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STRANGER THAN FICTION

Ahh…summer’s finally here. The time to bask in the glory of a tantalisingly warm sun for all of the ten days it’s out. The time when the scent of burnt sausages wafts through the air and inevitably someone you know begins to resemble a lobster from getting over-excited by the mini heat wave and spending every hour of sunlight spread-eagle on a sun lounger, manoeuvring every half hour to the precise angle of the UVA rays. The time when you can relish, minus any trace of guilt, endless lie-ins and lazy days before the next year of uni beckons or, rather more scarily, you’re dragged kicking and screaming into the real world.

But, hang on a second, do you hear that noise? The thudding beat of some techno-style track followed by a booming Geordie bloke telling you what day it is and commanding you not to swear. Sounds strangely and scarily familiar. All of a sudden you realise what the oncoming sound is. Oh dear God. As it gets louder you scramble, running as fast as you can and clamping your hands to your ears in a vain attempt to block it out. But it’s too late – it’s arrived and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. Yes, Big Brother is back, looming like a dark ominous cloud on the horizon or a sudden swarm of fierce hornets. Oh joy of joys.

So once again Channel 4 wheels out the annual BB parade replete with blinding flashbulbs and unfurled banners, coming to invade almost every media outlet near you. And it rolls up the curtain every night for 13 weeks although it certainly feels more like 13 years. Unlucky for some? Unlucky for all of us. Witness quite possibly the most annoying woman on the planet – no, make that the universe – Davina McCall screech like a banshee and work herself into a tizz over a garden swing that transforms into a hot tub or a tunnel leading to a secret room of some sorts, pulling a vast array of facial expressions previously unseen on any other human being while trying to flog hair dye in the ad breaks. And that’s before any of the ‘contestants’ appear.

In the last few weeks I have managed to successfully avoid it, honing the skill until my fingers are automatically trained to flick over the channel at the mere mention and my eyes avert themselves from the slightest snippet of press coverage. For some reason which I can’t recall – perhaps a type of morbid fascination – I found myself watching last year’s launch. Needless to say, the characters on show weren’t enough to entice me for the whole run but because the names and faces had crawled into my sub-conscious I became dragged against my better will into conversations about who said what about who in the diary room (cue a lot of nodding along and a few well acted ‘oh my god, really?’s for good measure). This year however I am free… aside from having to dodge large chunks of the Channel 4 and E4 schedules which I usually cherish as they become filled with BB spin offs.

I had a conversation not long ago which came to ponder the apparent merits of reality TV. Some of the others involved made it clear they preferred their televisual viewing to centre on what was ‘real’, true to life, and above all believable as opposed to the stuff of fiction that I favour which can be by all accounts often far fetched, improbable and a tad idealistic. Of course there are a ton of very insightful documentaries out there which highlight the big wide world how it really is. Placing Big Brother alongside these is at best laughable and at worst a horrible insult. The fundamental problem I have with the vast majority of reality shows is their very labelling – in what way can the situations they set up be considered real? How is dumping a dozen D list celebrities in a jungle infested with maggots, rats and the like in any way connected to reality apart from the already known fact that such types will do anything for publicity? The closest you’ll get to experiencing an X Factor style scenario in mundane normality is by ending up in the local karaoke venue minus the judging panel, unless the few revellers in the corner come over all critical. If I didn’t have anything better to do I might consider writing a strongly worded letter to trades descriptions.

Far from being the real deal, actually isn’t BB the most staged show on TV? From the earliest stages of selection, the producers are plotting what chaos can be caused mainly through a mix of volatile hot heads, Big Brother’s ‘evil’ machinations and copious amounts of booze. Entertainment at its best, eh? The lowest point of which surely came in the form of the famous – or more appropriately infamous – ‘Fight Night’ whereby that year’s housemates engaged in an early hours brawl which invited police attention. If I wanted to be entertained by drunk people fighting – which I really don’t – I wouldn’t have to wander too far outside my front door. Add to this the way in which the audience becomes gradually brainwashed by the producers’ demands to heckle the chosen hate figures and shower love on the one who’s been edited to look like a hero. They might as well hold up cards marked ‘applause’, ‘cheer’, ‘boo as if you’re faced with Robert Mugabe’. The way in which usually rational members of the public react in light of such shows is actually quite frightening. Take another recent reality event, Britain’s Got Talent. Each night a totally dreadful act seemed to be purposely paraded just so the audience could hurl abuse at them. OK, so people willingly participate but by taking advantage of their obvious delusions, the producers make a fool of both the acts themselves and the baying crowd who become unfeeling and almost inhumane as they’re carried away by mob mentality.

Reality TV as a genre appears in the last couple of years to have been milked more times than Daisy the cow. Some of the more recent offering have the distinct air of being presented to television execs with the accompaniment of a barrel being vigorously scraped. Big Brother as well, the big brother of all reality shows, is now so predictable that it risks becoming a parody of itself. Now inexplicably in its 9th year most of the previous series quite easily blend into one never-ending nightmarish mess. After choosing a set of apparently ‘boring’ people one year, the show now has a pile of stock caricatures they can rely on to supposedly stir things up. There’s the mouthy one, the girl with the ridiculously silly name like Chardonnay, the camp one, the one who pretends to have outrageously politically incorrect views to make it on but is actually really bland, the social ‘oddball’…this isn’t evidence of my amazing psychic powers, it’s just how it is. Like anything that becomes instantly popular, BB has become a victim of its own success. In its early days it could be considered an interesting social experiment – the contestants had no idea if 6 or 6 million people were watching them. Now everyone knows the riches in store – the possibility of a sleazy photoshoot or the chance to open a local convenience store, if that thing takes your fancy. The result is a load of fame-obsessed wannabes and a show that strains to outdo its self imposed levels of stupidity and scandal year after year.

So for as long as BB remains on our screens – let’s face it, it doesn’t look like it’ll be evicted from the schedules any time soon – what could be done to make it that bit more bearable? For starters the selection process could be made essentially more real – instead of purposely picking the exaggeratedly extrovert, why not take the list of total auditionees and choose at random? Eliminate the careful editing from the start. Although it’s probably likely that many current candidates fall into the bracket of being OTT in any case. Another option is to stop the publicity overload – let the housemates believe the cameras are turned off, have no awaiting crowd when they’re booted out and make selling stories to the tabloids prohibited. It’d surely be a shock to the system to let the spotlight seekers fade into obscurity long before their fifteen minutes of fame are up. With any luck, it might make Big Bro slouch away and die of boredom itself. Anything that inflicted the horror of Jade Goody on the nation twice deserves to be shot down in flames. I’m sure Davina will console herself with her lifetime’s supply of L’Oreal products. This is television audiences across the land – would Big Brother please clear off before we all go mad and drive bulldozers up to the house in protest.

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