Events | 2009.09.03
Too much reality to bear | Germaine Greer
Today\'s young people no longer need to watch Big Brother to learn how to be themselves
Big Brother is over , or nearly. The messy, extrovert neighbours we have been peering at through our lace curtains will soon be moving away and their jerry-built house will be demolished. Somewhere out of sight, they will continue to release pop songs that don\'t make the charts, record derivative exercise videos, merchandise cheap scent, get married, behave badly, get divorced, have nervous breakdowns and/or their breasts enlarged, but no one will be watching. The 11th series will limp to air next summer; that, according to Channel 4 director of television Kevin Lygo, will be its "natural endpoint". In 2010 there will be another 13 weeks of gasping in prolonged anticlimax. Then at last Big Brother can be buried at the crossroads. Let\'s hope the final series has the Man himself dragged out of his hiding place, arraigned by the housemates who are the worse for the experience, and sentenced to condign punishment for perverting the nation\'s taste. That I would watch.
As we approach the end of the tenth series of British Big Brother, we can see that the terminal disease of the series is already upon it. A kind of dry rot has eaten out any creativity left in the initial idea. Producers, directors, and researchers, all at their wits\' end, have been frantically changing the format, breaking their own rules, introducing genuine chaos and unpredictability, to the point of cancelling the prize money – and still the viewers tune out. On Friday nights last summer more people watched re-runs of Midsomer Murders than watched the evictions of Big Brother 9; at 3.8 million there were about twice as many people watching then as are watching now, with the announcement of the winner of Big Brother 10 only a week away.The Big Brother format was devised and premiered by Endemol in the Netherlands in 1999; within a year it had reached Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, the US and Britain. It was eventually tried in 70 countries and is still running in most of them. It appears not to have worked at all in about a dozen, but this may have had more to do with poor execution than with the format itself. Norway and Portugal were tired of Big Brother by 2003, the Netherlands by 2006, Belgium by 2007. In Australia Big Brother was axed last year after a male housemate rubbed his naked genitals against an unwitting female housemate\'s naked back in one series, and in another the production team withheld from a female housemate the information that her father had died suddenly. N o other country seized on the concept as early and kept it as long as Britain, where in 2001 more young people voted for evictions from the Big Brother house than voted in the general election. Future media studies students will write theses on why Big Brother enjoyed such success in Britain and why it took so long for the nation\'s stomach to turn, but turn it has.
Big Brother was one of those shows, as Friends was in its day, that young people watched in order to find out how to be themselves. Unfortunately what they learnt from Big Brother was that a girl who is plain or assertive is to be avoided. Any female who fails to hide the fact that she is more intelligent than the people around her is to be reviled. The feistiest girls are tossed out of the house, one by one, until only the meek are left. Of nine Big Brother winners, only three have been female, and that includes Nadia Almada (who had undergone gender reassignment only eight months before). Women get a far rougher ride from both housemates and viewers than do gay men, however waspish and over the top. Big Brother leaves us with a lasting impression that British misogyny is crueller and more pervasive than British homophobia.
Today\'s young people learn how to be themselves via social networking sites. Depending on their generation, YouTube or MySpace or Facebook or Twitter will create for them a peer group, and establish parameters of acceptable and unacceptable behaviour, in a far more reliable way than Big Brother ever could.
As viewers have become more sophisticated they have realised the Big Brother\'s flies on the wall are very choosy insects, whose compound eyes make a rigorous selection of what they want you to see and how they want you to see it.By massaging the imagery of a particular housemate the cameras could groom him (or, less often, her) for retention in the house and eventual victory.
Potentially disruptive housemates could be pilloried by judicious cross-cutting from camera to camera, until any redeeming feature they might have laid claim to was edited out. The housemates themselves have become more sophisticated and at the same time more desperate. Spontaneity and simplicity have vanished.
Jade Goody was both spontaneous and simple, in the best sense of the word. Big Brother taught us to sneer and jeer at her and finally to condemn her utterly. Even so, Jade\'s career was the ultimate Big Brother success story. She was the one person who was famous for being famous. Then reality intervened. In Jade\'s handling of her grim fate and the elegant and courageous manner of her dying , it became clear that she really was a star. She died in earnest. Big Brother cannot handle that. For Big Brother the bite of reality will prove lethal.
Germaine Greer was a contestant on Celebrity Big Brother in 2005
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]ermaine-greer-big-brother-ends
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