Big Brother, Celeb Culture, Heat etc Basically the whole point of what follows boils down to: Celebrity Culture Deserves To Be Recorded More Intelligently And Thoughtfully Than It Currently Is. If you can't be bothered to read the rest of this post, I'll understand.

....And so, another series of Big Brother grinds to a crashing halt, having taken ONE QUARTER of the year of our Lord 2006 to complete it's stuttering, over complicated and mildly unimpressive development, and to reach the fascinating resolution of this years grand narrative, namely -May: Pete Enters House, Everybody Says 'Oh, This Guy Is Definately Gonna Win' / August: Pete Wins.

Let me make a few things clear. I'm a fan of Big Brother, as much as one can be a 'fan' of something like Big Brother... it's sort of like saying you're a 'fan' of the Olympics...Big Brother is not a television show, it's a sporting event...one watches Deal Or No Deal, one follows Big Brother...I think it stands significantly apart from Love Island, I'm A Celebrity Get Me Outta Here etc etc, head & shoulders infact...it is the first & best of it's kind, it's impact on pop culture - for better or worse - on a scale unmatched by almost any TV show of the past...what...decade? I've watched every series. I've seen every First Night, and every Grand Final - counted 'em in, counted 'em out. Dig it; I've taken each series of Big Brother seriously, ranted & raved at the TV, developed highly complex mathmatical equations to predict voting trends, even Picked Up My Phone And Txted where I've thought it absolutely necessary. Admitting to following Big Brother is pretty much taboo amongst liberal lefty arty circles, certainly amongst my friends you may as well admit to enjoying the Bush administration's foreign policy, Starbucks or - god forbid - Friends. It stands for everything these cats hate - dumbing down, celeb culture, chaviness yadda yadda...which says much more about my friends petty prejudices than it does about any of those things...

...but I'm not here to defend Big Brother, or my interest in it. What I wanted to talk about was the lazy, disrespectful way BB is written about in the media which would claim to treat it with the most respect, ie Heat magazine et al...and when I say et al, I'm really just talking about Heat, it being the only Celeb rag I read regularly...and how these rags don't discuss BB in the terms it deserves.

To explain. This year's BB has been below average. Not terrible - see The Year Cameron Won - but nowhere near the exceptional entertainment of The Year Nadia Won, AKA The Best Big Brother Ever, not as good as last year...infact, now I think about it, perhaps the second worst series so far. The problems: the housemates were all a bit dull & thick, poor choices by Endemol, as a consequence Pete - relatively speaking the only real STAR - was destined to win from the beginning...it was too long, they were spreading themselves WAY too thin...(3 MONTHS fer chrissakes)...not enough happened, and consequently they relied more heavily than they have during any other year on gimmicks like SECRET SECOND HOUSE, PUTTING EVICTED HOUSEMATES BACK IN, GOLDEN TICKETS yadda yadda, none of which can by themselves make for great BB- only funny, volatile, interesting housemates can do this. Any self respecting BB fan (is there such a thing?) would tell you that after the successes of the last 2 years BB7 was a big dissapointment, and they could tell you exactly why.

So how come Heat Magazine (AKA The People Who Should Know More About BB Than Anybody And Take It Really Seriously) spent the last 3 months pretending it was really great? The answer, obviously, is that they're completely in the pocket of Endemol, they owe Endemol way too much, and it would be ridiculous to expect them to be heavily critical of a series which fills their pages for half the year, and when they've always been such dedicated cheerleaders for the show. Their hands are tied.

BUT!

That's a real shame. BB deserves to be written about intelligently, and at the most basic level this boils down to Heat being able to say: "We love BB, it continues to fascinate us, for those of us so inclined the bad years are in their own way just as interesting as the good years, this year hasn't blown us away, and here's why." You don't help something by blanketly saying everthing it does is brilliant. This BB wasn't brilliant. Heat should have said so. Heat owe it to BB, and to serious fans, to be honest and critical where necessary. After the Cameron debacle, Heat suggested softly that it was an underwhelming year, and the following series - Nadia - was The Best Ever.

Noughties Celebrity Culture is vacuous, dumb, shallow yadda yadda yadda...but it is REAL and HUGE and I THINK PRETTY INTERESTING & there must be a gap in the market for a publication which discusses it in on an intelligent level, acknowledges the shades of grey etc etc, recognises the reliative goods and bads thereof...and that's my whole point, really. I'd like to read about these subjects in a way which reflects the way I feel about them, but I recognise that perhaps I am asking too much of the publications dedicated to recording them to expect it. Infact, perhaps I am wrong, perhaps a phenonema gets the media it deserves, and if the writing about BB etc is poor then that is simply a reflection of the subject matter. Then again, perhaps there will be a critical u-turn on this sorta stuff in 10 years time and there will appear in Borders 100s of very high-brow books about BB written in very elevated language, and I'll be complaining that a vital, fun pop phenonema had been co-opted by acedemics who are seriously missing the point...told you you should just read the start of the post, huh?

Oh, and another thing. I hated Nikki.

Labels: Television

  ¶ 10:35 AM