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Who wants to be humiliated on air?

Big Brother has high ratings now... but the extreme vilification of contestants could prove fatal

Barbara Gunnell, readers editor
Observer

Sunday July 14, 2002

'PJ you're on your way' - well, gone and almost forgotten now, but last Friday, emerging blinking into the searchlights, haloed with razor wire, walking the one-way steel bridge out of the Big Brother house. In a minute, a hyperactive but slightly done-this-a-bit-too-often-to-be-too excited Davina will lead you by the hand and force you to watch - in front of your mother - your under-the-blanket fumblings with Jade - 'I did not have sex with that woman' or was it 'nah dintav sex wivver' - your bathroom reflections, your unguarded scratchings, fartings and belchings. You may even get to see what you look like tossing in a sleep tormented with lustful dreams.

Few of us get to study anyone else (or even ourselves come to that) so intimately which is, of course, the enduring fascination of Big Brother, now lurching drunkenly towards the end of its third series. Say what you will about Big Brother 3 having lost the plot, and marching far into territory beyond any recognised boundaries of decency for mainstream television - Jade stripping off drunkenly having lost a game requiring a bit more knowledge of the alphabet than she possessed - but the viewing figures reveal that more of us than ever are watching: 12 per cent more than watched series one and two and that was before the all-time record Big Brother audience when 7.8 million viewers turned on to see Adele evicted.

Maybe we're lured by the warnings about 'strong language' and 'discussions of a sexual nature' or the Schadenfreude of witnessing the inevitable humiliation that follows bucketloads of alcohol. (Last week six housemates downed six bottles of wine, eleven beers and one and a half litres of cider in one session, the voiceover for the highlights of the Big Brother week told us with awe.) And the continuing enthusiasm of the tabloids ('Jade's had it away with PJ' was one of dozens of front page heads) has kept the programme in the public eye.

Despite this, or maybe because of it, people are strangely reluctant to admit to watching the programme. You, too, may have had a conversation which goes something like this: ' Big Brother ? No, I watched the first and second series but this lot are so boring - Tim always preening and Adele a real bitch and Johnny so self-obsessed and Jade so stupid and Alex nasally droning on...' Sure, you never watch it.

Peter Bazalgette, the creative director of the company that produces Big Brother has put this down to AB snobbery. 'The chattering classes love the shock of the new,' he said recently. But now the programme has moved into popular viewing 'we will start to hear negative remarks from the people who lauded it as a cult revolution'.

Which is fair but only up to a point since it ignores the fact that the fly-on-the-wall shows lauded as a revolution have transmogrified into something quite different.

Seen from this distance, the early episodes had an innocent charm - Anna the lesbian former nun strumming her guitar and teaching the house to sing 'It's only a game show'; Craig, the first winner, a Liverpool builder, giving his Ł70,000 winnings away to a medical charity; Brian the Ryanair steward holding housemates and us in thrall to his garrulous wit. All earned affection and were rewarded with a few more than their 15 minutes of fame with Davina.

The BB3 contestants are, on the whole, younger, tougher - chosen to be so one hopes, given the tortures and humiliations inflicted on them. The show has been planned to create rifts and divisions - physically with a rich house/poor house boundary, psychologically with tasks that involve favouring housemates. Taciturn Alex, one week, had to choose three housemates to live on the rich side with him. Later, posh Tim had to live by himself eating steak and enjoying hot showers and mod cons while the poor side of the house ate rice and washed in cold water. Alex has recovered but Tim's status with the public has plummeted and he increasingly shows signs of anxiety and paranoia about what the press outside are saying. And he's right to be fearful. Public vilification is also on a different scale than in the earlier shows. Contestants have been described as freaks, thick-as-a-brick, ugly, two-faced. One has been abused so viciously for her physical appearance that C4 must surely fear for her psychological health when Davina coos at her - some predict as early as next week - 'the papers have been a bit unkind to you, haven't they?' and then flashes up any one of dozens of excruciatingly unkind headlines.

Mirroring this is the bloodlust of the crowd outside. Adele's 'sin' was double-dealing (none of us has ever said one thing to someone's face and another in their absence, have we?) The house listened with horror at the baying as she opened the Big Brother door to leave.

But it was Adele who had earlier hit on an apt metaphor for the housemates' situation. 'It's like the gladiators,' she said. Assuming she meant the Roman gladiatorial games rather than the TV show, she was right. We give them the emperors' thumbs up or throw them to the lions. We know this is good for Channel 4 ratings, but after this series, will there be anyone else who wants a one in 12 chance of winning Ł70,000 that badly? An evening with Chris Tarrant would be easier. And even Jade could answer some of the questions.

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