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.