Saving Big Brother
After all the hullabaloo surrounding last year’s Celebrity Big Brother, Channel 4 went into hasty back-peddle mode and announced there would be no celeb version in 2008. Which is true. Ish.
They’ve gone back to the drawing board, coming up with Big Brother: Celebrity Hijack, which will be shown on E4 for the next few weeks. Last night was launch night, featuring an hour long simulcast on Channel 4 and E4, before the main channel was ditched in favour of an E4 exclusive (clever digital telly marketing strategy there).
There have been some big changes in the format: rather than filling the house with a bunch of celebrities or forcing a freakshow as they’ve tried to do for the last few summers, they’ve selected a group of twelve gifted contestants aged 18-21. The whole thing immediately feels more natural, a hark back to the simpler days a few years ago when Big Brother was good. The twelve chosen ones just seem, well, normal. There’s no forced “stick a homophobic guy and a lesbian together” meddling. It’s almost like a rerun of the Teen Big Brother show.
That’s not to say there’s no fun. The celebrity hijack element comes into play here: Each day, a new celebrity will get to become the voice of Big Brother and decide what goes on in the house. Last night was Matt Lucas, who busied himself communicating with one of the contestants via a hidden earpiece, telling him what to say and do. Poor guy, but it was quite funny.
So will Big Brother: Celebrity Hijack manage to save Big Brother from a slip into ratings obscurity? Possibly. It’s too early in the series to make those kind of predictions, but it certainly already feels like a return to the basic winning format of putting a bunch of normal people together in a house and observing how they live together.
Please don’t mess this up again Channel (E)4.
