I love it! Best line of the season so far from Eye on Big Brother, who in a fascinating post, dissects what’s wrong with this year’s show - the rather ikky (in many ways) Terri has jumped to favouritism because she’s actually a - person. Not one of the identikit templates the producers have served up to the advertisers - the “FHM blonde”, the “funny dude”, the “good looking blokey bloke who works out”, the “brainy skinny guy”, the “overweight girl”, the “rural character” etc. What we’re witnessing, he argues, is commercial tv, reality style, eating itself because it’s too commercial for its own good.
In a recent radio interview, I spoke of the “trade off” that Big Brother seemed to have made, somewhere around the 2005 mark. Suddenly, every housemate was basically the same, because they’d clearly decided to deliver a bunch of carefully devised characters, targeting an identified demographic. This need - driven by advertising - preceded the housemate selection, and it completely f*cked up Big Brother. That’s the beautiful thing I eventually realised, when I started to look closely at Big Brother. For all the horrible things we can - and do - say about it - for all the evil manipulation, the contrived scripting, etc, etc - none of it has actually paid off. It’s bizarre - it’s a bizarre portrait of that industry - an industry who just doesn’t seem to get it, because it’s head is apparently too far up its own ass. Instead of changing direction, they’ve always just turned everything up a notch, and seem completely unable to concede that the format - as Ten clings to it - has bombed out, in the end. This year, a great deal of effort was put into re-branding the show as something so very “different”; but when it arrived, it was nothing of the sort. It’s almost funny! I mean, really, at what point does someone say, “You know, maybe we’re adding the maths wrong. Maybe when we do something and the show slips down another rung, this means that what we’re doing is wrong”? But, no. It seems they can only evaluate it as it being “What we did, we didn’t do well enough.” The glass is half-empty, or half-full, of course. I think they’ve got it totally f*cked up.
I haven’t really been watching BB (I think beyond snippets, I watched one episode to see who everyone was) but I have really been enjoying reading The Eye’s commentary. Through what he is doing I can see how people can follow BB with out participating in the sadism he identifies. Eye does a great job of drawing out the broader societal concerns coming from the interplay that is happening on the show.
(This something that I think that you try to do too Kim, but so often posts on BB here turn into stoushes between the BB haters and the BB watchers.
Yes Eye, I’ve been thoroughly enjoying your blog. It’s fascinating. Keep it up.
BB this year is in fact different. I haven’t watched as much as I had in previous years because there’s no BB Up-Late. The only time I watch it is when there are Denton repeats on the ABC (mercifully now ended) or on boring ABC Wednesday nights.But the impression I get is that this lot of BBs, especially the boys/men are nastier than any other lot they’ve had on in previous years.Which is another reason I don’t watch it.
And BB Out Loud or whatever its called is just as obnoxious.I’m not a Squires and entourage fan. He’s a bit like some-one from the Footy Show, except he’s got more than a rwo word vocabulary.
Is a ‘rwo’ word vocab, like a two word vocab but with more swear words?
Ah, two word. But I see no reason why we shouldn’t coin a new word:rwo - meaning a two word vocabulary but with more swear words. Somebody should contact Kate Burridge [sp.?] from Can We Help and The Einstein Factor.
I’ve been a bit disappointed by that, Rayedish. My last post, I thought, offered something interesting about body image to discuss but the comments seem to have largely died after the initial BB haters v. BB sort of not haters threads!
Here’s that last post in case anyone missed it:
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/06/04/biancas-growing-body-pains/
Yes, I was surprised that you didn’t get more take up on your last post too. Maybe cos less people are watching the show people don’t have as much to say about it, even when the discussion is attempting to go beyond the show itself? Or maybe the Bill Henson posts were taking up everyone’s time!
Both fairly likely explanations! Maybe in retrospect I should have written about body image and used BB as an example… ?
I would have seen about five minutes of the show this year as we decided to actively avoid watching it for various reasons but I enjoy reading these posts because of the cultural, sociological and psychological stuff.
Like, who cares? Big Brother, so five years ago. Sure it’s human psychology in a goldfish bowl but some specimens of the human race really aren’t worth observing.