The northlondonhippy

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?

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