Big Brother
Below are comments (mistakes preserved) written piecemeal by myself about the UK ‘Big Brother’ TV programme as part of the ‘Nemonymous’ forum kindly allowed upon the TTA Discussion Boards. Thanks to any who contributed to that forum, especially Marion.
2004
From my 56 year old perspective, last night's Big Brother was probably a bad influence on those involved and on those watching them - but the argument/fight was so well 'dramatised', 'stage-lit', 'acted', 'scripted', it was probably one of the greatest contemporary 'dramas' (full of accidental imagination, believeable grotesque characterisation, Shakespearean tragedy etc.) that TV has ever allowed to be broadcast.
I agree with a lot that has been said - but my point was that that nugget of television (the argument/fight) with all its raw emotions blatantly seen without acting (the stage-lighting of the bedroom where some house-members cowered, Shakespearean comedy (the clown suit etc), Shakespearean tragedy etc.) was very striking television which could have been written by Dennis Potter or Harold Pinter or a combination of the two! I brought it up on the nemonymous board becaause of the 'anonymous' voices that masquerade as an overall 'Big Brother' - interspesed by the occasional narrative collusion with Davina.
Ahmed and his 'mantra of name' and his acting of anger or real anger was this millenium's phenomenon on TV.
I was very upset at the eviction of Victor on Friday. He was a greatly misunderstood character - and the way he sometimes 'performed' (and created whirlpools of mannerist theatre around him) I felt the whole thing was a wonderful Tennessee Williams play. Miche the Moucher is a likely bunny-boiler. Hope she doesn't read this thread. She knows where the bodies are buried.
Actually, BB is symptomatic of a lot of what is wrong with life today. Swearing, loose morals, blatant exploitation etc. However, paradoxically in a way I can't really explain, it also seems constructive, semi-dramatic, inspiringly nightmarish, thought-provoking in its development of one's own insights into the psychology of the modern angst. The question is what one does with those insights. Turn it by alchemy into art (writing)? Or allow it to help you understand and help yourself and others in this human jungle?
Yes, Dan was and has always been very impressive. Shell the 'posh eye-candy' gets on my nerves. Nadia is improving all the time. Stu and Jason are also-rans in my book. Never liked Jason ever since he started in the house (dressed only in a (what do they call it?) ... thong). Stu was subsumed by Miche the Moucher and now remains a Charwoman's Shadow (a la Lord Dunsany)
2005
The big question for me (so far before getting to know these people, as it were) -- is everyone in life now an eccentric or were we always eccentric ... or to be eccentric these days, does this effectively mean you are non-eccentric? Eccentric: in your face, over the top, beyond some norm we expected in yesteryear of a pre-determined sexual/mental/physical narrow pathway between birth and death...
The Science of chicken gutting. Maxwell's silver hammer. Makosi is the key. Mary is the nicest. Craig is a nettle waiting to sting. Sam and Lesley want to lay the table. Roberto is a great bloke. Kemal dervishes to win...
This business of everyone accusing each other for being false - ie playing to the camera (as maxwell says to kemal) -- is rather absurd. Life itself is an all-enveloping, ever-whirring camera (except when one is alone - and even then one plays a part to the camera of oneself). The only difference is that, in the BB house, the camera is literal. Hell is other people. In camera. And I was right. Everyone is mad, but Craig is even mad within the rational terms of his own enacted madness. Derek is less mad than he is pretending to be. Mary has misjudged Science.
Just seen tonight's summary show ... and I really do feel this group is shaping up into a synergistic unit ... even at times of splatter and ricochet. And Makosi is a visual and mental delight, clever and incisive. Positive, too, are, in their own way, Kemal, Derek and Science.
Every human being is vulnerable in different ways, some show it, others don't, others feel it, others don't. But if they don't feel it (and we don't know if they feel it or not), they potentially feel it more than anyone else, because of the need for a blocking mechanism called 'denial'
They've all been sitting in cardboard boxes, lately, I hear; is this Beckett, Pinter or Warhol? Actually some of the E4 streaming is of people sleeping or just bedcovers twitching -- for hours on end. Very early Warhol. later when they get up - the sound cuts out quite often into Pinteresque meaningful long pauses, wrapped in birdsong or planesong.
I find this set up of people genuinely horrific and some of them are beginning to rattle my equilibrium and it's becoming a disturbing chore to watch it on a nightly basis. Like the Dr Who version of it, it now has the *feel* of being life and death, with bad wolf undercurrents. I think I ought to go out more! ;-)
It's not the maggots so much, as the task concept of Room 101 in this context, and reward as bait: and mixed aims: and self-justifications as to workability: and work ethic: time-watching: sacrificing the one for the all etc etc. that is so brilliant.
Makosi is a star! And she has created some of the bext drama on TV since 'The Wednesday Play' !
This season's BB has had some very good ideas for scenarios etc. And, despite, many of the HMs' shortcomings and irritations, they have presented some interesting 'dramatic' situations as a result. What is 'drama' but either scripted human interactions or unscripted - and BB is a sort of Mike Leigh play, because they know they are being watched by an audience, but it is one step rawer than such a play, but does that make it better? Has there been such an 'art form' before in the history of art as that presented by some of the techniques hatched up by the BB management? It is ground-breaking, often nauseating, often depressing or disturbing, but always surprising & 'happening'. A mean shot of civilisation today.
Nemotions is the word I'd use to describe the conscious or unconscious illusions or delusions of 'players' in a live 'ad lib' unscripted knowingly-audienced drama based on the assumed 'real life' of those players. Interesting point though - what *is* the difference between illusion and delusion?
I was born in the late Forties - and my own children never acted like that crowd on BB, but it is hard to imagine what a BB programme would have been like in the Late Eighties/ Early Nineties, when they were old enough to take part. Talking about the collective memory of the 2nd World War (as you put it), that certainly exists for me. Rationing was still going on in my own real memory, for example, although the War had finished a few years before. A strange phenomenon: in the Sixties when I listened to a new group called The Beatles, the music from the Twenties and Thirties seemed enormously distant and otherworldy to me at that time. But do young people who listen to pop music today, feel that the Beatles era is just as distant to them (which it actually is in terms of years as the Twenties was to me in the Sixties)?
Interesting theory during the Saskia interview - that she had been bewitched by Mary, after their earlier argument. This fits the evidence, as if you explore this thread in its old days, I certainly had a soft spot for Saskia (and someone said: Mary is just HORRID. Didn't like her style at all tonight - see her trying to intimidate Saskia with the hard eyed stare? But the wench wasn't one bit phased... (and) Saskia is indeed the least unlikeable.) It all started going pear-shaped at that point: good to see Saskia gone. I hope Maxwell goes next.
My first real laugh in this series - seeing Makosi lead the conga with Science at the back. Orlaith is the new Eve - but with two apples. Don't forget you heard it first from me (11.46 am July 3) that Science is a possible dark horse winner! Eugene will have an outburst before he leaves the house, I predict. I think I may have learned more about modern life from this nemotional drama that is BB than from any work of fiction...
During the debate, it occurred to me how we can all argue presuasively (as, for example, Derek did) for something you don't believe in. This is politics. It's also like working for a company and selling something you despise. Who is ever one hundred per cent themselves during the interactions in their life; do they indeed get to the bottom of their own intentions, let alone anybody else's? Not to admit this is to have tunnel vision. We can only do our best to be true to ourselves and to accept others as being true to themselves. In BB, we just have the HMs' 'nemotions' I spoke about earlier with which to make our judgements.
I'm intrigued by the cigar incident. This was a perishable item provided (I believe) by BB specifically for Derek. But people share alcohol when it's given to them. Science was not a sneak thief (as Derek suggested) but a blatant one making a point. A very complex and subtle point, although he was drunk, too!
Yes, indeed - a microcosm of life and politics, a mandala of decisions, reading and misreading other people, a mantra of intertextual nemonymities. And that's not as silly as it sounds.
Actually this was part of the theatrical grotesquerie by Anthony mixed with the dead pan Sheik of Araby that made the 'happening' such a landmark in TV history. He is either a natural instinctive genius who uses his gormlessness as part and parcel of his Jacques Tati act or one that he does consciously and quite artfully.
Derek's white monk ( a good name for a lager that: White Monk ) and Science's didactic approach to Adam & Eve and Orlaith's by now decidedly stale apples: a mix of poetic images: 'seven types of ambiguity'.
For a week or so, I've been trying to relate BB to THE TEMPEST, and in many ways it fits, starting with kemal as Ariel ... then casting the clowns, Prospero, Sycorax, Miranda etc The House of course is The Island.
But tonight, I realised that this is a Shakespearean Tragedy in general - and their nemiloquys are almost heart-rending. Maybe Derek is Iago...
I've decided that there should be no winner; there can be no winner. The whole ethos/ rationale for this BB is tarnished by bringing a new HM in within 2 weeks of the end. I will not recognise the eventual winner. And if the winner reads this thread (which they will), they will know they are not a winner. Having said that, I hope Derek is voted to be the last HM. I enjoy his soliloquys. He has enhanced the Shakespearean feel.
Only a game show, yes, but one that has taken the suspension of disbelief (of soap operas - someone I know says she is *in* there) towards a balance of belief that doesn't exist but seems to be a universal dream for much of the population that is as prevailing amd believeble as the weather. As BB peters out towrds its last weel (typo), I wonder if Derek is finding himselg (another typo) fancying Kinga's body?
Interesting stuff on the summary programme last night. The meta-theatricals were done very well - and threw an oblique light on the actual theatricals (nemotions = concoctions of self): both real and vicarious. Eugene and Kinga make a great act together, both meta- and pseudo-real. But I think Anthony is right about Eugene: that he is more real than pseudo-real. And I do think Craig is right about Makosi (but Makosi is still, to my mind, the best winner out of a poor choice). And did they ever realise that the booze they were drinking all evening was non-alcoholic? Or was the drunkenness an act which they connived in unspokenly?
I feel this series of BB has teased out many interesting points regarding meta-drama, the pseudo-real, nemotions etc. as well as making one more perceptive about people and their (mis)intentions and failings - and their positive points when none first seemed apparent --- plus just the enjoyable froth of a provocative games show, itself with some serious failings as well as evoking sharp observations on life and our own sporty, serious and/or tongue-in-cheek loyalties and dislikes about the presented (often crude and despicable) ciphers of people. Thoughts for a crumbling generation. I feel both positive and negative about such considerations, neither condemning or praising, but somehow wiser (I hope) after the event. It's not serious, of course, but it also *is* serious somehow, and revelatory.
I'd go further. To become a writer, one must possibly first watch Big Brother as that's where the best writing's done. A uniquely dramatic masterclass-on-the-hoof, simultaneously ingenuous and disingenuous. Simultaneously collective and individual. And so many other latent riches about modern humanity (whatever one's view about it) as examined under the meta-fictionalised camera obscura. Revelling in vulnerability....
I feel sad that it is now all over, like closing the covers of a favourite book after finally finishing it with a sigh of satisfaction at its crystallisation of insight.
2006
Genuinely felt delighted - and emotional - at the concept and the subsequent execution of Chantelle's final celebrification (or denemonisation).
It's a mark of immortality - whilst before in pre mass-communication eras few people went down in history books - therefore religion provided the 'immortality' because there was no feasible ambition of 'immortality' in any other way. Today, one can imagine one is in the public eye, and the public eye immortalises in a very insidious but also a believable crystalline fashion. Notoriety or self-crucifixion are two possible paths towards this crystallisation within the 'public eye' as well as more straightforward forms of fame - all as provided by the mutual reflections from the blurred unreality/reality syndrome of mass communication-mirrors (and I would include the internet as well as TV as examples of this).
Coincidentally just read this tonight: From Alan Bennett’s Diaries 2000 10 December …the role of the audience has altered in the last twenty years and been infected by the pop concert. There the fans make themselves part of the event, helping to create the experience they have come to see. And so it is more and more with the theatre. …As it is, an audience goes to [Peter] Brook expecting magic and gets it – just as a different audience does from Andrew Lloyd webber. I’d just like to see those audiences switched round; that would be real theatre. 23 December A good documentary on Channel 4 about Humphrey Jennings in which one of the conclusions is that Jennings’s work deserves consideration because at a time when we are uncertain of our identity it helps to tell us who we are (or were). Over the credits the next programme is announced, self-examination as it has since become, yet another round-up of the Big Brother series. No irony, I imagine, is intended.
On the different subject of this being high drama, there is the added dimension of knowledge as to 'theatrical' characters ('real' or otherwise) who are in the 'play' built up by their projections in the media pre-production ... giving subsequent shock or confirmation, perspective, comparisons of added depth etc. ... which one does not get in a normal one-off theatrical performance where 'characters' often need to be built up within the span of the 'play' itself.
I've been involved in role-playing exercises in business over the years - but George's pussy cat was carried out almost *too* well!
Interested by the 'lie' philosophy being built up: out and out lies, secret mission lies, economical with the truth and swearing on one's mother's life.
Last night's 'film' was a hilarious pastiche of (or a burlesque coda to) the various threads within the House that led to the epiphanal argument, an argument that was a memorable dramatic scene surely instigating, inter alios, GG's downfall intra- and extra-mural as the incorrigible bully (irrespective of what you think of his political views).
Yes, I'm beginning to like the two older ladies - dawn and lea. & indeed shabaz in now at the head of my biff league. I did not like the way grace was so conniving in getting her suitcase and immunity. I like pete, the first tourette's inspired showman I've encountered. It remains to be seen how conniving his act really is.
Sezer spoke (to camera) just before he first entered the house with some reference to this being Sezer's palace. He sees himself as a Machiavellian narrator who has somehow escaped the clutches of the author who created the narrator. Or, rather, it is me who sees him as in this role because he may be too shallow (as the real person that Sezer is) to carry the burden of such a self-vision.
In the 'dying fall' of last night's summary programme, Pete erupted with a quiet and gentle version of his tic ("w,,,kers") as Lea affectionately kissed him goodnight. Earlier in the day, some HMs had been talking about ghosts ... and I wonder if any ghosts in the BB House manifest themselves each time in or by this tic...?
A coup de theatre - Pete's comic Shakespearean soliloquy in the diary room at the end of last night's summary programme. A tic de force.
As Ashleyne said, contestants know exactly what they are going into... I think Pete did an excellent impersonation of Imogen's sneer-faced 'brown-studies' interspersed with turgid smiles. I think Richard was very astute about Glyn when nominating him. Nikki is a mixture of (i) acting and (ii) self-believed-self-imposed-torment-which-isn't-con scious-acting. She's starting to get on my nerves.
From the human condition ... to the meaning of life. I've spent years watching BB hoping against hope to discover the meaning of life ... and when, at last, it comes (from the mouth of Glyn), they censor it!! And, at the end of tonight's summary programme, two tragic clowns in Nowhere (Lea & Pete) tussle with the fateful misunderstandings of human relationships amid the heavy balloons of entropy.
By the 'tussle with misunderstandings etc', I meant (i) our perceptions of the relationships (which you are describing vis a vis your own perception above) ...plus (ii) the perceptions of those involved in the 'tussle' about him- or herself and about the other one involved & (iii) their own perceptions of our perceptions of them (ie of those assumed perceptions of the audience as particular individuals and generally). Perhaps we are all tragic clowns in this way.
Although I enjoyed Pete's 'subdued' (!) diatribe against the multinoiac jungle jealousy rife in the house, I can't help thinking that it is easy for him to be the insulated showman who has eschewed any emotional involvement with the others.
BB contains some of the most genuine heartfelt emotion on public TV or some of the most over-acting! Whichever the case, it's real. It wasn't scripted.
On the lighter side from the renewed multinoiac jungle-jealousies and conspiratorial asides within asides, I enjoyed Glyn's chimney sweep spaceman (called Gertroo?) and his Eminem persona or runtish Midwich Cuckoo. I still wish I knew what he said in the diary room about the Meaning of Life.
The dramatic atmosphere - especially at night in the garden - reminds me of 'Cat on A Hot Tin Roof' by Tennessee Williams. I can't beleive I'm watching it half the time. Therefore, it's impossible to switch it off. Actually, having recently reacquainted myself with my own 1974 novel (The Visitor), I am amazed how it prefigures this type of Reality TV!
I think it was Machiavellian of BB to say the meaning of 'Machiavellian' is 'shrewd'.
I agree, yet I find the subtlety, even complexity, of the existing permuation of relationships potentailly fascinating when taking into account the way they may develop with the catalyst of familiar-faced 'intruders'. Someone mentioned somewhere that Aisleyne has gradually fulfilled the roles of people who have left. In fact, in one example, she has even grown to *look* like Lea as well as to act like her!
Later: A couple more tours de force or coups de theatre from Pete tonight! How can this man lose BB? I believe Pete loves Nikki - but I'm not sure whether Nikki is acting her love for him. PS: I wrote a brief fiction tonight which includes reference to BB: http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/cartwheel_crazy.htm
No comments:
No trackbacks:
