Post 463 - Welcome To The House Of Fun

Somewhere in the world there exists a videotape of me auditioning for Big Brother 2. I live in hope that it's been destroyed, or at the very least, taped over, but something tells me it may still be in the grubby hands of my ex-girlfriend's brother, who stumbled upon it when I ill-advisedly left the tape in his camcorder when we shared a flat, and then routinely humiliated me by playing it every time we had people round. I didn't do anything really bad in it. I didn't strip naked and run down Union Street or anything like that. It's basically just 10 minutes of me sitting on my sofa wearing a Rangers shirt and talking in a a dull monotone voice about my dull monotone life, while an Offspring album plays in the background. I can't imagine why the producers weren't tripping over each other in the clamour to get to the phone and offer me a place in the house alongside Bubble, Helen, Brian et al. It was probably the Rangers shirt.

The venom some people feel towards Big Brother is just a bit odd to me. In my (square) eyes, it is what it is - a program about a bunch of nobodies living in a house, fucking around all day, and arguing (all things I do well, incidentally). If you're really that offended by it, then just change the fucking channel. There's about 600 other channels of shit for you to watch. By ranting and raving about it, you're pretty much doing exactly what the producers are hoping for. I kind of feel sorry for Big Brother. It was, and is, a national institution in the UK, a large part of the summer, and the pounding it gets from the critics and the public are ruthless. they way they go on, it's as though Big Brother is to blame for the economy, paedophiles, the Yorkshire Ripper, the dogshit that you stood in on the way home, and the fact that you can't find anyone who'll sleep with you. It's like a pack of wild dogs circling a defenceless bunny, just savouring the moment they can get in there and rip its legs off.

Look, we all know that BB is a load of old shit: it's just fame-hungry wannabes so desperate for 15 seconds (it's not even minutes any more) of fame that they will line up and volunteer to be utterly humiliated; to be forced to do things things most sane people wouldn't even consider; to let 8 million people watch them taking a shit, in the vain hope of catching just the tiniest crumb off the celebrity status cake. It's using people's dreams and their fears to let them make massive fools of themselves for our entertainment; it's basically a 21st century version of the Victorian freak show; it's tawdry, dumbed down TV for the chav generation. But by fucking Christ is it not entertaining at times? In the first week of this series there was a guy who was forced to dress in a mole costume 24 hours a day, sleep in an underground mole hole, and taking orders from a talking chest of drawers that only he could hear, which was ordering him to sabotage his new friends drink, food and fags, lest he be cast back into his everyday boring life and be forgotten about a few weeks earlier than he would have done if he'd stayed. And he did it as well, the sneaky little cunt! As one poster on the Aberdeen Music forums succinctly puts it "I love watching freaks in a box performing tricks for the futile "plaudits" they get". And so do I. It's cruel, it's voyeuristic and it's humiliating for all involved, but above all else, it's entertaining - and since it's in the entertainment industry, I'd say it fulfils it's remit quite nicely, wouldn't you? Big Brother has never claimed to be anything other than a light entertainment TV show which doesn't take itself too seriously. The only people who do take it too seriously are the people who get so amazingly wound up every time someone so much as mentions it. Well you know what? You can take your snobby elitist bullshit and fuck off. You have 30 seconds to collect your belongings and say your goodbyes.

Song currently stuck in my head - "That's What You Get" by Paramore.
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