Monthly column on the arts: include me out

'Hell', Jean-Paul Sartre once memorably observed, 'is other people'. I've frequently remembered that while dipping into Channel 4's summer block-buster, Big Brother.

The theme of the show is simply ten people, locked up in a purpose-built house bristling with concealed cameras and microphones so that no detail of daily life goes unobserved. The five-million-plus TV audience sees life in the lounge, the bedrooms, the showers. (An early sign of how the participants would handle this publicity was a graphically-filmed episode where several used their naked bodies to paint the walls. If you happened to miss the painting, you could still watch a man and a woman showering together afterwards.) Each week the participants vote by secret ballot for two of their number to be evicted. The viewers then choose one of the two., As I write, three contestants remain. A final vote will determine who wins the £70,000 prize. So popular is the show that those evicted so far as busy selling their stories, usually for more than the prize money.

It's been called voyeuristic. It certainly is. Oddly, the conversations are often more titillating than the nudity and the occasional media-hyped suspicion that some participants have managed to have sex without anybody noticing. One participant, Anna, is a lesbian ex-nun, whose sex life has become a media epic; another two, Craig and Claire, groped each other under the blankets. The blankets are to be auctioned when the show is over.

Freak show

The real damage, however, seems to be to the contestants. Bishop James Jones has expressed public concern for them, as has media psychologist Raj Persaud who called the show exploitation. A BBC executive labelled it a 'freak show' - though that might be sour grapes. Perish the thought.

Yet Sartre's comment does seem apt. His play Close Quarters, like Big Brother at the moment, features three people, one of them a lesbian, in a sealed room. The lesbian is prominent in the torments that the three inflict on each other. It rapidly becomes clear that Sartre is constructing a powerful metaphor for hell. We are not here by chance, observes one character, but by the will of the author.

In Big Brother, the disembodied voice of 'Big Brother' himself (he is never seen) dispenses favours, rewards ingenuity, punishes failure, and listens to the contestant's most private outpourings as well as their secret nominations for evictees. Like Sartre's, this character is a brazen distortion of a perverted deity with absolute power and a warped sense of humour. Because we can see the contestants in their life together and also in their private moments with Big Brother, we can observe how relationships are destroyed and treachery becomes entertainment. 'Nasty Nick' expelled from the game for cheating early on, is remembered partly as a hero because he played to win and partly as a villain because he was found out. But each week viewers have watched players counselling each other, building up relationships, and then in the privacy of an audience with Big Brother voting them out of the house. In one episode a player was accidentally heard nominating the next person to go, with predictable consequences for his relationship with that person - a relationship that suddenly seemed very artificial and fragile.

But what was I seeing anyway? These are people whose entire waking and sleeping lives had become a reel of videotape, to be edited and presented exactly how Channel 4 saw fit. No wonder the evictees so far have been dismayed by seeing how they have been portrayed. 'We weren't told we would be manipulated as characters', said Sada Walkington, the first to be evicted. 'I was typecast as the dippy hippy southern posh blonde.'

Unmitigated tosh

What are we to make of it all?

I can think of nothing positive to say about the show. There are things we can learn from it, but only by default. Big Brother, for example, like Friends, Frasier and the like, shows what great value people place on relationship in a world where larger values like family and church are in decline. People wanted to believe in Nasty Nick's kind words to his colleagues, and when his cheating treachery was revealed, people felt betrayed as much because he broke relationships as because he broke the rules. You can see, too, people trading privacies: at times the show has the same weird atmosphere as a pub, when people will pour their hearts out to you in the most intimate way and then fail to recognise you in the street next day.

But that's clutching at straws. Big Brother is a load of unmitigated tosh, I'm afraid, and the long and weary road to the prize money has shown neither audience nor participants in a good light. The only consolation is that we didn't think of the idea ourselves. We pinched it from abroad. Nice to think there are depths that we British aren't clever enough to sink to under our own steam.

Monthly column on the arts: include me out

A review of the Channel 4 series Big Brother - what are we to make of it?

Freak show

Unmitigated tosh

David Porter

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