I cannot explain to you why I like Big Brother. I have been meaning to node this for a while now. Tonight is as good a night as any, for ten minutes ago, six days after the
final eviction, my housemate just got home from a nightclub I didn’t go to because I am feeling ‘depressed’.. even though I
knew Pete from Big Brother was going to be there and even though I knew I would regret not going, just as I knew I would regret not going to the eviction despite the fact it is filmed right near me.
So she comes home,
tipsy, she runs in, looking all beautiful and
sh!t, and she yelps “Pete kissed me!” He was bartending for the night, as some promotional thing, (he was this
charismatic,
chick magnet bartender before Big Brother, we are told) and my housemate asked for two
Bacardi Breezers, and he kissed her on the cheek! Now, I am not
boy crazy, I am not into
reality television, I am not a
groupie, I don’t see how a ‘
celebrity’, (and I put that in quotation marks because lets face it, he became famous by being on tv, he didn’t get on tv for being talented), and yet.. I feel
so jealous.
I can’t even describe this type of
envy. I am
so happy for her, even though there is nothing to be happy for. It’s over for her, she’s forgotten it, now she’s chatting to her boyfriend and reading a magazine. But i.. I am left sitting here thinking
is it too late? Can I still go? Why the hell?! It’s a reality TV show! Its 12 people sitting in a house being bitchy and going to the bathroom, and
I’m feeling green eyed because I didn’t get a kiss from a man who, to tell you the truth, I found to be an absolute
jerk until he was evicted.
I have considered this, I have thought it over and over because I was troubled by the fact that I could even like this show. I don’t really go for the idea of reality TV, usually. I did in the beginning, I thought it was interesting.. but then I got bored. After like two episodes of Survivor. Temptation Island mildly interested me, but nothing good happened. Why Big Brother Australia then? The best I can tell you about its appeal is that, just as in the end they warmed to each other despite perhaps hating each other in the beginning, we begin to love them as well; they become ‘family’. And we all love a competition. And we love mysteries. It’s always interesting to see who wins. And to have a part in that is even better. And although people frown upon hype and fanaticism, when you’re in the middle of it, it’s downright zippy and gleaming, I mean to feed off everybody’s energy at one of those big eviction parties would be amazing, considering the emptiness of day to day life. It’s the type of time where everybody is your friend.
And that’s another thing, it unites people. It might sounds cheesy but it just out and out does!
I’m not sure what Big Brother was like in other countries, but in Australia it was wonderful :) Let me run through the characters (in the order they were evicted):
- We had Andy the tall, Brazilian, outlandish dominatrix who brought with her her whips and vibrators and swore she wanted to have sex with all the boys on the show, with the blessing of her *gasp* husband, yet only managed to get one pash.. with Sara Marie. The fact that she was voted off kind of set the scene de jour, that Australia just wouldn’t look kindly upon Big Brother turning into some huge twenty-something romp.
- Then we had Sharna, somewhat old compared to the rest, in her thirties, a bit of a blokeish man, your average Joe, as she would say, she had a bit of a thing for Pete, she was brash and bitchy, but pretty funny. When she was nominated she threw a huge tantrum and vowed not to speak to the housemates for the rest of the week. To her credit, she’s learning not to be so “nasty”.
- We then said goodbye to Todd, a vegetarian with long dreads (Jemma cut them off), primarily because he smelled like meditation oil. Mixed with BO.
- Next went Gordon, or Flash. One of the more ‘outgoing’ types, he finds himself physically attractive and had a bit of a thing for Jemma, who wanted none of him, and so voted him off rather than actually coming out and telling him to keep his distance. She then felt bad. Ha. Flash Gordon had pretty outrageous (so he’d like to think) hair. I couldn’t even explain it. Bald, except some spiky thing on one side. They called him Donkey Boy, after seeing the size of his penis.
- Lisa, the most boring person alive. I have not one more thing to say about her.
- Peter! He had a relationship with Chrissie and was often very cruel to her, but we learned he had Crohn’s Disease which is a some kind of bowel condition by which he loses blood and in effect, has the same mood swings as PMSing girls, so we forgave him. He was goddamn funny. He should have stayed longer, and would have were it not for the aforementioned PMS. He raised controversy by kicking a chicken.
- Shock Horror! We had intruders! Two people from the outside, Anita and Rachel. Anita was elected to stay, which was amistake because Rachel ended up far more easygoing and hilarious than Anita, who was an Israeli, whiny, competitive woman who sparked the phrase here in Australia “Stop Smirking At Me”. She had frequent outbursts.
- Jemma the house’s resident beauty queen. A make up artist before she went in, Australia laughed at the fact that she asked for her special lip gloss to be put on the grocery list. She was overly nice to the point where you wonder if she is a fake, and she’s dreadfully boring, but pretty. She wants, and I imagine she will get, a TV presenter’s job. She showered in her underwear and was known for her awful, awful off the shoulder tops and eighties earrings. Eek. Hideous. She seems to have bought some style since leaving.
- Johnnie, or Rotten Johnnie as he was named by the media. He has a bit of “Lucifer’s Kiss” in that he’ll vote someone off and then be nice as pie.. but I really think he was just trying to be affectionate to everyone. He played the game well. He is gay, but he pashed Sara Marie and dry humped all the boys (and they him). It was amazing how loving the boys were towards him. They’d cuddle up with him on the bed and kiss his cheek. It was a lesson in tolerance for this country for sure.
- Christina the ballerina, who you hated in the beginning because she was a meek, clingy girl who has absolutely no hand in her relationship with Peter, and it seemed, no personality. But she blossomed, particularly after Pete left, and she became a little more vibrant, a little more secure.
- Sara Marie! It was insane! She was the clear winner! But on the second last night, she got evicted! It so happened that nine minutes before the eviction, Ben was the one to be evicted.. but then suddenly the lines went crazy trying to get Sara Marie out. She is larger than life! She’s loud and quirky and wears bunny ears, she worked at a strip club, she was honest, she annoyed people, but no matter how many times she was nominated she never got evicted. She is the clear favourite. She has no body image problems despite being a ‘larger girl’, so this has given a whole breed of weight conscious teens some damned confidence, something which needed to be done! Most famously, she created the “Bum Dance”, a curious feat indeed which involves one wobbling their butt in quite an unbridled manner and accompanying it occasionally with slaps of the hand. Note that she did this in a G-string one night.
- Blair was the youngest at 19, a classic Aussie boy. He has a complete “Dolly magazine cover” face and could probably walk straight on to Home and Away or Neighbours. At the beginning he seemed obnoxious and arrogant but towards the end he really opened up and became this beautiful person. He pashed Sara Marie and he cried when Johnnie left and he loves his family. He’s like Australia’s new heart throb or something, amongst the teenagers. I cant believe he didn’t win, after Sara Marie left.
- Blair and Ben were best friends, they were hilarious. Theyre both kinda just sporty, Aussie guys who love their family. Ben was just a really nice guy, but could be accused of having little personality. He’s like a big teddy bear. He scraped by in the beginning by being less obnoxious than the other housemates, and won the $250 000 for himself.
Facts and Figures:
14,000 people applied to be on Big Brother. This
social experiment lasted 85 days, included 14 housemates and 12 chickens, 2 dogs (one real, one electronic), 25 cameras and 23 microphones. Over 350 staff worked day and night outside the house to bring Australia the action.
Throughout the 12 weeks, the housemates were allocated a food budget of $3.50 per person per day. However this could be gambled according to the weekly task, with the housemates betting a percentage of their budget on whether they passed the task. In total the housemates spent $2423.18 on food and drink, with $518.79 of this spent on wine and $280 spent on beer.
The house itself was built within 6 months by over 300 people. The house used 150 loads of concrete, over a million roofing screws and enough corrugated iron to cover eight football fields. As it is more than 300m from the control room and production offices, over 30km of cable joined the two.
The amount of videotape used in the production of the Australian Big Brother television shows spanned 27,000km – enough to stretch from Brisbane to London and back again.
Batteries for the housemates lapel microphones were an extraordinary expense. Over 2,500 batteries were used during the production at a cost of approximately $10 each. 10 lapel microphones were broken at a cost of $600 each, and 2 transmitters, that they all wear, were broken (one by Blair jumping into the pool, and one by Gordon wearing his in the shower) at a cost of $7,000 each.
Big Brother Online was an unmitigated success. It was the biggest single streaming event in Australian internet history. At any given moment there are an average of a thousand people watching the live streams. There has also been an average of 0.8 million page views per day, and over 56 million page views over the whole project.
The moral of the story came to be, from the perspective of the housemates: “Don’t take your friends and family for granted”. Nice. This still sounds boring. I don’t know how to explain what makes it exciting. I cant. I wont.
PS By the time I finished this writeup I wasn’t jealous of my housemate anymore. (Bitch.)
i wrote this node because i am literally having withdrawal symptoms. And the facts were supplied by bigbrother.com.au