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Big Brother
July 2010ZANI – Goodbye
Like a nuclear resistant cockroach or the skinny Terminator from the second film, it just seems impossible to kill, doesn’t it? The amount of times I’ve heard this last three years, ’Opp, that’s it now from us at Channel 4. No more Big Brother, we’ve realised it’s reached its life’s end,’ only for that music (oh dear god THAT music) to explode out of the glass tit in the corner of the room and, like a staggering drunk who keeps leaving the pub only to fall back into the door and gurn ‘goodnight’ in a North East accent to us all over and over, it’s back...for one more series. One more time, we’ll have to pass newspaper stands and see those purveyors of all that’s good in the world, The Sun, and its annoying and even more arrogant younger brother, The Star, blurt out from their Red Top front pages all the inane and brain-freezing rubbish about what another bunch of no mark wanabees are up to. With wars, recession and and a hole in the ocean spilling millions of barrels of oil nightly into our seas, never has the term, ’And while Rome burned he played the fiddle’ been more apt.
I remember the first one. I was on my first ever acting job. Hardly high art itself - it was a drama series in Wales - but I had to learn lines, pretend to be someone else and wake up before 7am every morning. While not quite a ‘day at the pit’ as my old man would have done, it gave me that one thing that every single human soul needs to survive…a bit of self respect. Soon, the ‘crew’ (it was funny how the actors almost sensing the threat to their profession almost immediately boycotted it en masse) were talking about Nasty Nick. Oh, this guy was bad they said. Oh, he was mean. Oh, he was the most terrible thing since the Black Death got it on with the Plague and made something which made your head drop off instantly. ‘Dear me.’ I asked. ’And what’s this man done?’ I asked a particularly het-up make-up girl one day...’Well, he’s manipulative..’ ‘Oh Really?’ I enquired, ‘And what exactly is he manipulating?’ ‘Well,’ she explained, almost breathless at the audacity of the man, ‘He’s LIED about who he is and exaggerated..’ I actually said to her, ’Umm…don’t take this the wrong way, and I’m sure you’ve grown up watching Dirty Dancing so you have a very skewed view of men, but most of us do. It’s to impress you, because, well, the truth about us is usually a bit rubbish and boring you see?’ She didn’t get it. She was gone in her Nick hatred - Big Brother had claimed her. Like those Zombie movies when the person gets bit and that’s it…well, she was a zombie. There was no one home behind the eyes. And it spread like Spanish flu. And the more it spread, the more entrenched I got. I would not watch a program that prided itself in dishing out the worst kind of medieval punishment. It was the modern equivalent of going down to the Tyburn Tree with a packed lunch, a few beers and your mates to see a few executions. And what these poor idiots never realised was, that they were ALL at the mercy of the producers’ editing. I hated it. Everything was getting nastier, meaner. Jerry Springer was becoming Jeremy Kyle. People were to be shouted at, spat at, rather than helped. It seemed a whole century of an underlying ethic of improving people’s lives had gone into reverse. It was like Britain had turned into an adult version of Lord of The Flies and the end result would be Cowell sneering at people putting their caps on the floor and singing for him and their supper (and they just gave that man a Bafta for god sake).
Of course, it was impossible to ignore it completely. I mean, unless I went to live on Mars or somewhere as quiet like West Wales you could not escape it. I mean, talking of Wales, a particularly dopey Welsh girl was on there saying spectacularly stupid things like ‘I like blinking I do.’. How do I know this? Because I’m Welsh and people started saying it to me in the street, at work, and, even in the pub, as men too fell under its evil spell (shame on you.). And what happened to this Wildean Welsh girl? Well they gave her a slot on Lorraine of course. I mean, that makes perfect sense. Put her in with a Scot who also spends hours talking about stuff as important as how you should wear your belt and hat and what sandals you really need for the beach this year. But the real ‘star’ of Big Brother was still to come. Jade Goody. If ever someone physically symbolised what this awful program was all about she was it. Reviled, loved, reviled again and then, of course, (tragically) loved. Even now, her ex husbands and boyfriends make the press because of her. Whether being up for sexual attacks or ‘not believing their luck’ in meeting someone new (Jade would have wanted it.) there they are dolefully looking out of the magazines that have been spawned by this devil of a program.
And so, this country that had endured Hitler and the Blitz by dusting off last nights’ bombs with a strong cup of tea had became hysterical over the most inane and pointless things. We’d literally lost our moral compass. Of course, this wasn’t an overnight thing. Lots trace the ‘big bang’ of the sad loss of the ‘stiff upper lip’ to the death of Diana, but, in TV world it was a slow dripping process that began in the early 90s with the Word, Eurotrash and the rise of the ‘celebrity mags’. British Television was famous the world over. Old men with posh names would wait for hours for a big gorilla to come out of the fog, sniff around a bit and then disappear. There were fantastic costume dramas about incredible things that happened in our History like the ‘Monocled Mutineer’ and Channel 4 in particular led the way with brilliant Working Class based dramas like ‘One Summer’. There was no one to touch us. America had the syrupy stuff like The Golden Girls and Different Strokes, the Japanese for some reason liked to attach crabs to people’s genitals and make them swing over sharpened bamboo shoots, and Europe seemed to have game shows with soon-to-be Spice Girls grinning manically while standing by giant spinning, glittery wheels. In short, it was mental. But really not in a good way. As kids on holidays in Spain, we’d sometimes knock the TV and laugh hysterically at what we were watching. We knew it was inferior to ours. It was something innate in us. After all, we had stuff like Auf Weidersen Pet or Boys from the Blackstuff and back home we relegated all the ‘pub crowd’ rubbish to late on Friday nights on Channel 4. Marvellous. What could go wrong?
Everything. With all this history, this incredible past, this genuine craft we had in TV making, what did we do? We threw it all away. It would be like an exquisite Turkish Carpet Maker suddenly being sacked and being replaced by a fella banging out straw mats for a fiver a pop. It was awful. In fact, there should have been a European law against it. There probably is now. But when a Dutch fella walked into Channel 4 and said ‘Urdy Gurdy (or is that Scandinavian…sorry, but you know what I mean) ‘I have for sure, a great movie TV idea, for sure guys. It’s about a load of random people and we put them in a house and just film them, for sure.’ Instead of someone putting a plant put over his head and calling for security they actually commissioned him... Honestly, that person is the TV equivalent of the guy that turned down the Beatles. He’s Mussoliniesque in getting it wrong. He’s the bloke who sneaked on the Titanic and when the ship pulled out of port jumped out of his hiding place smugly and shouted, ‘Haha. No getting rid of me now’.
And there wasn’t. Because TV was never the same again. Channel 4 had brought Kong out from the jungle and really thought they could control him, yet ever since, the big bastard Monkey has been stomping all through British Television destroying everything in its path. Even as I write there is a new BBC (yes Auntie fell to her knees and sucked reality cock quicker than a crack whore who’d just been offered a fiver) series about Western Women being Tribal Wives. I mean have you ever heard of anything quite so awfully patronising in your entire life? These spoilt, idiotic, fame hungry women will now glide in like gilded Swans to some poor African village and piss and moan like Upper Manhattan brats about having to carry a pot of water 98 miles on their heads and then say how lucky they realise they are in their safe European homes. It’s awful and symptomatic of the kind of drivel commissioners will cream their pants over since Big Brother exploded like an awful atom bomb into our lives. And this ladies and gentlemen is the radiation...they tell us this is the last one, well good I say. Because we’ve been living with the after effects ever since and, like Chernobyl, it’ll take a long long time (if ever) for things to get back to what they were. Big Brother? For me, it’s a Good fuckin’ riddance.
© Words – Jonathan Owen/ZANI
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