Big Brother 15- Week 9 Assessment.

  Big Brother- Week 9 Assessment: Did that just happen?

 

We are into injury time in this year’s season of Big Brother, the players on the pitch are drained, the fans in the stadium are growing tiresome but things are beginning to build towards what could be an exciting climax.

Why am I bringing up all of the football connotations? Well aside from Big Brother one of my other big passions is football, and in many ways I cam make comparisons between Big Brother as a franchise and a football team; they will frustrate you, more often then not squander potential and on many an occasion leave you questioning why you put yourself through supporting them day after day, yet once in a blue moon they manage to pull out a result so amazing it makes all of that suffering as a fan worthwhile, and in this week’s eviction the show managed to pull off it’s own version of a 3-0 drumming of Manchester United at Old Trafford, a double eviction which proved incredibly rewarding on both a personal level and a show level and has helped to make the series all the more unpredictable as we reach the final minutes.

The first part of the double however wasn’t where the magic lay, even though it was one which I was satisfied with on a personal level. I always had my worries about Mark as a housemate even from the early stages of the show expecting him to be a horrible contrived irritant which would stay in the show well past his sell-by date, and to a large extent I feel like this came into fruition, a horribly obnoxious camera who gave me Charlie Drummond vibes in the way in which he would use  his lovable fun-guy persona to hid a dark and nasty side to his personality, the only difference however being that Mark’s focus was based on airtime whereas Charlie’s was through trying to win the show. On the plus side however with Mark I found it refreshing for a their to be a relationship in Big Brother between two gay contestants which didn’t have any kind of stigma associated with it or any kind of audience hysteria, but even in that case Mark came across very poorly in the relationship, more often then not treating Christopher like dirt and blaming him for Mark being perceived so poorly. It was very egotistical of him and I’m glad we managed to get a week without him in the show barring some sort of task twist, which based on this series I am wholeheartedly expecting.

Where the real joy with this eviction lay however was in the eviction of Winston, a result which I would probably put up there with the likes of Kirk and Natalie, Kathreya and Maxwell in terms of great Big Brother evictions, not so much because of Winston as a person but more down to the way in which it has helped to blow the show’s endgame wide open. To be honest I don’t have that much issue with Winston as a housemate, he seemed pleasant enough and I would put him up in the higher echelons of contestants cast to fill the ‘Essex lad’ archetype that the show thrives on these days, the issues for me stems from what he represents as a potential winner of the show, we have seen housemates similar to Winston end up being strong contenders for the win simply on the back of being inoffensive and attractive, and with a group demonstrating as many individual flaws as they do the likelihood is that Winston’s Brian Belo meets Sam Evans persona would have been an easy default vote to win, and would in the process be the cherry atop of this poor series.

The thing that surprised me most of all though was the way in which the Winston eviction came about, I remembered posting on the BBUK Facebook page after the Thursday highlights show a casual comment along the lines of ‘wouldn’t it be great if Winston went this week’ not expecting any psotive responses or any kind of serious take-up of this suggestion, and yet found more and more people as the day went on sharing this same opinion and snowballing into the serious campaign that ultimately proved successful. It has also proven to be the symbolic benchmark for one of the big themes of this years series; tactical voting. More so then any other year in Big Brother history we have the voting audience become much more overtly cynical about the voting process and have begun to abuse the system to bring about results and consequences which they may not have done so in the Channel 4 era of the show, Tamara and Matthew’s boots were attempts to send a negative message to Helen and Ashleigh respectively, Jale and Zoe’s boots designed to save Ashleigh and Chris and even through to saving Pav in the Armageddon week to make sure that Bianca went at his expense. This could be held as a sign of a maturity in the voting audience, but in my opinion it is an indicator of the fact that the swing of power between the tweens and the housewives has begun to be swung back towards the latter demographic. For all that people try and imply that Reality Television is something aimed at the tween audience and those with an impulsive mobile phone finger it is in my opinion the housewives which hold a large sway with phone voting then many like to give them credit for, you only need to look at Christopher Maloney’s success on The X Factor as evidence of that.

The question then becomes who the housewives will look to favour when they and the tweens make their votes on Friday night. Most of the bookies will be looking towards Ashleigh as the winner, but part of me feels that the voters may be a bit hesistant to give her the win when push comes to shove, Big Brother in the Channel 5 has had many issues with the voter’s relationships with women and I feel that Ashleigh may go the same way as Deana and fall short come the end in spite of internet polls and bookies odds saying otherwise. If Ashleigh is to be this years Deana then in my opinion it will be Christopher which will prove to be the Luke. A genuinely nice person, prominent without ever being too overbearing and not carrying as much of the personality baggage which Ashleigh has had during this series, it’s not the result that would be most ideal of the potential choices personally, but it is one that I would happily accept and one which I am quietly confident of happening. I also have a sneaky suspicion that Ash may surprise many coming into the final vote, he survived two evictions where he was a dead cert to leave and has since the vote to win lines opened shown more of a jovial side which will endear him to the audience, have a look at him to take fourth, and maybe even third depending on how the week unfolds.

The final whistle is about to be blown on this series and maybe on the whole what we have seen hasn’t been worth it, but when you nail your flag to the mast you have to keep it up there.

Big Brother 15: Week 8 Review- Every Little Helps

Big Brother 15: Week 8 Review

Firstly I want to start off this week’s assessment by apologising for my failure to post a review of week 7, I had a lot on my plate over the course of the week and unfortunately didn’t have the time to publish my feelings about the week’s proceedings. To be fair though if there was a week to miss writing about however then that was the perfect choice, as the premise of having to write positively about Steven Goode is one to scare off even the most passionate blogger. One of the things is highlighted to me though is the way in which the opinions of those that watch the show can change so quickly over the course of the week, and this week’s proceedings helped t highlight two very notable examples of that, both of which I have plenty of grievances about.

I will begin by speaking about one of those changes of opinion, that being our most recent evictee Zoe, of all of the three intruders that entered during week 6 Zoe was the one who I had as a lock to make it the furthest, even possibly to the final, she was a bubbly character whose presence would make a welcome change in a house defined by negativity and she had a pre-show fan base that put her in a good standing, as demonstrated by being saved first in both a vote to save and vote to evict scenario in her first two weeks, then of course came the Tesco comment, and the opening of the floodgates towards what would ultimately orchestrate her departure. I do understand the grievances that a lot of people had with Zoe’s Tesco comments, as somebody who had worked in a supermarket for a short time I can tell you that it is an incredibly strenuous and highly demanding role which doesn’t give the payment to it’s employees that they ultimately deserve, employees which are more often then not in that position through necessity rather then through an indication of their skill abilities, and it does annoy me that there are people like Zoe who look down on those types of people and considers them as lesser standard of human because of their profession. At the same time however I do feel slightly aggrieved that this comment was blown up in the way that it was by the audience, and that in the eyes of the audience Zoe was targeted and subsequently evicted on the back of one throwaway comment, in my opinion though I think the comment was more then anything the key to unlock the door as it were to targeting Zoe, prior to the comment there had been murmurings surrounding Zoe’s behaviour and the feeling from some in the fanbase that she was getting annoying with her overly peppy Vera Lynn-meets-Sonia routine, and what the Tesco comment did more then anything was allow those which had issues with Sonia to justify venting them in a public forum, in the same way that I feel that I feel people were scared to speak up about Chris until the label of creepy Chris was assigned to him by production.

And speaking of which we come to Chris and his downfall both within the house dynamics and with the audience itself, going from someone with a realistic chance of winning the game to all but certainly being evicted before the finale, Chris has by a long way had a terrible week within the show, but at the same time I do feel that a lot of his behaviour has been exaggerated by production and made to be a lot worse for the sake of attempting to create the next chapter of their show’s story-arc. Firstly there was the grievances that Chris had with Pav, and I will wholeheartedly agree with the majority that Chris has not looked good in his treatment of the Sikh housemate, but at the same time I feel that there is something in the show that we as an audience are not seeing so that they can push the Chris and Pav feud as the lead storyline of this week. Firstly as we know from the previous weeks Chris has been very accurate in his readings of the housemates and that his diary room commentaries about those housemates have been some of the best elements of a weak series, and I find it difficult at times to think that someone who has had such a good read on house proceedings can get this one suddenly so wrong, and the other aspect of this is the fact that Chris’ grievances with Pav feels as if it is shared by the rest of the house, some of the tweets designed to try and substitute for a live feed (yeah right!) have point to the housemates having problems with him, added to that is the fact that all the housemates aside from Zoe voted for him this week, and yet within the confines of the highlights show this has been portrayed as solely being Chris’ problem when I don’t feel this is the case. On a side note I have found the sympathy vote that Pav has generated this week slightly annoying as well, I understand based on past experiences that the British public do love to support an underdog, and I admit that I have been a victim of that as well, but this is the same person that people were clamouring to be evicted last week due to being dull, and the fact that he on some forums the second favourite doesn’t sit right with me. I do like Pav as a person and he seems pleasant enough, but he has up until now not been exciting television.

Getting back to Chris however the other big attack that has been thrown at him this week is the question of his behaviour around Ashleigh being creepy, and this is one that really annoys me in regards to the producers of the show. Up until this week I have never seen anything about Chris and Ashleigh’s friendship that has been interpreted as being uncomfortable, just two friends that appear to be on the same wavelength as each other and need each other to get through the process, and yet thanks to the mechanisms of the production team and the awful labelling of Chris through Bit on the Side this friendship has had so many awful connotations and innuendos thrown towards it which are hurtful and unjustified, and a guy like Chris who has in my opinion been perfectly pleasant throughout the series has been painted by the show and his detractors as, for all extensive purposes, a sick pervert. The sad thing is though is that part of me feels that a lot of the catalyst for these accusations to be thrown at Chris stems from his appearance, being someone who is older and not particularly attractive he attracts negativity from an increasingly shallow audience for behaviour which may be interpreted as romantically motivated, yet I have the feeling that had someone like Ash and Winston behaved in the way that Chris has this week non of these accusations would have been thrown in my opinion. I know that the show needs to thrive on painting villains of the week for entertainment purposes and that I can’t imagine Chris being somebody who production had lined up as being part of their endgame, but no man deserves to have those kind of accusations thrown at him, especially from a supposedly credible production company as Channel 5, and whilst I was happy that Zoe went this week it was more down to wanting to have Chris stay and send a message to production that their behaviour was uncalled for, even if I do admit Chris would have filled the ‘big character in week 8 boot’ rather well.

Two weeks to go now before the inevitable Winston win, lets just hope these are a lot more enjoyable then the past eight.