Tonight’s final of the reality television show “Big Brother” has drawn betting of an equivalent intensity to an England international football match, according to William Hill.
A spokesman for the bookmakers said its telephone betting department was taking 1,000 calls an hour and that it expected to take £1 million of bets today. More than £6 million is expected to have been bet on this summer’s series of the programme when the winnner is announced tonight.
“Big Brother is officially big business,” Rupert Adams told Reuters. “We have never seen anything like it -- the trading floor is as busy as for an England football international and we have even drafted in extra staff for the final day.”
Pete Bennett, from Brighton, who suffers from Tourette’s syndrome, has long been the favourite to win the show, which has run for an unprecedented three months this year and kept a loyal audience in thrall despite the heat and the distraction of the World Cup finals.
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Channel 4 is hoping to surpass the 7.8 million viewers who tuned in to see Anthony Hutton, a dancer from Liverpool, win last year’s show. MDSL, a research firm that specialises in telephone expenses has calculated that more than £500,000 of text messages could be sent to the show from company mobile phones.
Bennett can currently be backed at odds of 1/3. Aisleyne Wallace, a confrontational Londoner, is second favourite at 7/2, while Glyn Wise, a Welsh teenager, is available at 6/1. The final installment of the show begins at 8pm, with the winner announced in a second programme that begins at 10pm.