With my commentary coming to a close this week, I’d like to look at some of the reasons why BB was axed before I close this diary off over the coming days. More information has come to light this week about why BB was axed. I often wonder if anyone that buys BB in the future will bother to learn from the mistakes made in this first incarnation of Big Brother Australia. I can only hope so because many mistakes were made, from the deliberate lies entrenched in every aspect of the show, to the greed that brought it down in the end (outside the betting scandal).
But history has a habit of repeating. We’ve seen it through the decades in Vietnam and in Iraq and we’ve seen it in the business world time and time again. It beggars belief but it still happens. Will we see it with any reincarnation of Big Brother? I hope not because it won’t be worth wasting the time and money if the same old same old is just going to be repeated. And television viewers will remember the past, see it in the present and switch off. So let’s look at what they’ve seen recently on the path to Big Brother Australia’s destruction.
The major cause of the show’s demise seems to be the production company. Many of us BB fans have been frustrated with the producers at ESS for years for deliberately running this show into the ground like they have. This week it was revealed, as I mentioned in a previous update, that they didn’t want the show moved to a later timeslot. Network Ten executives finally became fed up and axed the show instead of negotiating any further.
This was the best decision they’ve made because now ESS executives have had the wake up call they’ve been in need of for a while (but the geniuses at ESS shot themselves in the foot because plenty of ESS employees now have to find work elsewhere - common sense might’ve told them that they’d have to if the situation failed to improve, but, quite astonishingly to many observers, common sense always did seem to be lacking among the producers of BB). If the show ever returns on another television network then ESS will probably have less bargaining power. Maybe then we’ll finally see the BB series we’ve always dreamt of. This leads me to the other reason for BB’s demise.
Since around 2005, many of the housemates have failed to entertain (that’s all viewers ever really wanted: entertainment). This lack of entertainment has been a huge reason for the decline in ratings. My regular readers might recall me saying several times before (and it’s in the wiki) that BB came about as a result of the biosphere experiment. That involved a group of people living together and performing tasks in a controlled environment. That sounds like Big Brother, doesn’t it? Well that’s what it was based on.
Big Brother then took the “prison” environment of being in the house and tried to create entertainment out of it. That might not be very nice, and several housemates have complained about the psychological torture of living in a confined space for three months, but they still had the opportunity to be entertaining toward each other and the viewers to help them to keep sane.
In order for that entertainment factor from the housemates to happen, though, you need to find an entertaining cast. The producers failed in this area so many times after Peter Abbott left the role of EP. Strip this show down by getting rid of all the eviction voting, the hosts, the scandals, the advertising by mostly morally reprehensible companies selling low quality rubbish, and all the media attention and you have a situation that is little more than prisoners living together being watched by the nation (sort of like in The Truman Show but that only focused on one person).
That would be boring if it was the biosphere experiment but this is television and you need that added element of entertainment. That’s where ESS failed. In the place of entertainment they added contrived scandals instead. That saw the beginning of the end of BB in this country. The greed of ESS in wanting that early timeslot so they could sell BB to Ten for more, push for bigger advertising revenue sponsorships and aim the show’s appeal at kiddies to fleece those watching in an earlier timeslot for voting money throughout the week, plus the substitution of entertainment for scandal for media attention, saw viewers vote with their TV remote and tune out.
BB used to be a show that adults could watch. It was sort of like the modern day version of Silvania Waters and other predecessors to today’s Aussie reality television. The housemates in the early years were interesting enough characters capable of holding interesting conversations when they chose to. Since then the housemates have been brainless twits with no entertainment value to speak of. That’s why no one cares about BB anymore; no reason to watch.
Viewers didn’t care as much as the producers did about who was spooning whom; who was kissing whom; who was doing anything but just be plain entertaining. If only the producers kept a policy of choosing only entertaining people as housemates, not dummies that had no appeal to anyone. The bad casting is without a doubt a huge factor in BB’s demise. No wonder Andrew Denton once famously suggested that it is ridiculous to have a group of people sitting around doing nothing in a house for three months only to come out of there as celebrities with no real lofty goals beyond the goal of celebrity itself.
BB used to be an entertaining enough escape from boring drama shows that are often confused as “quality” television (there is no such thing on commercial TV, I can assure you - that’s why it’s on commercial TV and not the ABC or SBS). Now television viewers can look forward to more boring sport than ever before and also drama shows that will be axed after two episodes as ratings drive decisions towards whatever is more profitable. It’s the same old story and commercial TV executives are completely clueless.
At least with shows that are entertaining you can enjoy that brief escape from the mundane routine that some people have in their daily lives. That’s why Big Brother originally offered an alternative to what was out there then and is out there now (and the quality of other local productions has slipped even further since BB started in 2001, as the drive towards mediocrity becomes even more relentless for the sake of profit).
A trend towards turning off the TV so one can get out there and live life seems to be the main outcome that commercial TV in all its mundane mediocrity is driving more and more people toward. That’s certainly a good outcome, but for those left behind, and those that just want to watch because they like to, there is still a market for shows like Big Brother and there always will be.
Some people hate it and some love it, but it always be fondly remembered as a different kind of TV experiment in its first year or two. Some people say it will be remembered negatively because of what came after those initial years (the sharp decline in quality of casting and other aspects).
But later on, people will not so much cringe and express disbelief when they look back on BB as much as they would’ve when Graham Kennedy was exploiting his viewers through live TV commercials on his show all those decades ago when TV had only just begun (that’s where all this mass marketing started, for which BB is singled out for criticism by the ignorant today), they’ll cringe and express disbelief that society’s relentless push to sell mediocrity for maximum profit ever took off so exponentially this decade, with BB just being one of many examples of that corrupt greed.
That corrupt greed in the pursuit of mediocrity is in a nutshell what today’s society is all about and ironically - as you’d expect when you shoot yourself in the foot through practices that are unsustainable in the long term - it’s what brought down Big Brother (the public grew tired of it just as much as Network Ten did with ESS). It’s the reason why I’ve always had a problem with the continuing involvement of ESS in Big Brother and I’d like to see an alternative way of bringing BB to life again occur one day, without their involvement where possible. And so and as high school and university students continue all these years later to study BB, and now the added element of its wreckage, and they will continue to study all this for many years to come, Orwell probably wouldn’t be too impressed with how it turned out, but then again …!