Back by dope demand
From Grace Dent's Blog - This article is so brilliant that I have replicated it here with no shame. It is from the BRILLIANT RADIO TIMES WEBSITE and you can read it EVERY DAY by clicking HERE or HERE or even HERE!!On day 67, not long after Nikki was voted out of Big Brother 7, Dermot O'Leary said in an interview with New! magazine: "The show has definitely suffered. There's something unbelievably endearing about the girl. I don't know why she was evicted. We were thinking, 'There's no way she can go, something must be wrong.'"
Dermot continued: "I still haven't met anyone who voted for Nikki. It showed that there's no way the show could be fixed. If they could fix it, I'm sure the programme-makers would have moved heaven and earth to keep her in there."
By eviction night on day 79, heaven and earth duly moved: Nikki is back, along with Grace, Lisa, Lea, Jayne and several other characters whom viewers spent hundreds of thousands of pounds voting out under the silly assumption they were voting them out for good.
And now we're invited to spend even more money voting four ex-housemates back in. One of these evicted housemates is now eligible for the £100,000 prize money. I suppose there are two ways of looking at this.
The first is to see it as a brilliant, satisfying twist. Just imagine the vile, antisocial behaviour we can enjoy if Nikki, Grace, Lisa and Lea are given more telly time? On Friday's Big Brother's Big Mouth, the ex-contestants pleaded to re-enter the house, exuding that same "I'll say anything, me, to get on telly" desperation employed in their intro VTs.
"I'll be swearing and smoking…and I'll beat Ash up!" grunts Lisa, as Grace and Nikki snigger beside her. "Cuh! I'll bring out Ash's true colours!" promises Spiral. "Yeah! Someone needs to knock the tiara off the ghetto princess's head!" gurgles some random member of the audience, clearly struggling to remain coherent amid so many F-list celebs. "Don't worry, I'll do it for you!" brags Grace, wrapping an arm around Nikki. "She can do it 'erself!" crows Jayne.
As the dismal little clique chuckle and boast about committing GBH on Ash, I'm sure there were people all over Britain thinking, "This is the best telly evvva! Gimme that mobile, now! Let's text in dat orange one who looks like Justin Lee Collins wivvout a beard. She's nasty! And that one who acts like a six-year-old and calls people sluts and squeals all the time! Me likey nasty people. They make my head feel fizzy and gud!"
A lot of people, quite sadly, do think like this. That's why Grace and Nikki will most probably return on Tuesday.
The alternative way to look at the "twist" is with a certain amount of anger. Well, anger ebbing slowly to resigned bemusement at the bizarre way Big Brother 7 has gone.
Obviously, it's true that Big Brother over the past seven years has weathered multiple twists and turns. I know that all too well; I've watched every single series.
But crucially, during the past seven years, the one constant, basic rule that has kept the show alive is that Big Brother is a test of popularity and endurance. The winner can be a timid goody-goody or a noisy prat, but their skill is to stay popular. If you're not popular in or out of the house on Big Brother, you'll be voted out eventually and then it's game over for good, leaving the ultimate winner. Week after week, it gets harder to stay popular as the homesickness and cabin fever affects your persona; but if you can endure this longer than everybody else then the £100,000 is yours.
What makes finale night so goosebumpy is the expression on the last, triumphant, sensory-deprived soul as they climb the white stairs and find themselves rocketed back to reality in an explosion of fireworks and flashing cameras. Whether your personal favourite wins or not, it's a curiously satisfying end.
To meddle with this basic fundamental rule and let Nikki, Grace or Lisa etc back in to win feels quite wrong to me.
Big Brother can experiment with fake evictions, golden tickets and secret houses, but the moment they change the rules, the whole concept feels utterly pointless. Not only were they were turfed out by a majority vote because of their unpopular behaviour; since then, they've all been home to their families, slept well and recharged their batteries. They've eaten nice food, been down the gym, seen all their mates and had their hair coloured and cut. They've bought some new clothes, had a good look through all of their tabloid clippings, and now they're allowed back into the house once again - fresh as they were on day 1.
Meanwhile Pete, Richard, Ash, Imogen, Jennie and Glyn sit in the house feeling addled, flabby, homesick and slightly deranged.
Big Brother can experiment with fake evictions, golden tickets, secret houses and secret gardens, but the moment they simply just change the rules so they can re-instate Nikki, Grace and Lisa, whose deranged behaviour wins ratings, and then give them the chance of winning £100,000, the whole concept of Big Brother begins to feel utterly pointless.
If nobody at Big Brother gives a hoot about the last ten weeks of texts that everyone has spent money on, then why are we still lining their pockets by voting at all? It's just a thought, but why not just stop voting? Then the producers can decide among themselves who wins and why, while at least we enjoy the ongoing antics for free.
I can't see the point in voting any more for Big Brother 7.
Susie Verrico v Davina McCall was all rather amusing. Beforehand, Davina interviewed Mikey, telling him several times he's been a "brilliant housemate". "When you see your best bits, Mikey, you'll know why!" says Davina. Mikey's "best bits" VT is several clips of him waving his hands or occasionally dancing. The absolute highlight of Mikey's tape is the time he jumped into a big pile of cushions. "Wow!" gushes Davina, "Mikey! You were such a brilliant housemate!"
Susie's interview is starkly different in tone. Evidently, Susie has been a bad housemate. Actually, not just bad as in boring, but bad as in nasty. Evil, in fact. They've made a compilation VT of Susie complaining about chewing gum and the kitchen mess where they've slowed down bits of her speech to a growl and made slow-motion shots of her scowling so she looks quasi-Satanic. Susie takes it all in with calm aplomb.
"Your boobs are enormous!" hoots Davina out of the blue, pointing at Susie's chest. "They're not that big really," replies Susie. "Yes they are!" giggles Davina. Susie looks at Davina with an expression that appears to say: "Davina, you're almost the same age as me. Why are you suddenly acting like an hysterical 16-year-old?"
"Now, let me get this straight," says Davina, "You auditioned three times? You were a stand-in. And your husband bought 800 chocolate bars. You were desperate, weren't you?!" Everyone in the crowd smirks at the word desperate. "Well, to be honest, you have to be desperate to do Big Brother," replies Susie, "Everyone is desperate who gets through the auditions. You have to stand in the rain and cold for hours on end." Davina looks at her notes, ignoring the answer.
"So why didn't you do anything when you were in there?" asks Davina. Susie fixes her with one of her looks, then says, "What did you want me to do?" There's a small, awkward silence. Quick, Davina, stick on Mikey's best bits tape! Show her the cushion jump! "Erm…well…I don't know," stutters Davina, "My feeling was that you wanted to be there so badly…and then you didn't embrace it or even let your hair down!"
"I don't let my hair down like that," says Susie plainly, "I don't get drunk. I didn't want to have sex on TV. I didn't want to play Spin the Bott…" "Well, why did you go in there?!" shouts Davina, who is famously teetotal. "Exposure," replies Susie, with refreshing honesty. "Exposure?" Davina sneers at her. Clearly the years that Davina spent running around the streets of Britain like a headless chicken doing Streetmate and MTV's Most Wanted were simply for the good of her own health.
"So do you want to go back into the house?!" shouts Davina. "Yes, OK," says Susie, who we now have firmly established was an exceedingly bad, boring, shallow, and disappointing housemate. Susie skips off to join the queue of "brilliant housemates", such as Nikki and Grace who have come back tonight just for "the experience" and not for increased exposure whatsoever.
"Keep texting to vote who you want to go back in!" screams Davina, "The numbers are coming up now! This week's money is going to charity!" Wow! Charidee. Isn't that big of them?!
Maybe if millions and millions of us had known months ago that our next ten weeks of voting money was all to be for nothing, we could have put that cash to a worthy cause, too.
Labels: Big Brother, Grace Dent, New Year, richard
posted by Freddy @ Monday, August 07, 2006
Comments: 0
