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

Slap Bang with Ant and Dec

There’s no flop like a Saturday night flop. The archives are littered with the corpses of people who’ve attempted to succeed on a Saturday night and failed miserably (Lulu, Gaby Roslin, Shane Richie and so on). It’s odd as Saturdays haven’t been the big telly night of the week for ages – that honour passed on to Sundays years ago. 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

It’ll Be Alright on Election Night

It used to be that when the voting closed on election night, not only would you get exit polls and swingometers into action, but also satirists coming on screen to glory in the freedom that no government for a night brings. Indeed, in 1997, BBC2 devoted almost four hours to comedy-related programming, including the mammoth Election Night Armistice offering instant piss-taking on the night’s events. Read more

Election coverage – week three

Ratings continue to tumble. Viewers are switching off their sets in protest at relentless footage of vain, bickering groups of people struggling to survive in increasingly hostile, desperate circumstances. 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