It's back. Graeme Blundell sorts the rumours to find out what to expect from the latest series of TV's most famous reality format--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
theAustralian
April 22, 2006
AFTER the heterosexual thuggery in last year's Big Brother, will all this year's housemates be gay? Or will the AWB inquiry be an influence, with contestants, in a tough-nut approach to propriety, tell Big Brother, "I can't remember" at every opportunity when reprimanded? These are some of the hot rumours that have run virus-like through websites over the past week, several of which are still circling the sixth show, which starts tomorrow.
Will a raunchy former nun be a contestant, a bride of Christ with a difference? Is there a new upstairs "his and hers" penthouse suite for the inevitable "Battle of the Sexes" games, or a glasshouse sin-bin under a heavy tarpaulin in the Dreamworld house's garden?
One thing seems likely. As the local show runs parallel to the British version, there will be exchanges between housemates crossing the globe to live in both houses. Valid passports are prerequisites for contestants, along with potty mouths, poor manners, a lack of shame and a willingness to flash their arrangements.
Some gossip has the new show featuring a housemate giving birth live on TV, as occurred in The Netherlands on Big Brother last year; unlike the Dutch version, both parents of the Australian baby will be in the house. How the father will be unknown to either the other contestants or the viewers is unknown to everyone but BB's manipulative psychologists.
I used to be hooked on Big Brother. Or maybe the idea that one show could so brilliantly illustrate the notion of television as a shotgun marriage of commerce, sociology, art and bad manners.
I still love watching the hybridising of genres and formats that the show has come to represent -- part soapie, confessional, fly-on-the-wall documentary, scripted drama and game show.
As a concept, Big Brother wittily crosses the grey precincts between public and private, consumer and producer, viewer and participant. A precursor to the truly Orwellian brave new world of fully interactive TV, Big Brother also represents an astonishing convergence of information and communications technologies: broadcasting, internet, telephony, print, radio. Serious stuff.
I'm still fascinated by the way deeply comfortable myths about community, friendship and individuality are wrapped up with fictional conventions such as conflict, multiple narrative, plot and happy endings in a package of seeming spontaneous truthfulness.
Big Brother works so well because it comes with a tantalising promise of contact with reality but at a secure distance: it's a virtual compensatory actuality, combining entertainment with comfort and security.
"Bogan Brother", as some websites call it, offers a kind of safe environment where, for an hour or so each night for 12 weeks, we don't have to share physical space with the kinds of people we avoid in public. You know, strung-out, thin-faced blondes with show-off arses and loud-talking, air-headed, farting blokes who call everyone "mate".
There is a continuous, coast-to-coast, suspension of disbelief in the three months Big Brother is on the screen, as we watch these rather ordinary people struggle to play themselves without a script.
The voyeuristic "slowing down at an accident" anticipation glues it together, along with our fascination with the human zoo, a kind of manipulated psychological experiment.
Daily viewing becomes an established ritual - even if we only dip in and out to see what the stylists have done to 43-year-old presenter Gretel Killeen's hair. No matter what pact you might make to ignore Big Brother, you find yourself using your SMS vote to get rid of some stupid, sexist and tattooed person you have really begun to hate. But the reality is, after almost 15 months of Big Brother screen time, the sociology has begun to wear thin and the characters are becoming less interesting, even as Ten has upped the controversy stakes.
Last year breasts and testicles were groped, semi-erect penises were waved around, girls pashed girls, contestants strutted nude and Glenn and Michelle allegedly became the first people to have sex on local TV. The failure of the young female contestants to fully complain, or even notice the level of harassment, was seen by some commentators as another example of the death of feminism.
Ten has pledged to improve codes of conduct and, according to straight-faced press statements, threatened to incorporate psychological training to increase awareness of sexual harassment, assault and bullying after last year's show earned the name "Big Brothel".
This is unlikely to happen, despite warnings from the so-called regulator, the Australian Media and Communications Authority - a contradiction in terms as obvious as the Robert Menzies Humanities Building or the Harold Holt Swimming Pool.
Most of us are ready for the removal of games, the banal conversations and the pseudo-scientific structures of Big Brother just to see the contestants nude up and pair off.
Australia would vote for who does what to whom, in what combination with whomever else, in whatever position, in real time. Points would be lost for talking and there would be instant expulsion for anyone contributing anything resembling an idea. Brilliant host Killeen would just sigh at all this speculation. One of those long, decolletage-shaking Gorgeous Gretel (as fan sites call her) sighs. Nothing fazes this woman. She powers through hairdos, eyelashes, hem lengths and Wonderbra uplifts of such audaciousness that the tears we see in her eyes must be real.
Over the months of each show, our admiration for her ability to keep fronting something of such unabashed banality - without ever blushing - turns into the subtler nuances of cohabitation and we begin to become irritated at her constant irony.
"Can't you take anything seriously?" we snap at the screen, the way we do at partners we love but who don't take us sincerely enough.
But I can't wait to see how she handles it this year. Once, her welcoming hugs and motherly pats to calm the nerves of evictees seemed genuine. By last year they appeared to say, "Thank God, another loser I'll never have to talk to again."
Her innate sense of showmanship made her audience feel they were part of the TV game, their quick-quipping big sister not afraid to rubbish her owners, slag off at the contestants on their behalf or snap her fingers at the electronic monster itself.
But last year a sterner Gretel confused them and they wanted her to lighten up. But for this viewer, her way with words, her teasing, wanton style, has created a self that she has relaxed into as the shows have accumulated. She makes fun about being as much in the dark as the Big Brother contestants and creates theatre about her ignorance in the same way that Graham Kennedy did when he presided over the live box. (Why is it impossible to imagine a man fronting Big Brother?)
A clever woman who is sometimes seemingly encased in backstage chaos through her hidden earphones during the live segments she can't show the viewer, Killeen lets her quick mind pantomime an incapacity for accepting simple conclusions.
"Let's look at this then, shall we?" she'll say with a yawn. Or, "They have to be joking. Let's take the commercial break early."
She has the great TV talker's gift for seeming to completely endorse her show and completely undermine it at the same time. Where will the Big Brother ride take Gorgeous Gretel this time?
Maybe she'll compere the show from inside the house. Now there's a rumour.
Big Brother starts tomorrow at 7.30pm on Ten and will air weeknights at 7pm.
