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.
Intelligent? No. Big Brother housemate? Yes.
Not quite as strange as last year, but not exactly BB4 contestants either (thank goodness).
Alan Carr sums it up nicely: “They should have played circus music when they came out … complete loons.”
Pete to win! (obviously Endemol’s pick)
Tonight is the night. Big Brother returns for its seventh summer season with the longest ever series and the largest number of contestants. This thing is going on for quarter of a year!
Sixteen hopefuls enter the house later this evening. Will they all be making the same mistake so common in housemates past? Will they wrongly assume this is their ticket to automatic stardom? Will they wrongly think the public see them as anything more than entertaining lab rats?
And what about Endemol? Will they assume we’ll put up with more of the same rubbish? Will they get creative? Will their “new” ideas work?
Tonight is guaranteed entertainment: we know what we’re getting on Launch Night (a dumb blonde, one or two gay blokes, a couple of conflicting ethnic minorities, an older woman, a hunk and a supermodel I’d guess) and it would be very difficult to muck up. As for the next thirteen weeks, I’m not so sure. Yes I’ll probably still watch it, but Big Brother needs to pull its oversized socks up and find once more the freshness of the early series.
As Channel 4’s summer behemoth Big Brother draws to a close this week, it seems the bosses have another series up their sleeves to attract us advertising friendly viewers.
Lost begins tonight with a two episode special, sandwiched neatly between Big Brother’s surprise eviction (yeah, right, as if the housemates haven’t twigged).
Supposedly Lost is as big as Desperate Housewives in the States. With a lack of quality drama on TV at the moment, it should do well here too.
A plane crash and survival on a deserted island. The first episode is just a few hours away. Will it live up to the hype? I guess I’ll have to watch it.
Fellow Big Brother fans will know that the wise guys at Endemol decided to stick Brigitte Nielsen’s ex-mother-in-law in the house earlier this week (Incidently, I think this is going too far down the evil route, but that’s a rant for another blog entry).
Anyway, a marvellous Jackie-ism from last night’s highlights show on C4:
Jackie is in the diary room, complaining to Big Brother about the quality of her fellow housemates. Apparently she was told she’d be shacked up with eight of the most brilliant people in England. She goes on: “I thought you’d have somebody like Bill Gates here”.
Ah yes, that well-known British billionaire Willy G !?!?!?!?!?
To summarise then:
- John McCririck
- Prof Germaine Greer
- Caprice
- Bez
- Lisa I’Anson
- Jeremy Edwards
- Kenzie
- Brigitte Nielsen
Looks like the rumours were true about them having difficulty finding people to sign up. Some of these look like choices out of desperation. Mind you, its a strange mix. This could be interesting…