Big Brother 15: Week 6- Armageddon Off My Screen

Big Brother 15: Week 6 Assessment- Armageddon Off My Screen

Are you still watching everyone? Can’t blame you if you aren’t.

We have survived Armageddon week in Big Brother 15 this week, and by the rate things have been going I could have done with sending most of the house and the production team up on a rocket to try and blow up an asteroid, as a combination of their own behaviours had led to more frustration and annoyance then anyone watching a television show should be victim to. This week in many ways can be considered symbolic of Big Brother 15 on a whole; the drama and the scandal certainly has been plentiful, you can’t exactly call a week where four contestants have gone as being dull after all, but the whole scenario has been tainted with such a degree of disappointment, contrivance and arrogance from the production team that the entire situation has left a very sour taste in my mouth and left me at times questioning the value of watching the show, a sad thing for a long-term fan such as myself to say, but an opinion which has begun to be uttered more vocally by many die-hard fans within the community.

I will begin by addressing the key factor which links a lot of the reasons for this downturn in series perception, namely the Armageddon twist. We have become used to the fact that Channel 5 are some of the masters of advertising hyperbole, often making ridiculous exaggerations over house twists and casting decisions which ultimately just leave the viewer greatly under whelmed, and in my view it is the Armageddon twist which symbolises this more so then anything, turning what was hyped to us as one of the most explosive weeks in Big Brother history into nothing more then a glorified advertising campaign for the new Planet of the Apes film, something which can only be redeemed by the fact that the ‘Apes together strong’ motif continually uttered during the adverts is a perfect anecdote for Helen’s side of the house. Everything about the setup seemed not only underwhelming compared to the speculation which the show had created for itself but at the same time it also led to a degree of desperation and contrivance from the producers to make up for the fact that their hysteria failed to live up to expectations, the casting promises of boyfriends and enemies of housemates for example was replaced instead by three of the most tedious contestants that the show has had, not so much in them being particularly dull people but in that they all represented character types which have by now just become stale in the channel 5 era.

This is most clearly represented in my view by Bianca’s short stay in the house this week, from the view of production I do understand the reasons why Bianca was cast on paper, she was confrontational, obnoxious and was certainly going to ruffle some feathers in the show, but everything about her was done with such an air of desperation and contrivance on her part that any sort of benefit she did bring to the show was automatically nullified, I see her eviction this week, notably in a vote to save designed specifically to save characters such as herself, as an representation of the publics tiredness of the increasing desperation of Big Brother housemates as much as a protest against Bianca herself as a person, although that in itself is something that would require a completely separate article to itself. In terms of the other new housemates however there is a similar air of been there, done that with the characters chosen. Pav seems pleasant enough, and it is refreshing to have another Sikh housemate represented in the show (joining Siavash in that regard) but there is very little else about him which stands out as interesting and original, we’ve seen so many other male housemates obnoxiously state their intelligence and how they will be able to manipulate the house only to slip into a sea of dreariness and fail to live up to their expectations, and Pav is no different in this regard, he certainly talked the talk with alluding to the prospect of nominating Stephen this week, but when push came to shove he bottled out and settled for people-pleasing, a role which is all he’ll succeed in as a housemate. Meanwhile the casting of Zoe is just plain bizarre for me on so many levels, yes she is bubbly enough and a refreshing change from the innate negativity from the rest of the house, but I can’t honestly fathom the reasons why she is there in the first place, I know that the line between Celebrity and Civilian versions of Big Brother has become increasingly blurred since Channel 5 took over, but in my view Zoe is justified enough to lock herself into any celebrity version, and added to that I also perplexed because I don’t on paper see much way which she is going to progress the show’s storyline forward, even with Bianca as much as I disliked her I knew she would serve a purpose for the show in a way which right now I’m struggling to see with Zoe, I certainly think she will do well, maybe even win if the cards fall into place, but it is certainly a strange call her casting.

But now we get to the stuff which had everyone wound up this week, and I mean really wound up. I know Big Brother fans on the whole have a tendency to go over-the-top with many of their grievances with the show, but in this situation I will whole-heartedly agree with them about everything. This week has been a mess of twists and obnoxious production behaviour all designed to orchestrate and demean Danielle and to orchestrate her departure from the show, the desperation from production to do so being one of petulance and immaturity which should be well below a supposedly responsible broadcaster such as Channel 5. I understand that Danielle did have a lot of baggage coming into the show that the production team would have disliked, especially in her presentation of herself as a prudish figure in complete contrast with that, but her treatment in the show drifted into victimisation, and I felt the way that the show went so gung-ho on her was very unsettling. But the thing was though as a viewer I liked her a housemate, yes she was contrived and as false as they come but at the same time she was so bad at attempting to keep up her good catholic girl charade that I found her entertaining with it, she served her purpose in the show as comedy value and to be honest I found it disappointing that she went, especially in such a contrived manner at the hands of the production team.

The worst thing about the whole situation for me however wasn’t so much the twist itself, although I agree it was bad, it was what the twist represented in terms of the relationship between the production in the show and the viewer. Making this a week which has all but exclusively been chosen by the housemates (allegedly) is symbolic to me of the contempt that the Big Brother production team has for its audience. We all know that there is a need in reality television in recent years for there to be a need for storylines in the show, and when done right I agree that they can help improve a series on the whole, but at the same time the viewer should always be the one who has the final say in which direction the storyline goes in through their eviction votes, and that say this week was thrown out of our hands in my opinion because production frankly did not trust the viewer to make the decision that production would want for it’s storyline to progress. This for me is a cardinal sin in the television industry, especially on a show so reliant on a strong relationship with the public to generate voting revenue and to keep the show going in the first place, don’t get me wrong I am one of the first to disagree with the public and their choices of winners, but at the same time I also accept that this was the decision of the majority of the voting public and in my eyes the show should act in the same manner rather then having a tantrum over it and taking away the voter’s right as a punishment, in the television industry the aim should always be to give the viewer what they want, not to have a tantrum when what the public want isn’t the same as what you the producers want. The whole situation stunk of production’s contempt for the audience, and the show should find itself very relieved that there are a lot of fans sticking by the show through brand loyalty only, and even those die-hards are left questioning their loyalty to the show.

What makes the whole thing worse though in my eyes is the direction that production wants to show to go down if they had their way, something which has been demonstrated further this week though their twists and tasks designed to ostracise particular housemates at the expense of others, namely by helping to enable Helen’s harem in the house whilst condemning the group outsiders, culminating in the orchestrated boot of Danielle by the end of the week. There has been a definite aim from Channel 5 to try and push the show towards more of a scripted Reality audience, and Helen’s group in my view is representative of the direction that show ultimately wants to favour, but the fact of the matter is that the audience don’t want this from their show, they have spoken vocally on social media and internet forums about their dislike for Helen, the tedium of Stephen and Kimberly’s relationship whilst at the same time been very supportive of the outsiders of the group, demonstrated by the fact that the likes of Chris, Ashleigh and Christopher are polling so highly online. Production should be going out of their way to appease the viewer for their choices, understand the reasons why the public feel this way about their favourites and learn from this to help improve the show in the future, but as mentioned before there is this head-in-the-sand thought pattern from production which refuses to let them see the show in this way and instead persist with their aim for The Only Way Is Elstree. It’s almost akin to George Lucas learning of how hated Jar Jar Binks was in Star Wars and deciding that the viewer was wrong for thinking this way and giving him more airtime for the sequel. It’s a flawed approach which demonstrates contempt for the viewer, and will eventually come back to haunt Channel 5 if they keep it up, because trust me, once the old school viewers leave they will not be replaced.

Oh, and Marlon went this week as well.

Big Brother Week 5 assessment

Big Brother Week 5 Assessment: Draining Batteries and Draining Enthusiasm

Another week, another reactionary blog about the day’s events on Big Brother, and trust me when I say it has been an absolute slog to get through this week of the show, emotionally exhausting and frustrating in equal measure and sadly with very little to make you feel that things are going to take an upturn. Of all the series to start writing a blog about eh?!

For all of my frustrations about this series however the one thing that I cannot say is that come eviction night it has been boring. Yes I will concede that Pauline’s eviction was something that even Ray Charles could see coming but aside from that all of the evictions have been unpredictable and passionately fought in the online community, and the result of this is that even someone like myself who often likes to take a step backwards with the show and look at the wider picture has been getting more passionately involved with the evictions. This week’s outcome was certainly no exception, but one which for reasons I will explain somewhat feels fruitless.

Firstly however I’m going to start as I always do by assessing the most recent evictee in the form of Jale, now in the past couple of days, be it fuelled by her own wrongdoings or through her status as a target of the fanbases of other nominees I noticed a distinct downturn in the perception of Jale as a housemate, and even though I do agree that she was the right call to be evicted this week I can’t share the same negative sentiment over her in the way that others may have done this week. This was in my eyes somebody who was especially in the early stages somebody who was very level-headed, likable and played her role as an early season underdog very well, and you were left with the impression in those first two weeks that if there was somebody who you felt could have made the killer nomination work in their favour then it would have been her, compared to the launch night fear that I had with Jale that she was destined to be an obnoxious Becky Hannon clone she surpassed my expectations. Where Jale fell apart however as a housemate, and the reason why she was evicted this week, was the fact that after Pauline departed she failed to show much more character development and warmth as a contestant especially compared to her fellow nominees, whilst the second big mistake was through drifting over to Helen’s side of the house and becoming part of a rather obnoxious minority, ironically considering her supposed underdog status and with a series which has an underlying theme of ‘guilt by association’ with the majority of it’s evictions. Jale certainly wasn’t my first choice to go, but the best choice both in regards to likeability and the future progress of the show, leaving open a thin opportunity for the outsiders of the house to mount a comeback in the show’s proceedings, something that would have been nigh-on impossible had one of the other three nominees gone this week.

The eviction however was by all accounts a very small part of the week five proceedings, as this week saw us experience some of the most uncomfortable and frustrating footage seen in Big Brother for a long time, namely the progression of the showmance between Stephen and Kimberly. I have never been a fan of showmances of any kind in Big Brother, and when you have one consisting of someone as joylessly obnoxious and cold as these two you can imagine my enthusiasm would be right through the floor, and it showed as this relationship has become an essential part of number of long-drawn-out highlight shows, but what has made the whole thing worse for me is the behaviour of Stephen in the relationship, a sneering, obnoxious controlling figure more akin to that of an abusive boyfriend then that of a Big Brother housemate and one who through his demanding and condescending demeanour has become incredibly uncomfortable viewing, the wording with which Stephen speaks down towards Kimberly and the way in which she adheres to his every demand and keeps crawling back to him makes me feel very uneasy and leaves me worried about the prospect of another Hazel and Daley situation if Channel 5 do as I think they will and attempt to capitalise on the controversy that the two are generating for the show, and based on the past history with Channel 5 I certainly wouldn’t have put it past them.

The second big storyline of the week stemmed from Marlon’s decision to save himself from immunity as part of this week’s battery task and in the process saw himself thrust into a savage takedown by pretty much the majority of the house and in the process thrown to the sidelines with the rest of the outsiders ready to be picked off when the time is right. Initially I did share sympathies with the group about Marlon’s decision, it came across as cowardly and from a personal point of view I saw him by a long way the most expendable cast member of the series, but as I watched the rest of the group’s reactions to his decisions my opinions did begin to swing in his favour. Firstly there was the realisation that although Marlon was cowardly in wanting to avoid facing the wrath of the public he just did what any of us viewing the show would have done in the same situation, it is a game of self preservation after all, but the other big reason my opinion swung stemmed from the over-reactions of the other housemates and more importantly the reasons for those reactions. These housemates are among some of the most savvy the show has had, and after 15 years on the year all of them know pretty much every trick in the book when it comes to trying to win the show, and the way in which Marlon was attacked by the other housemates seemed more like a group of desperados looking for an opportunity to attack the man they perceived as being the villain of the week with the public, I didn’t see housemates upset about losing their shopping budget I saw a group of cynical desperadoes looking for their Craig Phillips moment to try and and propel themselves into having a chance of winning the show, baring this in mind I found it particularly interesting that Mark and Winston were the most vocal about Marlon’s behaviour when I would consider both to be the two most desperate contestants to win the whole thing. It is however notable and ominous on his part that even in spite of the controversy he generated Marlon remains the least relevant and least interesting contestant of the series, and that he must do a lot more to up his game to build up any kind of redemption for his sexist comments early in the series.

In the last writeup I did following Matthew’s eviction I spoke quite vocally about the way in which the voting public would more often then not fail to see the bigger picture of a Big Brother series and instead look for the short term self-satisfaction with their decisions. Well one of the things that Marlon’s eviction caused me to do, as well as many of the other elements of the battery task for that matter, is make me realise that the producers of the show can be considered just as guilty of this as those who vote in the shows themselves, in some cases even worse then the voters. With the voting public as much as it frustrates me I can to an extent understand the reasons for their voting patterns, they are victims of an impulse medium and most are teenage girls who would never have looked up the term common sense in a dictionary, but the Big Brother producers and executives are professionals with academic degrees and qualifications, they should on paper have the knowledge to understand the repercussions of their actions and understand the long term detriment some of their decisions make. The idea of allowing Helen to see what Ashleigh has said about her in the diary room does on paper sound fantastic, and in regards to the drama it generated it worked, but it has in the same time made fans question the integrity of the show, render the diary room as a concept all but useless and because it was Helen who was the beneficiary of the information given off the impression of the show favouring her, and sadly this is a situation which has shown its head plenty of times in the Channel 5 era.

This approach of short term drama over long term game has been observed by many of the decisions that production have also made in their eviction twists. The decision in week 3 to allow Stephen to nominate and subsequently evict Toya robbed us of a huge controversy magnet who was just hitting her stride at that point, the immunity challenge these week which saved Marlon and in the process kept around a farcically weak housemate at the expense of someone with a bit more depth and of course with this subsequent immediate eviction come the Monday night. I can on paper see where production are coming from, it is unique and is going to cause short term drama and intrigue, but in the process they are once again leaving themselves very open to the possibility of losing a fan favourite housemate and upsetting a British public which is already frustrated with the direction of the show. Personally I think this person will be Ashleigh, which would be for the show and production one of the worst scenarios due to Ashleigh’s popularity with the audience, her status as the most prominent anti-Helen housemate and the fact that her fan base paid large sums of money to make sure she stayed just three days prior to the eviction. The show is walking a deadly tightrope, and a bad move on the Monday is going to leave it hanging by a thread.

Big Brother 15: Week 4 Assessment

 Big Brother 15: Week 4 Assessment

It’s the morning after the night before.

When I put the finishing touches on last week’s update of this blog I certainly didn’t think that seven days later that I would be conducting the post-mortem on the eviction of Matthew Davies, a victim of one of the most controversial evictions certainly of the Channel 5 era and arguably of the entire franchise. Even by the traditional hyperbole that often comes with the aftermath of Big Brother evictions this one has arguably caused more outrage on social media and internet forums then any eviction that I can remember, and I’m certainly not the first person to throw in their two cents over this eviction and I certainly won’t be the last, and like most that have shared their opinion I am thoroughly disappointed with the result, although I have the feeling it may not be for the same reasons as many others.

Firstly however we need to start with Matthew as a housemate, the traditional post-eviction exaggerations of Matthew has led to him being painted as this beloved fantastic all star housemate who was a laugh-a-minute romp robbed in the prime of his BB career, and yet the sad but honest truth is that this was not the case in a long way. Whilst I am someone who did like Matthew as a person and saw him as somewhat of a positive presence in what has been an incredibly negative series I am also the first to admit that he was dull and largely irrelevant to the series, and that aside from one confrontation with Helen over spin the bottle he didn’t contribute much to the house dynamics. Where I have issue with his departure however stems from the fact that Matthew’s eviction has, in the process, ended up saving Ash and in the process, and keeping around a character which contributes very little positives, has an awful self righteous attitude whilst also enabling a very unpopular house majority, is something that doesn’t sit well with me. I do think that a degree of complacency has played a part in Ash not receiving his comeuppance, but it is also the house dynamics of this week and the public’s interpretation of those events which have truly proven the pivotal swing in this week’s eviction.

Which brings me onto the major gripe with this eviction result; namely the way in which the voting audience interpret the show in such a reckless manner. I understand that a show such as Big Brother is one that is driven on impulse and emotion, something which has been exasperated with the rise of social media such as Facebook and Twitter, but what really annoyed me was the way in which two characters in Helen and Ash, both of which had been the victims of vicious scorn online, have seen nearly all of their negative traits from the previous three weeks have been ignored from the audience thanks to a combination of a diluting of the edits of the two, a series of terribly tacky humour tasks and the emergence of a new villain of the week for the voting audience to get their teeth into in the form of Ashleigh, all three factors which to differing extents were producer influenced and orchestrated in the edit this week. Not only did I have issue with how blatant this change in editing tone was but more then anything I was alarmed by the way in which the voting audience managed to buy into what they were being shown in the highlights and in the process see Ashleigh as the figure to be taken down instead of Helen through getting rid of Matthew to send Ashleigh a lesson about her behaviour. I wholeheartedly confessed that Ashleigh has at times straddled the limes between confidence and arrogance, but I would like to think that between herself and Helen she has over the course of the show so far been the lesser of the two evils.

It is this kind of impulsive attitude to the show which at times leaves you questioning the way in which you are supposed to interpret a show such as Big Brother; what is the point of getting so invested into a show such as this, weighing up every single comment and argument over the course of 8-9 weeks, when the voting audience can make their judgements of right and wrong based on 4 days of desperate party lining from the production team, something which arguably will be amplified from production knowing from yesterday’s result that their input does influence the gullible voting public. It is very telling that a lot of those people who came forward and admitted to voting out Matthew as a means of spiting Ashleigh still listed Helen as their least favourite contestant in the series, which to me highlights both the flaws in the audience’s train of thought and the power of production influence.

And yet at the same time I cannot understand the reasons for why the voting public responded so badly to Ashleigh over her actions this past week, yes she was overconfident in her attempt to take down Ash but at the same time she was serving a role which a lot of the casual audience were craving for: someone to appose Helen directly and try and put an end to her alliance of alpha males. Last week the crowd was so vicious towards Helen that they were chanting at the eviction to get Helen’s enemy Jenny Thompson into the house, yet this week the public basically got their ‘Jenny’ put into the show in the form of Ashleigh, and yet have practically chosen to reject it with their decision this week. In some ways what has happened reminds of Big Brother 10 when Lisa received months of scorn and venom against her due to her treatment of Freddie, and yet when the opportunity arose within the house to get her out the voting public instead chose to keep her in as a means of teaching a lesson to an increasingly obnoxious Freddie, of course as we all remember Lisa then used that momentum to put a stranglehold on the endgame and guarantee her side of the house a victory, and that is a fear that I have based on this result. Still as a core five-some, and with satellite housemates in the form of Jale and Kimberly, Helen’s side of the house now dominate the house dynamic, and with normal nominations this week will more then likely orchestrate the boot of Ashleigh and further strengthen their position. And the tragic thing is that those who will be most vocal about this Helen centric house will more then likely be those that got Matthew out this week.

Makes you think doesn’t it?