thing, and swiftly. If they acted this quickly last Jan­u­ary with Shilpa and the witches’ coven, they wouldn’t be apol­o­gis­ing so much right now!

And who are the 900 peo­ple who com­plained that it was unfair to eject Emily? She can’t have that many friends and fam­ily members!

Emily was an aspir­ing actress and I said “was” inten­tion­ally. With that one word uttered fool­ish­lyy, she’s pretty much kissed her glit­ter­ing show­biz career good­bye. I don’t see how she can reha­bil­i­tate her­self back from this one.

Sorry, Emily, I’m sure you’ll Google your way to this page even­tu­ally. That’s my con­sid­ered opin­ion, but remem­ber it’s never too late to learn IT and com­puter net­work­ing skills! You’ll never go hungry!

I know I men­tioned Chanelle ear­lier, but I want to come back to her. Along with Nicky Maxwell, Chanelle has a good back­story; they both do. Nicky was raised in Mother Theresa’s orphan­age in India, before being adopted by a fam­ily here in the UK. Chanelle’s mother was a pros­ti­tute who was mur­dered and has also been adopted. I’m a sucker for a sob story, so are the tabloids. Only, and trust me on this, the tabloids pro­vide a lot in the way of lurid details than I will.

Charley Uchea is a nasty piece of work. She’s the sort of girl your mother would have warned you about, if your mother could have ever imag­ined that such a woman even existed! My mother could never have pic­tured Charley!

Hot body, ugly face, even uglier per­son­al­ity! Another BB triple threat. Buy her a drink? She’d want the bot­tle, and trust me mate, it wouldn’t be cheap! Her cousin plays foot­ball, that’s why she’s spe­cial. Page 3 chances: High, high, high!

Wangers.

Wangers?

When I was a kid, “wang” was another word for your din­kle, so wangers is a new one on me. I’m old, I don’t always keep up with the lingo you kids are using these days.

What­ever hap­pened to tits?

Laura Williams, AKA “Wangers” has ginor­mus breasts and a Welsh accent. She wants to be a funeral direc­tor, which is code for under­taker, which is fur­ther code for peo­ple who pre­pare the dead. Yuck. I don’t even like to touch raw beef or pork!

I don’t really get Laura, but appar­ently you all do, as up until the 2 new guys went in, she was the book­ies’ favourite to win!

Tracey Barnard scares me. She’s the sort of intense per­son who would cor­ner you at a party, get really in your face and spout her pas­sion­ate opin­ions on one sub­ject or an other for an hour or more and at the end of it, you still wouldn’t know what she was talk­ing about. Tracey is a type we’ve not seen before in BB (unless you count Bez from the celeb ver­sion), but a type none the less. Go on any demo, attend any ille­gal rave, or visit your near­est squat and you’ll find a Tracey-type, bor­ing he shite out of someone.

You’d think an old hippy like me would like Tracey; you’d be wrong. I did like the rumour they were test­ing her rolling papers for drugs, but that’s stu­pid. If she were going to smug­gle in some blot­ter acid, she wouldn’t do it on the cig­a­rette papers, but on the packet – prob­a­bly the flap – you know the bit you tear to make a roach! It’s made of card­board and far more absorbent. I just hope she does some­thing fun with it, like put it in the stew, so they can all trip their nuts off.

If only Tracey brought in some dull, rusty knives, then my BB dreams would really come true. Click HERE and/or HERE to see what I mean!

That’s the girls all well and truly slagged off, now what about the guys?

For­mer boy­band mem­ber and male model, Zak “Ziggy” Lich­man seems nice enough, in an innocu­ous, inof­fen­sive way. He’s dull, but the chicks dig him and isn’t that what really mat­ters. They deserve some eye-candy too. And I don’t blame him for zero­ing in on Chanelle, she is the hottest lit­tle hotty in the house!

Big Brother’s big twist when they put in the next two men was to send him a pair of gay guys. Whoa! What a turn! Gay men on BB, who’d have thunk it?

I haven’t really seen much of either one of them, so I will save my ini­tial impres­sions until my next post.

I don’t hate every­thing about this series, there are things I do like, they just don’t hap­pen to be the house­mates, that’s all.

I like the new house, I think the design is fan­tas­tic. I love the colours, the lay­out, espe­cially the lit­tle entrance­way to the diary room, with the colour-changing light strips. I like the new graph­ics and the eye as well.

Mainly, I still love the for­mat, even with the twists and changes. Lock­ing peo­ple up in a small, con­fined space and film­ing their every move is still pure, unadul­ter­ated genius.

I only wish it was my idea; then I would be filthy, stink­ing rich! I bet that’s a good thing to be. I’ll prob­a­bly never know.