Big Brother

Information has become the true currency in the Big Brother house. Whoever has the most information wields the most power, and with that power the ability to control the outcome. It’s ironic then that within the house the most powerful voice isn’t actually going to be allowed to win. Read more

Big Brother

Jon Tickle is scrubbing the floor of the kitchen in the Big Brother house. Anyone who had been away on holiday for a few weeks and tuned in could have assumed that a technical fault had led to E4 showing footage from an earlier week. Read more

Big Brother

They’re rather enjoying their innovations at Big Brother headquarters this year. Lots of chins have been stroked and as a result, lots of viewers (not to mention a handful of housemates) have been left a touch confused. Read more

Big Brother

Desperation or a masterly piece of innovation? The jury would appear to be still deliberating, and it’s perhaps a bit soon to decide conclusively upon the effect of the “housemate swap” which occurred in Big Brother at the very end of the fourth week, but there’s no doubt it has re-wagged the tongues. Read more

Big Brother

The basic idea for the Big Brother vehicle is simple. Take a number of disparate individuals, bung them in a house with hundreds of cameras poking their lenses into every orifice and corner, let them live their lives by a small set of rules and see who the public finds the most watchable. Read more

Big Brother

Sissy Rooney, a mouthy and moody fashion designer from Liverpool, has just been evicted to a muted, though not hostile, response from the crowds outside the Big Brother house. Such an indifferent reaction from the baying fanatics perched against the cordons is indicative of how little BB4, and those taking part, has caught on thus far. 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

Big Brother

Reaching around for the most unsuitable hook upon which to hang the launch of Big Brother 3, Channel 4 excelled itself by settling on a format that conveniently reminded viewers of all the worst aspects of the show’s history on British screens. 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

Big Brother Night

“It’s only a game show” chanted the Bow house contestants as the nine weeks rolled by. Yet in terms of its sheer scale, ambition and seeming ubiquity, Big Brother was the television (and internet) phenomenon of 2000. Read more

Big Brother

Big Brother is all about mechanics – the mechanics of social interaction, the mechanics of popularity, and most importantly of all, the mechanics of television. This is, we are reminded, a television experiment. And yet, doesn’t there seem something obscene about the vast complicated machinery that has been employed to circle and provoke and record the tiny responses of the subject? Read more

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