Susie O’Brien: The brash, beautiful allure of Big Brother
Iconic reality TV hit Big Brother is coming back to our screens, but if Channel 7 hasn’t find the housemates to entertain us it could mean their big risk is a failure from the start, writes Susie O’Brien.
Susie O'Brien
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Lock a bunch of people in a house who don’t get along very well and don’t let them leave or go outside. Then watch them fight about who’s used all the hot water and eaten the leftover fried rice in the fridge.
It sounds like lockdown at my house, but it’s the 2020 season of Big Brother.
The iconic reality TV hit is coming back after a six-year hiatus from our screens.
Brace yourselves. The scandalous show that brought us bum dancing and turkey slapping (which is nothing to do with turkeys) has returned.
Big Brother, in case you’re smarter than me and never watched it, is a show where 20 people are locked inside a house with cameras following their every move. It first aired in Australia in 2001 and ran for the next 12 years.
Each season producers take a few hot young things whose chief KPI is looking good in G-strings, ply them with lots of booze and watch them flirt with people they are not in relationships with.
There are blonde chicks with vivacious personalities, master manipulators, knockabout country larrikin bogans and chill alpha males who are closet misogynists.
The slutty, the sexy, the serious and the saucy are all welcome in the Big Brother house.
The action is spiced up with a secret millionaire, a mum-and-daughter duo with matching boob jobs, a male model with a naughty naked past or hunky identical twins who pretend to be the same person.
This time around, things feel a little different. The Big Brother 2020 housemates have wellness coaches, workers compensation clauses and a Zen zone in the house.
They’re even expected to recycle their rubbish.
They also have to do tasks in exchange for food. (Gee, I wish
I’d thought of that for my kids during iso).
This season’s contestants include a former AFL player no one has heard of, a 50-year-old recruitment director who loves a “statement blazer” and a guy who calls himself the worst driver in Adelaide.
There’s a geek who loves the outdoors and — gasp — doesn’t have an Instagram account, a 60-year-old 1980s aerobics star and a “down-to-earth, witty and good-natured family man”. The latter will no doubt last about five minutes in the house with among all the
20-something fame whores.
For the first time, the show will be prerecorded rather than filmed live and contestants, rather than viewers, will evict each other.
It’s designed to deliver a faster-paced format with the excitement coming from the strategic alliances formed among the contestants. You know, kind of like Survivor, but without the cockroach-eating competitions.
The things that kept us riveted in past seasons, like extended sessions of blackhead squeezing and dancing doonas, clearly don’t cut it in today’s fast-paced Insta society.
The show, which has a $250,000 prize pool, is a big risk for Channel 7 given the dire state of free-to-air TV. Last Saturday, a show on the ABC called Shakespeare and Hathaway watched by 152,000 people in Melbourne made the top-five most-watched programs nationally.
Big Brother’s success will be down to the characters. Shows like this work when you get to know and care about the people. Remember Reggie Bird who worked in a fish and chip shop who tearily announced she didn’t want to go back to her old life?
And the guy whose parents had died who went on the show to win the prize money to support his two younger siblings?
He won — of course he did.
There’s a reason why a slew of early housemates, like Chrissie Swan, Ryan “Fitzy” Fitzgerald and Blair McDonough are still in “the biz”. They were funny, likeable and real, particularly in the first season of the show because they had no idea how much they were being filmed or how they’d be portrayed on screen.
When the current cast — who were already in lockdown in the Manly mansion — were told about the coronavirus, their main concern was apparently whether the NRL and AFL seasons would go ahead.
Hmmm, it doesn’t bode well.
Let’s hope there are some genuinely interesting people rather than a mob of self-absorbed wannabes with high self-esteem and low IQs who rate their hobbies as “sinking piss” and “mucking around with me mates”.
You know, the types of people who sit around talking about how their “fame journey” isn’t going to change them and they’re going to “stay true to themselves”.
Then they win and spend their prize money on Instagram followers and tip off the paparazzi every time they take their tops off on the beach.
Big Brother. It’s exploitative, vacuous and sensationalist, which is why it’s bound to rate its pants off.
Susie O’Brien is a Herald Sun columnist