It must be the final night of Big Brother: there are the usual predictions of its imminent demise, the ritual hand-wringing over where it went wrong this year, concern for the poor, hopeless deluded souls, manipulated by the show’s producers and the sneering broadsides against reality television.
Rather less predictably, on Wednesday I found myself within inches of the six finalists, ushered through the “rat run” inside the house where, in a blacked-out sequence of warrens, cameras manoeuvre soundlessly, peering through toughened glass with a mirrored film as the housemates go about their business. For a diehard fan (the shame, the shame), this is as good as it gets.
I stuck my head through a patch of black curtain and, aaaggh, was inches from Aisleyne as she clipped away at Pete’s tufty bleached hair with garden secateurs, Richard chirruping that he preferred it spiky. It was like being a ghost. Nikki gazed straight at the invisible me, then jumped into Glyn’s arms, shouting in that deranged, overenunciating adult-girl way of hers that he was “lovely”.
What a peeping tom I felt. Glyn, the Welsh lad who is (inexplicably) a favourite to win, looked less gangly and absurd in real life. Jennie, the Scouse girl who never really fitted in, sat and chewed her nails. The gay Canadian waiter, Richard, who spouts sense and psychobabble in equal measure, checked his profile in the mirror. The poor sods looked arse-achingly bored.
The house is much smaller than it appears on screen, scrappier too and very claustrophobic. The ceilings are low. There was muck caked into the carpets.
Advertisement
For the last 13 weeks, you may have ignored the circus of Big Brother. Then you have missed the grotesque meltdown of a nutty camp Glaswegian (Shahbaz), the eviction of the wonderfully dour Bonnie (who pronounced her name “Bon-uh”), the requested departure of a posh boy called George, who never wanted to be famous. There was Sezer (“the geezer”), a handsome sexist who is now being investigated for alleged rape. There was Dawn, who claims that her requests to leave the house were ignored; police are investigating this too.
Tonight, after 93 days and around 2,200 hours of round-the-clock filming, one of the inmates will emerge from the house £100,000 richer and, boy, are they playing to win. Pete, for example, has revealed he must triumph to satisfy the wishes of a deceased loved one. For Pete, who has Tourette syndrome, no sentence is complete without the exclamation, “wanker!”. He has been the firm favourite to win since the first day because of his strange animal-like noises, physical clownishness and crazy, goofy ways (and possibly, for his many admirers, the rumour of a large penis).
My favourite remains Aisleyne, whom women (they vote more than men) seem to dislike but who is the most interesting character: a young woman who doesn’t shy from confrontation, but who rarely provokes it.
Of the evictees, there was Lea, a Zeppelin-boobed misery-guts, who stewed in paranoia and luckless lust for Pete, and Grace, who bitched about everyone and whose eviction became a cause célèbre when, in a departing gesture, she threw a glass of water over Susie, the housemate who had sealed her fate. Susie got into the show via a “golden ticket”, which had the tabloids crying “fix”, though the producers have vigorously denied it.
And there is Nikki, famed for her insane tantrums — over air conditioning, heating, a disco dancing task in which her MP3 player wouldn’t work — and loved, at least initially, for all of the above. But, tired of her deranged behaviour, which stopped being funny and just became weird and uncomfortable to watch, the public voted her out. The house became like a morgue and the show’s producers brought her back via a controversial phone vote, which reintroduced four former housemates.
Advertisement
Perhaps realising that those of us who had spent our money voting these people out might be uncomfortable with such a stunt, the producers donated all the profits of that phone vote to charity. Plot twists, BB’s stock-in-trade, are one thing, but the central tenet of the show — the viewers decide “who stays and who goes” — was violated. The authorities are now investigating more than 2,000 complaints from the public. Next year the catchphrase may as well be: “You decide . . . hmmm . . . or we will.”
“This is a game show,” says Paul Osborne, the series editor, unrepentantly, “875,000 people voted to return those four ex-housemates. They were happy to do that. Big Brother thrives on twists.” He says that anyone who objects to that should lighten up. “It’s been amazing to hear this kind of stuff discussed as if it’s a Home Affairs Select Committee. Remember the season one song? ‘It’s only a gameshow’ . Well it is.” If so, they urgently need to restructure the lumbering beast: by the end of 13 weeks, it felt knackered — just like its much-abused audience. In this last week, Pete and Nikki (“Pikki”) have been acting lovestruck. But the problem is that Nikki has been out in the big, wide world. She already has her own TV show, Princess Nikki. So coming back into the house — and throwing herself around like a Tasmanian devil — seems forced and calculated. Big Brother works only if the characters exist in the hermetically sealed world of the house.
The series will return next year, of course. Danny Cohen, head of factual entertainment at Channel 4, says that it will be “very different”. As you’d expect, Cohen and Osborne deny exploiting the participants. Osborne says: “We have rigorous pre-selection tests and we give them all a ‘talk of doom’, which highlights the negative stuff that could happen when they come out of the house — they could not be famous or they might have their private lives turned over. Ex-housemates nearly always tell me how much they got from the experience.” Not all of them want fame, he insists.
Well, they are manipulated in that house — tossed around like leaves in a salad bowl. But if this year’s lot are anything like previous years’, they will totter in and out of nightclubs, enjoy the attention, then fade away, perhaps a little wealthier. Next year, there will be more publicity-hungry kids who turn out to be sweeter or more damaged than they first appear, and there’ll be more fulminating editorials predicting the end of civilisation.
Big Brother may well be only a game show, and its fans laugh and sneer at its characters as much as the show’s critics and creators. But there remains — only just, but crucially — an element of fairytale about it. These are, as Osborne says, ordinary people picked because of extraordinary, rather than freakish, personalities. What makes us vote for our winner isn’t the booze or fighting, the snogging or the swearing. It is the glints of real character, goodness even, which elevate them above their baying peers.
Advertisement
That’s why Aisleyne, the stroppy tough who discovered her soul, should win. And because she has been unfairly trashed by her fellow housemates behind her back and because she has been made to look so bad on screen, let’s help her do just that. Call 09011 323314; or text “Aisleyne” to 84444.
Big Brother final, Channel 4, 8pm and 10pm tonight; contribute to The Times’s Big Brother blog here