Thursday 18 August 2011

Hopefully Big Brother will be considerably smaller this time round

With depressing inevitability, and exactly as predicted on this very blog, Big Brother makes its reappearance tonight, this time within the tawdry confines of the Channel 5 schedule, with a 'celebrity' version launching this evening.

God help us. With a recent bout of societal self-examination following the rioting, I would have hoped that this is the very last sort of thing that people would get behind. My first ever entry on this blog, back in June 2010, bemoaned the cultural bankruptcy and vacuity of this vehicle, but predicted it would be picked up by one of the other channels when C4 were done with it. Channel 5's output is not exactly overflowing with high quality original content as it is, and this will do nothing to raise the bar generally. It seems they're quite happy to recycle Channel 4's rubbish for them.

I sincerely hope that, particularly in the light of the recent trouble, this will bomb completely and disappear from view once and for all. If it does, I know, of course, it will not be as a direct result of what's gone on in our cities lately. But I do believe that such trite celebrity bollocks is one very small reason among the myriad causes that sparked the trouble. Not Big Brother specifically, you understand, but the celebration and elevation of celebrity regardless of the talent or achievements of the people enjoying it, which in turn leads to a sense of entitlement to wealth and fame without any discernible reason for gaining it. Maybe, just maybe, there will be a negative reaction BB in the post-riot television landscape, and it will suffer from its own emptiness.

I'm not holding my breath, though - the fascination some people have for these Z-listers seems endless, and there is talk that Charlie Sheen will be one of the 'guests', which will doubtless draw in those who regard car-crash television and live personal breakdowns as entertainment, just in case he goes nuts. Frankly, I don't care if he starts sawing his housemates' heads off with a butter knife, though I suspect the producers would be secretly delighted if he did. I won't be breaking what's now a years-long habit and watching so much as a minute of it.

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