Be Banished to Big Brother

As you may have notice, a regular theme with my blogs (apart from the depressing love ones) is my dislike of Reality TV shows, and moan because I usually get sucked into watching them. However, that is not the same with Big Brother, and never has been. I have watched very little Big Brother over the past 10 years, and I plan to continue not watching Big Brother. However, because we live in a society where the media likes to tell us things, regardless of whether we want to hear them or not, and peoples’ lives are so dull, that watching people moping around a house for 3 months in classed as 'entertainment'; I hear a lot of gossip about it.

I have three main sources of information about Big Brother. One is friends who for some reason seem to love Big Brother, and will talk about it with other people who watch Big Brother and reminisce over the previous days shenanigans, who will dump who, who will be evicted next and also who they predict to win. Another is radio, where some presenters are also huge fans of this show, and constantly feel the need to blurt out over the airwaves their opinions of what has happened and constantly say 'If you're not watching it, you should' - But I won't. The third is the Internet. It doesn't matter how hard you try, you always get some form of exposure to it, whether you're just on the news websites, catching up on the days happenings or on Facebook reading people pointless status changes (the subject of my next blog).

I'm very sorry for being cynical, but really it's in my nature. You see, I don't really think being stuck in a room full of cameras and people you don't know and won't like for a few months, being part of reality. Now, mistake me if I'm wrong, but Big Brother falls into the Reality genre. The only bit of reality in the show is that they have a kitchen with food in it. I could go broader and say that dumping 10 celebrities into the jungle with a film crew isn't exactly reality either. Neither is a film crew following the 'day-to-day lives' of Katie and Peter or Kerry Katona. Reality TV is really not the correct genre to put it into. Cheap, Humiliation TV - Yes.

I do have reasons for disliking Big Brother, apart from the one above. Remember that lovely women, who graced us with her presence on TV and in Magazines not a few month ago? I forget her name... Oh, that's right - Jade Goody. They even had the cheek to make a Jade Goody Big Brother special, to commemorate her life, as if they couldn't annoy me enough. If this show never existed, she would be completely unknown to me and most of the civilised world. She would have gone about her normal boring life as a dental nurse in Essex and would have died a normal dignified death without all the media attention. She has become, unfortunately, a role model of the 20th Century, and I fear for education in the future. I don't want any future children of mine to learn about Jade Goody, or even have to hear that name, and if they do, I will have to tell them the truth about the vile women that once lived off the media, and it would break their little hearts and they'd have nightmares every night for the next 5 years, and it'll all be the fault of Big Brother. Sorry for being blunt, but I've taken the Jade Goody rant a bit differently this time.

Anyway, another reason for not liking this show is Scrubs. Because of Big Brother, Scrubs is hardly ever on Channel 4/E4 at the moment. I've had to go cold turk-ey. I've gone from watching 2 episodes a day to watching none a day, just like that. Luckily, they timed it just right, so I can at least say that I've seen every episode of Scrubs, apart from Series 8, which hasn't yet been aired in the UK anyway. The point is that Big Brother took away my Scrubs. Simple.

However, if you want to look at it from a positive side, you could say that Endemol had done more to make the streets safer than Jacqui Smith ever did by locking up those 16 prisoners, I mean contestants. It's not as if the contestants have ever had an intellectual conversation, it's sometimes a wonder they manage to string a sentence together when slagging each other off. The fact that a Big Brother challenge was for two of them to legally change their name by deed poll shows how low down the ladder of intellect. One of them changed her name Dogface and the other changed his name to Halfwit. Now if you were looking through peoples CV's, choosing who to hire, those two names would certainly not be on the pile of possibilities.

The contestants still in the house don't, or at least didn't last I heard, know that Michael Jackson had died. However, to quote Charlie Brooker from a few weeks ago, "If we was to make a list of things Big Brother contestants don't know, this would be a very long" blog. And last week, they put in another 5 new housemates into the mix, and already, within a few days, two have walked out. One because there was no-one in the house who he wanted to talk to, and I think he should be hailed as the cleverest, or at least the most observant contestant they've ever had in the Big Brother house. Although, at the same time, you could say, 'Well what was he expecting to find? Stephen Fry sitting in the corner calling him over for a friendly chat by the fire place?’

Which leads me onto a thought, maybe they should do a Big Brother meets University Challenge special, where all the contestants are university graduates with degrees in Quantum Mechanics and Econometrics and Mathematical Economics. Sure it may not be quite as 'entertaining' as the current Big Brother format with people on benefits and strongly opinionated hairdressers (not that I'm undermining people in those categories, I'm just generalising here), where people don't get along, argue and date, but it'd make a nice change from all that, but even then I still wouldn't watch it, so what does it matter to me?
Even the people from Channel Four who introduce the show don't even seem care anymore. A few weeks ago I heard one of them say "Now on Channel Four, you can watch a bunch of random people asleep if you want to...". And that is what it is half the time. During the night, when they're sleeping or just getting ready for bed, you get a live feed of the house, on your living room TV. That's a bit perverted, watching people sleep. You have to be either very addicted to Big Brother or be mentally unstable to watch that the whole night through.

Why are we currently on series 10 of this now awful and boring show I hear you thinking? Well, it’s because writers of normal scripted television shows, cost money and also are very unimaginative. They can't think up new ideas, so they recycle old ideas, and jazz it up a bit to make it look new and fresh. For example, the BBC has commissioned a new Sitcom. I say new, it's actually Only Fools And Horses, but a bit different. It's what they are calling a prequel, where it will follows the life of Del Boy as a teenager. TV bosses have to decide whether to waste their money on silly ideas like that, or cheaply make reality shows, and seeing as we're currently going through a credit crunch, it's usually the latter.

And there we go, and nice cynical blog, ranting about Big Brother, and yet again Jade Goody as well. I'm considering doing a blog special, where I consolidate all my rants about Jade Goody into one big blog. That's something for me to do, should I run out of blog ideas in the near future.

So, on that long note, I shall say Toodles m’dearys
xXXx

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