Big Brother - TV review

First a confession. I was once a fan of Big Brother. I loved the first few years of the reality programme, after Craig Phillips, a builder from the Shropshire-Staffordshire border, won the first series – a victory snatched from beneath the noses of a lesbian skateboarding nun and a psycho called Nasty Nick.

In its early years, Big Brother was a programme for people-watchers, of which, shamefully, I was one. At one point in my life I would follow people around town, just eavesdropping on people’s conversations.

I always thought that if I could sit and watch CCTV footage of people going about their ordinary lives, I would be in heaven. So when Big Brother came along, I could do all my people watching from the comfort of my armchair.

For years I enjoyed the comforting companionship the series offered. Being on every night throughout the summer; it was like having a human behaviour World Cup to run home from school to watch.

Plus the fact that, in moments of self-doubt, Big Brother reassured you that you were normal after all. Perhaps too normal. Certainly too normal to get on a show like this.

One of the best things about watching Big Brother was being able to share your thoughts on proceedings in the house with other people at work the next day.

But since nobody watches it any more, even this simple pleasure has been erased.

Tuning in last night, however, I realised that I had grown out of my Big Brother days.

Not having watched for a couple of series, I was alarmed at how banal the shenanigans of the current housemates had become.

Spraying friends with fish guts over nominations, for example. Mind you, I’d quite forgotten that here is a show that has built its reputation by encouraging people to use the scatter gun approach to carping on!

The only way I could happily watch this daily tripe now is if I was bedbound with a nasty illness.

Like the mumps. Or if I felt that life was becoming too short and I wanted to make it feel really long.

Reassuringly, narrator and professional northerner Marcus Bentley, still does the voice-overs.

“Day one-million-and-twenty-three in the Big Brother house we have the objectionable Jersey farm girl, Lauren, objecting over a fellow housemate cutting up all the contestants’ cigarettes as part of a shopping challenge.”

Boy, she was mad. She punched a cushion in anger. Today’s youth, eh? A new feature of the show is that each time a housemate speaks, their name flashes up on screen. Presumably because so few people watch the show nowadays and those that do still have no idea who the housemates are.

Of course, casually dipping in and out of a long-running show like this is never easy. The context of observing human malfunction is lost and the ‘casual dipper’ knows not why. Suffice to say, he is likely to jump to conclusions. So here he jumps . . .

Having watched BB last night, I quite found myself yearning for the return into my life of lesbian skateboarding nuns, for psychopaths, for local folk like Craig, handy with bricks.

For, well, normal people.

Ben Bentley