Is BB2 about to take off?

In My View, by Ian Gray

SO who’s conning who in the Big Brother 2 stakes? Could it be that help is on the way this week with a (can you take it, folks?) black/white tussle for the door which is also a male/female struggle for survival, nogal.

Can we expect the race-sensitive brigade to claim blacks did not have enough money to save Carol and that the Boers rallied behind Richard?

Or, like most South Africans, don’t you care whether Dick, Tom, Harry or Aunt Isabel bites the dust on Sunday?

Despite apparent viewer apathy, the show still generates a whole heap of hype, mainly on M-Net of course, but from the start BB2 has bombed.

In its opening week this time round, it drew a third of the viewers who watched The Bold and the Beautiful which, of course doesn’t say much for the taste or otherwise of South African viewers. In fact, BB2 finished No 38 in the popularity stakes in its opening week and appears to have been dropping ever since. But M-Net’s advertising rates have not kept pace with the drop-off in viewing interest. According to one report, advertising spots in BB2 cost double what they do for The Bold and the Beautiful. No doubt M-Net will explain that away with talk of demographic breakdowns and niche interest groups to say nothing of target markets and the spending power of idiots.

And that despite desperate attempts to create an air of excitement as that dolly bird conducts breathless interviews with numerology psychologists, astrological psychiatrists, behavioural psychologists and just about anyone else willing to express an opinion about a group of people no one knew or cared about a few weeks ago and who have since revealed no talents to indicate a wildly successful future in jobs requiring people skills once they have joined the other losers on the outside.

And still they beg to be the next one out and when it happens, as in the case of the latest casualty Gross Jan, a lost soul in a desperate search for an identity if ever there was one, he would like to go back.

Too bad, old chap. The other inmates nominated you for outers and the viewers, those still interested enough to vote, helped them get rid of you.

It would be nice if he faded into the sunset doing his dance of the seven veils, wouldn’t it.

I raise this point because, breathless miss doing the exit interviews and all and all, does the whole platitude bit without any attempt to make contact with reality.

These characters all gave CVs and the like to M-Net when they were interviewed as aspirant contestants and these are offered as background to the inmates on the BB internet sites.

They were but cursorily checked because the station obviously wanted players for the new game and chose them accordingly. But certain aspects of Gross Jan’s interesting life (and lifestyle) have been revealed in newspaper articles, like his dead mother being alive and well, for instance. Now that’s what viewers would have liked breathless miss to ask him about last Sunday. Perhaps I had already retuned to that superb wildlife programme on another channel and missed the questions but those she did ask were banal at best. Gerry Whatshername, who did the gushing bit last time, was bad enough but this one seems brain dead – unless she’s working from a script provided by director or producer, which would explain it.

Producer and director must be in close consultation when they are not suffering sleepless nights separately. They have two major problems right now: first they have to retain the interest of the few remaining viewers and second, to do that, they need for the remaining inmates of Halfwit House to do something other than get disgustingly drunk in the jacuzzi and start groping one another.

Remember we had Canyon-mouth Margaret and I-can’t-get-enough Leigh (who, in fact, seemed to get nothing at all) doing that with Foulmouth Ferdi a long time ago.

It’s passe.

It’s also boring.

I can’t help thinking that this is where the contestants have to come up with something really startling and there’s this little lingering thought in my mind that they have been briefed for it (becoming completely debriefed or defrocked or something) by the production team.

Despite the euphoria that greeted the last lot, M-Net must have known much of it was artificial and that tedium would set in soon during BB2 unless a real character emerged about now to inject some life and interest into an otherwise sleep-inducing exercise.

You have been warned.

---

Previous

lstyle

Next