So here we are again. As important a part of the English summer as Wimbledon and strawberries, BB10 is almost upon us.
The controversies have already started. First, there’s only going to be one Big Brother’s Big Mouth a week, after the Friday eviction and it’s going to be hosted by Davina. I actually approve. The show was nonsense without Russell Brand. It might even bring out the best in Davina. She’ll actually have to watch.
Second, crucially, and much more shocking, is the cancellation of the live feed.
Okay, there will be some live coverage, most of it during the night, but ( judging by the current tv schedules ) it’ll only be on between the hours of midnight and 6 a.m, well after the highlights.
Back in the day, viewers with a satellite dish or the red Freeview button could find permanent coverage somewhere. Even further back in the day, ( series two, and a few others ) we actually had the choice of cameras. If something boring was happening in the garden, we could switch to the kitchen.
The claim is that this is for costs. It saves money. That I find hard to believe. All it costs is the rental of a channel – which can’t be that much on a multichannel satellite – and paying a team of people to cut the sound whenever they feel like it. How expensive can that be? Even Albania has a live feed.
But it’s all part of the general trend for Endemol - or more accurately Channel Four - to want to control the product. It’s the same thinking that has led to them pulling footage off youtube. They want us to go to the official website only.
They also want to censor the show. If they decide that Mohammed, say, is "Greedy Mo", they don’t want we the viewer to disagree. This misses half the point of the show. We want to check it out ourselves. Does he really eat as much as people say he does? I’ll make my own mind up on that one, thank you, Davina.
Much of the fun of the show is disagreeing with other people about who the good guys and the bad guys are. If all we’re getting is the Official Version, then that goes out the window. If everyone likes Nadia, and everyone dislikes Victor, then what kind of a show is it? We won’t be having big rows over it at the watercooler, that’s for sure.
Would Rachel have even won last year without the live footage? She hardly got any highlights coverage for the first five weeks. Until then, all we were getting was that she was the Boring One Who Sat on the Fence. Without live coverage Kat, Darnell or Mikey might well have won. Easy enough to edit out the pre-nomination pep talks, the self-pitying monologues, and the eccentric eating habits.
Of course, the show is edited. Of course, the producers have a bias towards certain characters. But the live feed was the vital corrective to that. Only having some, at night, when the older ones are asleep, won’t be enough.
Without it, it’s just another Hell’s Kitchen/IACGMOOH, heavily edited, not very live, not very reality tv show. No more Nomcam, either – the process by which eagle-eyed viewers watch the camera close-ups during nominations to figure out who is going to be up. So all that Monday and Tuesday rumour-mongering is going to be a thing of the past as well.
Forget about the audience, what about the housemates? It will certainly affect how they all behave to each other. During the day they won’t even have to try to entertain us. What’s going to happen to the tasks? They hardly try at these anyway, knowing if they fail they’ll still get a Chinese takeaway a couple of nights later. If they know they aren’t even being broadcast then where is the incentive? Even if they don’t know it themselves, the late entrant “brand new housemates” who are watching launch night along with the rest of us will know it.
How many times you can you watch an episode of Friends, anyway?
