It’s Time To Go…
Well well well… So Rove casually announced tonight that ‘there will be no more big brother’ after this series ends. Pity. It makes the piece I wrut (past-tense of wrote. Don’t look it up. Just trust me.) about it the other day kinda redundant. But this is my blog. I can post what I want! So here it is…
An Open Letter To The Producers Of Big Brother
By Gavin Miller – 11th July 2008.
Hi. You don’t know me but you should hire me as a production consultant for the next series of Big Brother, if there is one, because I have a few ideas to fix the show up. I saw the ratings for the show that featured Pamela Anderson entering the house, and if you can’t make that rate then you guys clearly need some help.
Before I begin dispensing advice I should point out that I am a huge fan of reality television, in particular Big Brother. On a good day Big Brother is a fascinating microcosm of society itself. At it’s worst, like this series has been, it is utterly unwatchable, and that’s a pretty big statement coming from someone who watched every episode of Australian Princess. Both series. (I don’t know why either. Something to do with the hilarity of watching absolute slappers trying to posh it up for the cameras.)
The first and most important lesson the producers of Big Brother need to learn is that we viewers don’t want everything to be so drawn out. Pamela Anderson could have flown back to Los Angeles and put a load of washing on in the time it took to get her into that house. By the time that show finally ended I no longer cared, and judging by the ratings in Perth, I was not alone.
The next thing that needs to stop is the endless and pointless interviews with family and friends of housemates. I stopped caring about the people in the house three weeks into this series, so why would I care what their Mum has to say about them? And while I’m on the subject of interviews, whoever researched Jackie O’s interview with Pamela Anderson should go and find another job that does not involve fact checking. There was not one single allegedly scintillating tidbit about Pamela Anderson that Jackie O used during that interview that was correct. The funniest bit was when Jackie O asked Pamela about growing up in America, and Pamela politely pointed out that she’s actually from Canada. Even Wikipedia has that one right. Pamela had a look on her face that screamed “Who is this moron telling me all these things about me which are false?” At least it was fun to watch Jackie O squirm. Kyle just kept staring at the camera as if his sworn enemy was standing directly behind it, and as usual his left eye was blinking at three times the rate of his right eye. (My theory as to what causes this twitch is best left out of this blog for legal reasons.)
That brings me to the next harsh reality of this reality television show: Gretel Killeen is a brilliant communicator and they never should have let her go. Good on her though, she is way too intellectually advanced to keep hosting that show the way it is, but when the producers of Big Brother take my advice on board and revolutionize the format in the way I’m about to outline, they should throw buckets of money at Gretel and beg her to come back.
All the producers need to do is watch the UK version of Big Brother and steal all the good ideas, of which there are plenty. In the UK the show is aimed at an adult audience. It is screened later at night and any swearing the housemates do is not bleeped out. The housemates come from all walks of life, and the freakier they are the better. Two years ago a guy with tourette’s syndrome called Pete went into the UK house. He would punch himself in the chest on a very regular basis whilst screaming out “wanker!” at the top of his voice. He won.
The most fundamental element of Big Brother that the Australian version gets very wrong, and has done since series one, is the constant talking to the housemates while they are in the house. They are supposed to be isolated. That’s the whole idea. No contact whatsoever with the outside world. Every time they cross to the house and talk to the housemates it waters down their product a little bit more.
Finally, and most importantly, what’s with the over-complication of the nomination and eviction process? For the last few years it seems that the producers have been scratching around for different ways of trying to arouse the viewers interest, and their texting fingers, with concepts like ‘vote to evict / vote to save’ and ‘the nominations twist’. Keep it simple, stupid. Three or more people get nominated, the public vote for the person they want chucked out, and that person get’s chucked out on Sunday night. No elaborate ‘would the four nominees stand up’ crap. That’s fine if you’re chucking someone off Australian Idol, but for Big Brother nothing has ever built the drama as well as the three nominees sitting on a couch, followed immediately by the old fashioned “It’s time to go…”
Apart from my brief attempt to tune back into this series when Pamela Anderson entered the house, I have given up on this year’s Big Brother. The Ten Network tend to make the best reality TV of any Aussie network, so please take my advice on board, move it to a later timeslot, aim the show at an audience that has pubic hair, get Gretel back, and save what was once the greatest of our reality shows.