A freak show too far?

There are two kinds of people: those who watch Big Brother and those who lie about it.
Your first clue is when you ask someone if they caught last night’s eviction, and you elicit an angry tirade – about why they would never lower themselves to watch these venal plebs – which, in truth, betrays more than a passing knowledge of the show.
The reason we watch BB is the same reason some of us will never admit to it. It’s not the smut, though heaven knows it helps keep the pot boiling – it’s that BB has become a contemporary pop culture morality play and we recognise a flicker of something in the dark, stained souls of the moral wreckages put up in Elstree Studios. Sure, they are terrible people, but only insofar as all humans are.
We revel in their hubris and downfall precisely because we know we’d make exactly the same (or similarly repulsive) mistakes if we were in their shoes. Only we’re not in their shoes, and we can turn off the TV and walk away as Grace, Jayne and Sezer pop up in the red tops and glossies bewailing their public vilification.
The stats certainly show that all those furtive glances at nominations night still add up to quite an audience. The franchise has spread to over 37 countries, and the current series in the UK began with a peak viewing figure of 8.1 million on opening night, when the house-mates were booed on their way to the house.
Continuing on the crest of that wave, the producers gleefully announced this year’s show would be the most twisted yet: a higher-than-usual number of house-mates squashed into a smaller-than-usual house, performing grueling endurance tasks.
What has most disturbed critics this year is the collective jib of the house-mates themselves: they have the appearance of a parade of downtrodden, desperate, egocentric people who should never have gotten past first auditions. In that respect, they are, you might argue, not so different from other TV personalities. But there’s more to it than that. Apparently, some of the participants were chosen specifically because they are affected by syndromes of one kind or another.
For example, Pete’s presence in the house is divisive. There have been a large number of complaints about it to the Tourette Syndrome Association of the UK, which argue that Channel 4 have deliberately chosen him for exploitative comic value. On the other hand, his mother told the Daily Mail that to exclude him would be to marginalise people with Tourette’s.
Anorexic Nikki went on to tell the News of the World that going on BB helped her recovery. Fortunately she left early in the week when the house-mates were put on “basic rations”, so the implications of starving a recovering anorexic were narrowly avoided. Or maybe we should say conveniently...
Shahbaz, a long-term unemployed depressive, who walked early on in the series, was reported to be on suicide watch. Trooper that he is, though, he soon fetched up on Big Brother’s Big Mouth, contentedly spouting his inane burblings in a feather boa.
Meanwhile Dawn, expelled under mysterious circumstances, announced she was going on hunger strike unless Big Brother handed over tapes of her time in the house. How much of this is manipulative stuff, designed simply to provide fodder for the tabloids is an open question – but in this instance, her strike was not followed with interest by the press and it duly went away.
Then, of course, there were the people with body dysmorphic disorder and the pre-op transsexual who was voted out for being too dull. Ouch.
While Big Brother is no great social experiment, it is an exercise in breaking down people’s defenses and exploiting the foolhardy and – on this occasion in particular – the vulnerable. The viewer takes none of the responsibility on board, as we all know they “have a psychologist on site”. But there is still stuff going on here that merits thinking about.
Like the controversial Milgram Obedience to Authority study of 1974, this year’s Big Brother has offered an insight into human deference to authority over personal conscience. The house-mates are encouraged to betray themselves and each other – and they do.
In Milgram’s experiment, volunteers were told to press a button to electrocute another volunteer (a fake) whenever they gave an incorrect answer. The volunteers became increasingly agitated as the shocks became more severe and expressed reluctance. Yet all continued to do as they were instructed. When a volunteer said “I can’t do it”, they were simply told “Press the button”. Further refusal was met with “You must” and so forth.
This was ghoulishly replicated in the order given to Aisleyne to choose between Jonathan and Spiral for eviction. Distressed and crying uncontrollably, she refused and was simply told “you must”. Sure enough she did, and Jonathan’s career in reality TV took an early dirtnap.
There is a view simmering that on this occasion Big Brother has gone too far in casting people who risk turning the series into an out-and-out freak show. That it is one thing to exploit people who are – at least relatively – secure and therefore capable of taking the stresses and knocks that come with the territory and another thing entirely to pick people precisely because they have vulnerabilities that others can laugh at and derive a tainted kind of amusement from.
And if Big Brother has gone too far, does the fault lie with Channel 4 and Endemol for trotting out this procession of freaks and humiliating them? Or might it lie with the viewers for complicitly reveling in the self-reflexive loathing, content in the assumption that the house-mates might go on to enjoy careers in benign obscurity?
In the end, the likelihood is that Channel 4 will look at the numbers – and if the ad and text-vote revenues have been strong enough, they’ll let other people do the worrying about ethics for them. But before those de-briefings occur, there is the small matter of who is going to last the longest in the house. As the majority of voters are teenage girls, the winner is rarely a girl (so much for female solidarity), and they're usually white too. Interestingly, bookies insist they don’t make a lot of money off BB, as public opinion often oscillates dramatically. Once a housemate is acknowledged to be popular, the backlash is swift and merciless. The only thing to mitigate it is some sort of quirk; like say, rumours that BB1’s Craig was in it to raise money for a very noble cause, Brian Dowling’s newly-out naiveté, Nadia’s well, nads, or, in Pete’s case, an endearing trait that means he can fulfil the role of an loveable but flawed, unthreatening hero.
Pete to win, with goofy Welshman Glyn hot on his heels.