is Big Brother Watching you

From a social experiment to a cash cow to the goose that laid the salmonella infected egg. Big Brother comes to an end this year. Already Channel 4 is starting the overkill that will accompany the shows launch next month. This show has done more than most to create eyesores on the television landscape, with its legacy of numerous reality based Television ideas.


What started out as a shot in the dark quickly became a fast track to celebrity status. In the first season it had residents that were allowed to read books, look after chickens and have uncensored discussions. They also got their clothes off day one thus making any titillation redundant. The show had a pantomime villain and was rather compelling as it seemed quite fresh. It is notable that the winner, Scouser Craig, gave the prize money to charity and didn’t have a load of skeletons in his closet. He is probably the most ordinary of all the winners.

As each years show came around it soon became clear that the producers of the show (most likely graduates the lot of them) made selections of residents based on inanity and breast size, along with tokenistic selections in terms of sexuality , race and ego.

Big Brother became a conduit for the most awful publicity hungry egotists who tried to be manipulatively outrageous, the sheer tedium meant that viewing figures declined with the result that the people behind the scenes tried ever more desperate attempts to cause controversy.

What Big Brother will leave behind is a black hole full of aspirant celebrity wannabes, pointlessly manufactured personas and a cultural deficit.

It’s ironic that the very name of the show comes from Orwell’s 1984 and relates to loss of free will and identity. To fiddle with the words of George Orwell;

"Don't you see that the whole aim of Reality TV is to narrow the range of thought? Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2010, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?... The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact, there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness."


- George Orwell, 1984, Book 1, Chapter 5