SundayTimes
By Peter Craven
20aug05
IT has always been the niftiest reality television idea: take a group of young people and place them in a household environment, subject to stringent rules and occasional bouts of alcohol and entertainment, and see what happens when they rub against each other or get on each other's nerves. See what happens when things start to rip.
Big Brother is the cleverest of all reality TV formulas simply because it allows for so much reality and therefore for so much danger. And one of the things it recurrently imperils is its own ideal of the communal happy family, improvised but getting along.
This year's Big Brother came to an disconcerting end on Monday night. The previous Friday, Vesna, the feisty Melbourne hairdresser, a large-hearted and declamatory woman, was voted out of the house: she was evicted despite being one of the favourites to win the prizemoney. Then, when it came to the endgame, Tim, the considerate liberal journalist, all patience and consideration during his sojourn in the Big Brother household, lost out to Logan Greg, a not very articulate country boy who entered the show with his twin, David (evicted weeks before the finale), with whom he is to share the prizemoney.
Then, by way of backlash, a group of Coalition MPs declared their intention to change the law so the Communications Minister, in this case, could take off the air an offensive show such as the controversial Big Brother Uncut if it offended community standards.
Certainly this year's Australian Big Brother has had more than its fair share of controversy. Many, including the Coalition politicians, were appalled by the sight of house member Michael jiggling his ***** behind a young woman. Michael, bald, burly and with a ring in his nose, who was evicted from the house early, was paradoxically one of the more mature members in a Big Brother house distinguished this year by a notably boysy and yobbo-ish group of blokes who - to take a relatively mild example - formed a pact to do nasty things to the toilet to annoy the girls.
Some fraction of this on-the-nose behaviour centred on Glenn (also known as "Shearer" because of his real-world occupation). Glenn was evicted from the Big Brother house by an overwhelming majority of viewers even though he had been tipped at the outset to be the kind of gentle, upright Aussie to whom Australia might give its heart, so that he would end up the winner of the Big Brother prizemoney.
Things began to curdle, however, when this freckly red-haired Ginger Meggs from the bush showed himself to be notably ungallant when it came to the girls. Glenn had won the prize that allowed him to take another house member off to a particularly secluded part of the house, where they could indulge in gourmet food, expensive liquor and whatever kind of intimacy, platonic or otherwise, the situation suggested.
There was footage of Glenn and Michelle, his chosen partner (and someone he liked who certainly liked him) canoodling in a very lovey-dovey fashion in a rose-scented bath and there was speculation that the romance had reached the point of consummation. It didn't, apparently, but that was not what was shocking.
What shocked the world of Big Brother watchers, from great-grandmothers to primary schoolers, was the boorish way Glenn later denied that he had any significant feelings for Michelle. When she was subsequently evicted from the house, he said absolutely convincingly and crassly that he was going after Kate, that he just wanted another notch on his belt.
Glenn behaved in the familiar way of the sexist Australian pig and the fact he was a bushie (speaking with a dinky-di laconic Aussie voice, vowels as wide as the brown plains are endless) made it worse. It was one of those moments in spontaneous TV where there was a collective nationwide drawing in of breath. It was genuinely appalling; it was all the worse because it was convincing and intimately familiar.
As a consequence, public perception of Glenn was transformed. Those who voted to evict him had their vengeance. The women and girls of Australia (and their many male cherishers) voted out Glenn in a show of disdain that cannot be a coincidence. It was coupled with Big Brother show host Gretel Killeen grilling Glenn about his behaviour with a barely controlled disdain, almost with moral fury.
It has to be admitted, though, that getting up close to something that may normally repel you is what Big Brother is all about. The logic of the show is to take an apparently random - in fact carefully vetted - group of people, no better or worse than they should be (though united in ways we tend to forget by their lust for fame) and to subject them to the slow-burning intimacy of each other and, by extension, that of the audience.
For anyone who makes the commitment to watch some fraction of a series the upshot, however predictable in theory, is surprising in practice.
The first response to a group of Big Brother contestants is that they tend to be unappetising. There we are being brought up very close to a group of people we would not want to know. They're too rough and loud, the girls are too tarty, the boys are too crass, everything that is being paraded as Australia - which is what the Big Brother audience inevitably gets called - presents us not with the pleasantly doctored mask of, say, Neighbours or the heroic faces of film stars (Russell Crowe or Nicole Kidman) but with the blemished face.
One common response to the first sight of the young Australians on Big Brother is to think that they're awful; what an inarticulate, vulgar, not very attractive mob they are. But then it all starts to change, through the reality-TV time capsule, in a way that mimics (in fact it reproduces) the logic of everyday life. Nothing is more corrective to our snobberies and our tendency to prejudge people in terms of their looks, accents, education and age than this kind of camera-induced eyeball-to-eyeball contact.
Apart from anything else, Big Brother sometimes can be a defence against an older person's assumptions that they know what the young are like and that they tend to be callow, silly, whatever.
There's plenty of this, but there's also the opposite. Michael (the chap who was assailed for his ***** bouncing around in the uncut version of Big Brother) was a case in point because the nose-ringed character showed himself to be an utterly decent, humorous type who objected to the bullying of Tim, the weedy SNAG of a journalist (who was almost programmed to be thoughtful and considerate) and who was Michael's favourite figure in the house.
One thing that complicated Big Brother this year was that the young guys in the house tended to bond together and behave as a pack, sometimes in opposition to the girls. Apart from Glenn, there were the Logans, identical twins Greg and David, who were natural followers and sided with the more dominant blokes in the house. Chief among the pack was Dean: handsome, intelligent and very cold. Dean seemed to have a lower level of automatic empathy than the average person. It was he who brutally baited Rachel, a self-absorbed girl from a difficult background who could not shut up and who had little sense of other people.
Dean's dry-ice contempt for her made for charismatic television of an unusual kind. And Rachel wasn't easy to handle: even the kindly Tim said she was like the hysterically thrashing person in the swimming pool whom you could not save because she would drag you down with her.
One of the strange charms of Big Brother is that you hear familiar sentiments such as these said with absolute gravity in new contexts. It is like the old paradox that the record of the intimate life of an absolutely ordinary person would be a dazzling and exotic thing because people who write books, plays and movies are, by definition, never ordinary.
What Big Brother achieves, through the medium of the camera's voyeurism, is an intimate survey of the ordinary people who become its stars. This can give it, during its odd still moments, the compelling quality of something utterly truthful, rarely seen.
The thing that is least obvious about Big Brother is the way it can capture the gravity or wistfulness of the housemates in ways that don't tally with our stock images of the young.
A few weeks ago Geneva, the bisexual girl with beautiful eyes, was bemoaning the fact - itself fallacious - that she was the least attractive girl in the house.
Christie, the bouncy blonde girl, turned to her and said, "No one's happy inside their own skin."
Unless we're their contemporaries, we don't often hear people of 20 talk like this, in utter seriousness. Nor - and this is what has caused the controversy - do we often get a chance to see them erotically cavorting or talking dirty.
The Big Brother Uncut show on Mondays directly appealed to the prurience of the audience (and, yes, Killeen does advertise it on the daily show). This is where you get the naughty bits - frequently culled from the parties - and it's also where you get what some people would see as the unsavoury talk.
There's not much point in denying the fascination of Uncut. The moral objections to it are a testament to that. In the manner of things potentially aphrodisiac, it tends to be deeply revolting if it's not your poison.
It is not at all difficult to understand why people would not want their 10-year-old to come within a mile of Uncut. Killeen ruefully talks about the existence of the show, as well she may. If anything is likely to disturb the innocent and deprave the susceptible, this load of dirty underwear will.
But do we think like that any more? The most affable, mass entertainment film, aimed at the 10-year-old in everybody, will seem gross and lubricious by the standards even of the 1970s. At the end of the day Big Brother is a kind of mirror of the interpersonal trivia of our times.
A few weeks ago the young man known as Hot Dogs was very drunk. He savagely grabbed Glenn, the offending shearer, by the testicles. He abused Vesna, his soul mate in the house, telling her she was a *****.
Neither of these things was edifying. They're an index, in extremis, of the rough and tumble world in which we live. Big Brother can be attacked as voyeuristic, crass and exploitative, but the true secret of the show is that with protracted exposure it is addictive to pretty much everybody.
Big Brother is ourselves writ large or ourselves writ small. It presents the spectacle of domestic everyday life, as if in a test tube, through a wilderness of hidden cameras. I suspect future ages will wonder at the archeology of private life it performs.
