Easy, big guy (5)
Posted 29 July, 2005 in TV and movies and that
For a while now I have been stumped for a subject to write about. I think of ideas, but then I always decide they’re too personal, or too political, or too hard for people to relate to. I should just bite the bullet and write. I am not really so busy that I couldn’t sit down and write an entry almost every day. But I’m not that lazy, either. So why haven’t I been writing? What’s on my mind?
English Big Brother, the TV show. I watch it every night. I am hooked.
I discovered the show a month ago when we went to London. It’s just like American Big Brother, but 1. people actually watch it in England, and 2. it’s much more clever. Unlike Big Brother here, or The Real World, it doesn’t include segments of the contestants commenting on their past activities, or interpretive commentary of any kind, really, other than the contestants’ real-time bitchery; instead of spoon-feeding you, the show leaves it up to you to interpret the events in the house. Sometimes, as in The Office, the situations can get so uncomfortable that you wish they’d cut–but they let the pain and awkwardness go on and on. It feels much less slanted and manufactured than American reality shows do.
Not only does Channel 4 air a daily show, full of insane people with all different kinds of cool-sounding accents and a lexicon of new funny slang, but they also have a LIVE FEED! That means that whatever you were doing, at whatever time of day, you could flip on the TV and watch the housemates in the house. This sounded incredibly cool. One morning while waiting for O to get ready to go out, I watched Makosi, a cardiac nurse from Zimbabwe, brush her teeth. Then I realized the live feed wasn’t actually that cool, and that I was sort of pathetic.
But the show, cut together, is excellent. We found it online and now we watch it like fiends every night. Big Brother changes the rules of the game according to the personalities and actions of the housemates as time goes on–for example, Vanessa, who had a chavvy London accent and talkedreallyfastbutthendraggedoutthelastwordofasentencelikethiiii-iissssss, loved to eat. That’s pretty much all she liked to do: she seemed to have only a rudimentary brain. When she failed a task, Big Brother punished her by not allowing her to eat the housemates’ luxury food, but only rice and veggies, for a week. Vanessa loved her “biccies.” That’s “cookies” in American. By the end of that week she was in the Diary Room (translated into Real World-ese, that’s the Confessional) saying “BigBrotherI’msohungryIjustcan’ttakeitanymoreI’mlosin’iiiiiii-iiit.” and crying. It was great.
My favorite character (because they really are characters, and they know it too) is SCIENCE! Yes, that is his name. Actually his name is Kieran, but he is a DJ and a rapper and so his name is SCIENCE! He is a skinny little black dude from Leeds with a big misshapen afro, and is only about 22. He likes to talk about himself in the third person, often directly to the cameras–one of which, a spherical remote-controlled cam, he calls “Dodgeball.” When he enters the diary room and Big Brother greets him, he flops down in the chair and says, “Eeeasy, big guy.” SCIENCE! is now gone, but not before throwing glasses of water in people’s faces, touching Derek the gay dude repeatedly to show he, SCIENCE! “ain’t homophobic, innit?” and ranting on about power to the people and how SCIENCE! is oppressed and no-one realizes his true potential, the potential of SCIENCE! He was voted off last week, and I miss him very much.
There is so much more that’s great about the show: the hilariously deadpan delivery of Big Brother when he (or sometimes she) speaks; the bald, black, fox-hunting, posh, gay Republican speechwriter Derek; the Geordies (people from Newcastle) on the show and their incredibly foonny accents, like; and drunken Anthony, a metrosexual ’70s dancer in his early 20s, mumbling that he feels so sick that “I want me mum and me gran”–aww!! But to get the full picture, go to the site, and check it out for yourself. Not if you’re a writer, though; once you get hooked, you won’t get anything done. Trust me.