The northlondonhippy

This is the first year in the his­tory of Big Brother that I’m not feel­ing with­drawal after the series ended. I wasn’t as attached to the house­mates as I have been in pre­vi­ous years. I wasn’t as attached to the entire pro­gramme. I’m not really sure why.

Sorry I haven’t been quite as pro­lific as I could have been on the topic of BB. I did con­tinue to watch faith­fully though and now that it’s fin­ished, I thought I would share my final thoughts.

For me, Big Brother 8 was the most man­u­fac­tured, self-aware series so far. The for­mat has been around too long for it to be any other way. We all know what to expect, from the view­ers to the con­tes­tants, which means the pro­gram mak­ers have to work that much harder to con­found our col­lec­tive expectations.

This year, there were a lot of con­founded expectations.

“Fake Week” was a prime exam­ple of this as the pro­duc­ers twisted every­thing up into all sorts of point­less frivolity.

Except it wasn’t point­less, was it? It amused us. Ok, it amused me.

A lot this year amused me, it seems like the theme of “fun” really did weave itself through the series. Some of the fun was cruel and if I was on the receiv­ing end of the cru­elty, I would have a dif­fer­ent view of it.

Show­ing the Halfway-Housemates the entirety of nom­i­na­tions was a mas­ter­stroke of nas­ti­ness. Reveal­ing nom­i­na­tions in gen­eral inside the house is cruel, but there was a level of evil in this par­tic­u­lar move that sur­prised even me.

The quiz in the final week was also quite mean, as BB showed each house­mate some­thing both embar­rass­ing and pri­vate as part of the task.

All of this self-referential stuff is send­ing every­one a mes­sage: Noth­ing is off lim­its, inside the house. Any­thing you say or do could poten­tially be used to upset your stand­ing in the house. In future, con­tes­tants might be more care­ful and guarded about what the say in their pri­vate chats or even the diary room!

As much as I don’t want to admit it, Charley was the star of the show this year and it was less enter­tain­ing after her depar­ture. Or rather, there was far less con­flict in the house which I equate with enter­tain­ment. Charley’s prob­lem will be con­vert­ing this into some sort of media career. Good luck to her, but I think she’s a bit of one-trick-pony and they will strug­gle to find suit­able vehi­cles for her.

Chanelle’s depar­ture also left a gap in my view­ing. Aside from being nice to look at, her tantrums were pure com­edy gold. They say she’s made £750,000 already, which is astound­ing. Now that Ziggy’s out too, I expect they will both clean up even more. I sure hope they got a lot of money for their rather embar­rass­ing photo-shoot in the Star on Mon­day. If you didn’t see it, they were both pos­ing together, in their undies, in a hotel bed. Cringe!

Poor Ziggy. I liked him. He isn’t a bad guy; he’s just very neu­rotic. He gen­uinely fan­cied Chanelle, it wasn’t just for the cam­eras. He eas­ily had the rough­est ride of any­one in the house this year and doesn’t deserve our scorn. We should all chip in a fiver each, so we can pay for his long-term Jun­gian analy­sis, which after a cou­ple of decades might get to the root of his neu­ro­sis. Until then, he’ll just have to make do with shag­ging Chanelle and mak­ing money off their celeb-value.

I was glad to see Brian Belo win. He’s the Essex ver­sion of For­rest Gump and peo­ple always go for the thick-o. Except I don’t think Brian is that thick, he’s just not edu­cated well. He’s your typ­i­cal Eng­lish lad and prob­a­bly the world’s biggest BB fan! I think its great that a proper fan won the show, instead of some­one who claimed not to really watch it much. Well done, Brian.

I was actu­ally expect­ing a twinny-win, as Sam and Amanda are just so like­able. They didn’t put a foot wrong in the house which explains why they didn’t have a sin­gle nom­i­na­tion through­out the series.

I was glad to see Tracey go a week before the final and I’m even hap­pier I’ll never have to hear her inane catch­phrases ever again. She was like a char­ac­ter from a bad novel writ­ten about real­ity tv; a poorly sketched car­i­ca­ture con­sist­ing of one shal­low dimen­sion. Yawn.

As for the rest, well they’re all pretty incon­se­quen­tial really. The one I liked the most that I thought should have had more time in the house is Amy. Aside from being a tasty bit of eye candy, Amy seemed bright and gen­uine. She should never have become such a fig­ure of hate within the house and if she had bet­ter taste in men and ignored Liam, she might have gone further.

The one thing I noticed this year was the num­ber of peo­ple who I’ve spo­ken with who have taken great pride in pro­claim­ing that they haven’t watched BB this year and that BB was a fail­ing, dying for­mat. It was as if peo­ple decided they were too good for it this year. How wrong they are!

BB con­tin­ues to be annual event tele­vi­sion, fill­ing Chan­nel 4’s cof­fers with loads of dosh. The rat­ings were down this year, but the pro­gramme con­tin­ues to deliver the right demo­graphic that adver­tis­ers love and in the younger age groups, inter­est remains very high. Maybe I just only talk to aging media-types. I need to get some cooler, younger new friends!

And if there were any doubts over the future of the next series of BB, Davina promptly put them to rest last Fri­day night, when she opened the audi­tion call for BB9. If you want to spend next Sum­mer inside the BB house, be ready to daz­zle the BB pro­duc­ers, start­ing in Novem­ber. Good Luck!

I do want to thank all 23 house­mates who spent time in the house this year. One way or another, each of you enter­tained me in your own spe­cial ways and for this I am grate­ful. And thank you to my hip­py­fans, who have put up with my spo­radic out­put and stuck with me for my thoughts on BB.

This will be my last for­mal BB col­umn, I’m not going to do it again next year. I won’t say I’m never going to com­ment on BB again, but I won’t be doing it in such an organ­ised way. I hope you’ve all enjoyed read­ing it all as much as I’ve enjoyed writ­ing it.

But fear not, this hippy still has plenty of other inter­est­ing things to bring you, so don’t be a stranger, OK?

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