|
Big Brother’s Irish appeal
By McGreevy
The woman from Big Brother was telling us how great we all are last week.
Sharon Powers, the executive producer, was in Dublin holding auditions for the next series.
Yes, it’s nearly that time of the year again. If it’s summer, it must mean Big Brother.
Sure, aren’t we a great race entirely. “The Irish have a great track record in the Big Brother house,” she told Sky News Ireland while refusing to show her face as if she was on the run, not the producer of a silly television show.
“I think Irish people are genuine, true to themselves and they have got a great personality, great sense of humour and genuine warmth about them.”
Now, it would seem ungracious to disabuse her to the contrary and tell her that Irish people can be just as dull, false and cold as anyone else.
Unwittingly, she may have given us a clue as to why we do so well at Big Brother.
When Irish people enter the Big Brother house they carry with them a whole set of presumptions for the watching audience. It’s a sort of mixture of naivety, condescension and genuine affection — mostly genuine affection.
The average British viewer thinks the Irish contestant will be good craic, that, whatever else they will be, they won’t be dull.
Brian Dowling, a sort of Graham Norton-lite if that is not a contradiction in terms, won four years ago because, along with being as camp as a row of tents, he was as mad as nine mad men.
When Dubliner Ray Shah exhibited a filthy temper on Big Brother IV, it was a sign of our forthrightness, because the English just don’t do confrontation.
Irish people do well too because they aren’t English. “The Irish are a fair race. They never speak well of each other,” someone once said, but if anything the English are even worse.
Four Irish contestants have taken part in the five series of Big Brother to date. We’ve produced one winner, two runners-up, Anna Nolan and Ray Shah, and ‘Tyrone’ Tom McLoughlin, who met his now ex-partner and the mother of his child in the Big Brother house.
The television programme has become the 21st century equivalent of the Eurovision for us.
There was a time when we could turn up to Eurovision, belch vociferously into the microphone, win and be the envy of all the countries who take it seriously.
Now, the Beatles in their pomp wouldn’t win it for us if they entered the Eurovision, so we have to be content for a little vicarious national interest with Big Brother.
Judging by the turnout in Dublin, the love affair between the Irish and Big Brother is reciprocated.
About 1,000 people turned out. There was the curious, a 53-year-old grandmother, intent on growing old disgracefully, and the downright attention-seeking.
One girl wore a black bikini in the freezing cold and said she wanted to be the new Jade, after Jade Goody, the famously thick Eastender who thought ‘East Anguler’ was a country.
Big Brother was great when it started. Most of us aren’t accomplished enough, notorious enough or saintly enough to be famous in our own right.
For a while at least, it was liberating to see people being famous for being themselves. Call it a celebration of ordinary people.
Now, though, Big Brother has spawned a monster. It’s called the celebrity who’s famous for being famous. Heat magazine is full of them, Jade and Helen and Michelle and Stu and, of course, Nadia — the nation’s favourite transsexual and advocate of plastic surgery.
The truth about my relationship with X, why I got a boob job, how I lost two stone. Yada, yada, yada.
Why would anybody want to be like them? Why are we so obsessed with the shallowest of people, so many of whom are celebrities?
The aspiring Big Brother housemates know now that they will be pried on by millions, that they will be trashed in the media, that some gold-digging hustler will sell the story of their sordid sex romps to a tabloid and their parents will be mortified forever.
It’s hard to know why any normal person would want to be part of Big Brother anymore. Yet, the people who queued patiently in the cold last week were prepared to take that chance if it means fame and fortune, however fleeting both may be.
Nobody wants to be a nobody. Fame used to be synonymous with excellence, now it’s just a matter of pot luck. Like Alex in Fatal Attraction, these people aren’t going to be ignored.
Good luck to them, but they can’t say they haven’t been warned.
| 