Big Brother reportage – on-going – by Marion and me:
Meanwhile, it’s a catharsis to watch something like this. An oxymoron that makes you feel that Horror fiction has still got a loooong way to go to be truly horrific. This is so much more frightening than real werewolves and zombies. Channel 5’s BB as the half real / half fictional mirror to our riot-riven communal soul.
Not the House of Leaves, but the House of Leavings; the Something Nasty in the Woodshed that is Jedward.
Ditto des of this parish, Essex born and bred. Clacton Pierrrot.
Agree about the off-putting deja-vu and the glancing blows of frosty-window face-images punctuating the screen syntax.
The group-symphony’s texture – however thinly based individually – is now growing thicker: gypsies, hard nipples, chin-licking, Jedward-jouncing (much prefer the Samanda twins), — but, being a Parliament buff, I’m much intrigued by the Ber-Cow, the land’s First Lady Commoner by dint of marriage to the Runtish Speaker (the Venal State’s version of a diary-room Big Brother) … what possesses her to enact this Christine Hamilton / Edwina Curry / Teresa Gorman (from Billericaaay) / Ann Widdicombe masquerade of celebrity-self-seeking? There is more to come from that quarter. A woman who will not be beaten.
Me: Anyone coming across that bald statement will wonder if they’ve left their sands of sense, or are tripping with Gaddafery in his last bunker, or we have left ours in watching this programme, Marion.
Yet, I sense for msyelf the story-line you tell so utterly entertainingly above (more entertaining than the thing itself) and I have been drawn in – as ever – to BB yet again. Inscrutability of character and of intention seen through two-way filters of truth and fiction, made-up-languages (similar to concepts in the book I’m real-time reviewing at the moment), sexual auras that you can cut with a knife and those that don’t exist or are repressed while leaping about in mock-unrepressedness (Jedward, my favourite ‘character’ in the House for various as yet inexplicable reasons) – all watched, like Parliament, by a yet-to-be-stuck-in Mrs Speaker whose eyes speak: Disorder Disorder – while remaining detached even from her own thoughts of self-serving publicity. Much better serviced by Strictly Come Dancing, than Big Bro, Madame Seeker. Come back Shilpa and Jade.
I like Darryn, the geezer with red hair. Has a twinkling rage about him.
The Jedward are more like characters from the Beano comic when wearing their hair tall, jouncing around like freakish friends of Lord Snooty.
When their hair is flattened – their characters seem to become more vulnerable, dare I say, more human? A phenomenon that seems to emblemise the vectors of reality TV, if not of reality itself.
This programme is a stress-test, not for banks’ liquidity in the current debt crisis, but our own debt for watching programmes like this, we as martyrs, to allow other people not to have to watch it, but still get some benefit from the ‘interest’ and the meaningful philosophy that others doubt as existing in such programmes at all. Confidence is everything. And quantitative easing.
Lord ‘Snooty’ Jedward – the brilliant stars I always thought they were when I first caught them on the Eurovision Song Contest. I was pulled to pieces electronically for that view. Now everyone knows I was right. My pieces are coming together.
I don’t like the filmic slickness tarting up the events, nor the instilling of brash personality into Big Brother’s voice in the diary room and into Marcus’s commentary. They’re better off with laid-back detachment as in the earlier years of BB.
And Bobby talking to the outside of the diary room door instead of to Big Brother.
The Jedward, meanwhile, are in a different league. TV cannnot encapsulate them.
I wonder if we viewers should be supplied with shock-devices as suppositories for real synergy with the events inside that small box that has over-shadowed my living-room since 1953…
The ‘wedding’ seemed staged, fabricated, mawkish, a professional (if fundamentally unprofessional) collusion of pre-meditation between the Hms and BB. Exactly, Marion, Hmm.
Meanwhile, Bobby Sabel’s collecting of his own body sweat then instilling it into a drink that Darryn needed to consume as part of the Wizard of Oz task – was, not only gross, but very symbolic. Sin-eating. Self-poisoning (exhibitionistically to millions watching) one’s own character by poisoning someone’s innocent body with one’s guilty body-fluids. This is symptomatic of the ’empathy problem’ that increasingly besets the world today (either individually (there are medical terms for this) and in big or small groups (social networking) (rioters?) (Libya) (UK coalition government) (the blue paint splashed over Clegg last night in parallel with Bobby’s sweat) – I could go on).
The Wizard of Oz set was well done, as were the costumes. And the Jedward were brilliant as Munchkins (like characters from the Beano again. The W of O is significant. Rupert Murdoch was revealed as a paltry figure from behind the screen at the Parliamentary sessions. And Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, I recently read, throws much light on this W of O phenomenon.
Despite Ch 5, this CBB is delving into deepnesses of which it is possibly unaware. That’s what can happen, I feel, when you mix reality with fiction in a synergy of randomness and synchronisation…
Me: Remember Noel Edmunds and The Late Late Breakfast Show… [Having said that, I am pleased NE has regrouped and come back with genuinely the most cleverly emotionally-engaging programme ever on TV: Deal or No Deal.]
Yes, I winced each time.
Well, I was wrong. The Bercow was jounced out – she was a woman who was defeated. But the interview was a brilliant retrenchment.
Still a lot of snazzy stagings – and trick-filming – but yes, a good first week. Well, ‘good’ in the sense of a a BB re-fix when I thought my need for it was over. There is many a truth between lip and sweat.
I’m beginning to like Amy Childs (BB’s own Amy Pond). “There’s nothing so random than calling Shakespeare random.”
Strange how Jedward are tolerated. Or perhaps not strange at all. The other HMs know they need to keep the action moving – and Jedward are good at that. They’ll put up with anything to ensure the biggest possible audience.
She also called ‘Romeo & Juliet’ ‘random‘, which I found interesting. Perhaps she was Juliet when time travelling.
If Amy is the Pond, who is the River Song? Tara or Pamela? And who the Doctor? The Munchkin Twins will be wearing gas masks soon. (Well, anything’s better than Hitler last night.]
I agree that such utter mess-making in the task-room should not go unpunished. It should at least be seen to be punished. But I sense we shall never hear the outcome of that fish-remains body-tobogganing.
On the other hand – against my better judgement – I admired the Boyo Toast-Tower – (Boyo is a variant of Dada in the History of Art Happenings).
In line with insanity now beginning to pervade not only the HMs but the audience watching them via Tara’s Tantric Mantra, Pamela then started making inscrutable Twin Peaks like catchphrases in her sleep. The Owls, The Owls. And cheeky chaps. Not cheeky yaps. Mitch Miller.
Jedward are enjoying it too much!!
Pre-CBB interview:
Gilbert and George Jedward: Can we do really naughty things and then you punish us with things that look like punishments that our unique and unified talent can exploit and enjoy?
Channel 5; (rubbing collective hands together): Well, boys, it is your programme. Everything and everyone else will be there simply to put your fledgling superstar in position and then orbit round it. ———
Jedward duly high-five each other rather too vigorously, emitting a playful “Ouch!”
Everyone is indeed orbiting the twin-balanced Jedward star. Well, except Pamela, of course. She’s formed from Chaos at the Bubbling Centre of Infinity – ?
Not only astute on the current shenanigans, but expert on BB’s past – eg. Glyn’s song.
And ‘fauxmance’ – brilliant. If that is orginal to this thread, we shall have even more flocking to read us (and soon be on 500,000 views).
I haven’t properly mentioned Paddy before. I now know the retrocausal origin of ‘stop getting into a paddy’ as my Mum said to me as a child in the early Fifties when I had a tantrum.
There’s a Platonic Form of Tangible Mess (of conceivably ultimate Jedwardian proportions) now roaming the House disguised as an intangible ghost or aura – a symbiosis of all the ectoplasmic torments, deliria, misalignments and mental-tics parboiled from Paddy and Pamela.
We’ll never know whether it was Pamela Anderson or not! I don’t really think she knows who she is herself – but she seemed more lively and sane after coming out of the house and being interviewed. I didn’t know she’d been ill in the house – or was that another delusion? I noticed Brian was talking to her in very CLEAR words so – that – she -would – understand –
Tara of the Narrowed Eyes is now taking on the role of house crazy. Perhaps she has been all the while, and just infecting everyone else with her aura.
Amy to win! Essex, ra ra ra ra!
This is not the old BB. It’s more a scripted, heavily edited, ‘show’ – and Jedward are now looting a supermarket – after their riots earlier. And Brian can’t interview for toffee. He can’t even deliver the script.
Jedward are disturbing. Paradoxically combined precocious / stunted mental growth. Mistimed touches of talent tussling with well-timed clumsiness. Clowns and comic characters. Also Fifties or Sixties pop star pin-ups with quiffs, eg synchronised Everly Brothers or a bifurcated Billy Fury… frozen in time and strait-jacketedly naive yet, simultaneously, pre-disposed to be set wildly loose amid X Certificate factors and modern-day screen-playtimes.
| Marion wrote: |
| Oh, Des – you found their school photos! You might have put a warning header up – I nearly had a heart attack! |
There’s no escape now. This thread has been threaded through not forward, backward, inward or outward but jedward…
| Quote: |
| this was the first time I have ever seen the true nature of the paparazzi. A twitching nosed, piggy eyed, heavy breathing, vulgar man. |
Spot on.
6/9/11
Slicks of drooly spit from Jedw with a plac-ard waved…
But the phenomenon that gets me – Amy’s gargantuan Essex Hair-Curlers? Is this a fashion-statement (gimmick) like the huge Midwich quiffs? Or a genuine attempt to curl her hair?
7/9/11
| Marion wrote: |
| Kerry, ever eager to play bawdy Nurse to Lucien’s Romeo, |
Brillig!
Kerry’s slurring got her into trouble before, didn’t it? But it seems OK in this context.
I got into a lot of trouble a few months ago when I said I enjoyed Jedward’s performance at the Eurovision Song Contest. It was indeed rather clever. And now I’m going to get into trouble again, I fear, because Edward’s speech in the DR about loose raw ends when twins are parted and John’s separate incantation of famous autographs while he was speed-spidering his own on several flyers clinched the deal for me. I suspect they will win and they deserve to win, too. They are deceptively clever lads who semi-Midwichianly and adeptly typify this time in this part of this century (for good or ill).
The interface of Lucien and Amy again typifies the raw, sometimes inarticulate, emotions of folk beset by our autonomously weirding world to which we (you, Marion, me, and any lurkers) also need to acclimatise (by watching role-playing at several levels of fiction and truth in BB itself?) – but this couple do so only as a contrast and foil to the more adept twins.
8/9/11
I think Darryn is indeed the biggest danger to the twins. A more unlikely contest it is difficult to imagine in the annals of sanity or insanity.
In the old days, BB showed tasks in as near to real-time progression as possible, like sitting in a box for the longest time. That was pure BB. Now tasks are edged and laced with music and hindsight — and riven with unfairness and slapstick. Even the DR de-briefings of HMs are intercut between our first viewing of the extraordinary renditions of the event itself. This is nothing short of the world gone mad on retrocausality, an eventuality I’ve been warning about since the publication of Cern Zoo.
9/9/11
Last night: Jedward out as third place! What do I know about modern culture? (10.15 pm) — Well, Paddy. Could kick myself for not making that call. In hindsight, so obvious.
Now, Pamela, for tomorrow’s BB kick-off. Now is this one really Pamela Anderson!? Or some other Pamela? (Glad Bobby got a kicking for feeding someone his sweat). Jedward, I still maintain are the bee’s crazy knees.
I don’t mind being proved wrong, Marion. Part of life’s lessons is to be justifiably criticised on the sound eventuality of facts open for all to see. Perhaps Jedward will push forward with a greater Beano comicfest of clownship by taking this one step back along with the friends of Snooty. I am pleased their hair-towers vigorously bounced back when pushed underhand. I shall bounce back, too…
Kerry Katona had a Road to Damascus, too, as she redrew her life’s path to as well as from her retrocausally converging destiny of CBB 2011. The nursing of career as well as motherhood. As dully glinting off Brian’s synthetic suit.
Onward and upward, with the metaphorical aid, not of giant Essex curlers, but of my own faith-sprung tower.
(BB continues tonight – please see eventual link to my report in comments below).
Last Balcony: Essex Serpents and Pier’s Echo 
2011 Big Brother HERE: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2011/09/09/2011-big-brother/