OTT talks to Charlie Brooker

To tie-in with next week’s debut of Charlie Brooker’s E4  zombie/Big Brother-fest, Dead Set, we’ve got an interview with the man himself.

Among other things, he reveals why he could never survive in the BB house: “If I’m sharing a small bungalow with people and there’s one loo, I can’t bear it. I have to wait till they’ve all gone to bed before I’ll have a shit. Knowing there’s cameras around, I just wouldn’t be able to poo. I’d probably start ingesting my own faeces…”

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Brooker C. and the zombies

Charlie Brooker’s new comedy-drama, Dead Set, was launched to the press tonight. A zombie drama set in the Big Brother house, it stars Jaime Winstone, Riz Ahmed, Andy Nyman, Davina McCall (who’s very good indeed) and, er, Bubble from BB series two.

The screening was introduced by Andrew Newman, C4′s Head of Entertainment and Comedy, and a fittingly Nathan Barley-esque (now that’s a phrase that’s gone out of heavy rotation) figure. “It’s gripping, dark, excting, gruesome and really original,” he said, before going on to rubbish rival networks. Read more

Dawn of the dumb?

The PR push begins for Charlie Brooker’s E4 Big Brother/zombie drama. Read more

“You lost me at carrots, which was the first draft of ‘You had me at hello’”

As the Big Brother season once again holds us in its grip (is this the worst crop of contestants we’ve ever had?) I thought I’d note two things. Read more

“Remember, truth flies like an arrow…”

I’ve been enjoying Bamboozle – The Secret Gameshow on E4, even if nobody else in the world seems to be watching it. The premise is simple – three contestants are each set six tasks challenging them to hoax their way onto television. It could so easily have ended up as a nasty, cynical Balls of Steel exercise, but it’s just half an hour or so of low-budget messing about, really. Read more

Curb Your Enthusiasm

It’s rare for a TV programme to leave you so inclined that the minute it’s finished you want to watch the whole thing again straightaway. It’s even rarer for the programme in question to be a sitcom. Read more

The West Wing

Apropos nothing whatsoever, Press Secretary CJ Cregg interrupts a conversation with Communications Director Toby Ziegler to reveal she misses the “husky voice” of some person called Ben she recently lived with for six months. Read more

The West Wing

President Bartlet’s White House isn’t quite the alluring and mysterious realm it once was. It used to play host to one of the most unmissable, unforgettable series on television. Read more

Big Brother

It’s perhaps a case or ironic confluence that a week prior to the debut of Big Brother 3, I was reading Ben Elton‘s book Dead Famous – the story of a reality TV show, House Arrest, where 10 people are confined together in a pressure cooker environment competing for prize money, all thinly disguised caricatures of contestants from Big Brother‘s first series. Read more

TV Go Home

Until recently, the boast “from the cult website …” would surely have been considered the least promising, driest possible build up to a new comedy show. However throughout Tuesday night as E4 trailed the upcoming TV Go Home this was the phrase apparently designated most effective in rallying up viewers. Read more

Big Brother

What will be the lasting memory of Big Brother 2? No overwhelming moment of high drama, no intense, carthatic confrontation or resolution – the only fireworks were those let off outside the house, which the contestants gawped at before dutifully scurrying back inside on their masters orders. Read more

Big Brother

One of the best things about Big Brother is that the series is constantly developing throughout the run. The programme at the moment is perhaps unrecognisable to the programme at the end of May; the days of Penny and Stuart now seem so long ago, at times it’s as if they were in the last series. Read more

Big Brother’s Little Brother

The enduring pleasure of Big Brother’s Little Brother is the belligerently unsubtle way in which each evictee has been thrust onto our screens for five days, Sunday through to Thursday, thus reducing the compelling urge that most of them appear to suffer from – that a high profile media career awaits. Read more

Big Brother

In its final stages now Big Brother is reaching the point where, for me, it became most interesting last time round. Less people means more time for the remaining participants. More evictions mean a higher awareness amongst the housemates of both the impending end of the show and of their own mortality within it. Read more

Big Brother

Whilst Big Brother is running the risk of passing off with no real incident (certainly there has been nothing this year to match the “Nasty Nick” confrontation, nor the rampant shagging that seems to take place in most other country’s versions of the show), praise be for the E4 spin-off Big Brother’s Little Brother. Read more

Big Brother

The week began in a rather dull fashion with Josh complaining to Elizabeth that he felt the Big Brother experience wasn’t helping his personality to flourish in the house. After some shrewd prompting from The Patronising One, he revealed: “If I told two people in here what I really thought of them, I’d tell them to fuck off!” Read more

Big Brother Live

Hysteria in the tabloids, recriminations in the jacuzzi and nudity before the watershed – Big Brother 2 has pretty much picked up where the first series left off. But this time round there’s one key difference, because as everybody knows by now, you can follow the action round the clock on E4. Read more

Big Brother

Really it was inevitable that the merits of Big Brother 2 would be regarded with suspicion. It is a general rule of thumb in television that second series of programmes tend quite simply to not be as effective as the originals. Read more

Big Brother

So who did you vote for? That’s what Ian Jones asked you on these pages last time around, during Big Brother series one. This year, you could even be forgiven for thinking the same question was genuinely about politics. But, if it was, would you have a ready answer? Read more

Big Brother

And with these choice words – “Faarkin’ ‘ell!” – did the lukewarmly-anticipated sequel to Big Brother begin on Saturday. The apposite exclamation – which spoke for us all – came from Paul Ferguson, aka Bubble, first housemate through the door in a curiously staggered entry. He was as unprepared for the awfulness of the 2001 décor as we were. Read more