Only being real (Big Brother, days 44-47) by Grace Dent
After a long weekend of rabid quacking, eventually I pressed mute on my remote control. I muted Charley. I could not stand another moment of her mouth clacking open and shut and the class-A ordure spilling out.
I can’t hate Charley. From the moment she jumped out of that limo on day one, I’ve felt pangs of pity for her. Well, OK, “pity” mixed with moments where I’d gladly shake her firmly by the throat, then bury her in a shallow grave somewhere over by the designated smoking bench, using her “£300 boots wot-her-cussin-Keiran-bought-’er” as an ad hoc gravestone.
The one important thing we’ve gleaned from Fake Eviction Night is that Charley definitely lives in a mostly fictitious world. This is a pretty neat trick if you can do it. I wish I could, but reality punches me in the face all day long.
In Charley’s world, for example, she waltzed out of the house to a barrage of signs covered in hearts and kisses screaming “We love you!”, as the security guards, who were all male models, undressed her with their eyes.
After a warm embrace by Davina, who told her personally how special and unique she was and gave her coded messages of support from her mum, Charley walked though the crowd of well-wishers and Endemol staff who were crowding around to adore her.
When Davina showed Charley the video compilation of her behaving like an antisocial maniac, the only thing she really took from it was “Ooh, I look ugly when I’m shouting”.
But when Davina showed Charley a bunch of relatively tame clips of housemates nominating her, Charley was incensed. How could Ziggy slag her off, what with him totally definitely asking her out on a date? And Liam?! What’s his problem? Charley’s never had a bad word to say about Liam EVER!
After 48 days of Charley, I still can’t work out if:
a) She’s simply such a complete airhead that she continually gets the wrong end of the stick about everything and then puts a cocky, positive spin on things anyway
b) She’s actually very, very astute. A brilliant hustler. She knows that she’s fibbing almost 100% of the time. She knows Ziggy didn’t ask her out. She knows she’s never partied with R Kelly and Posh Spice. She knows the crowd were mostly hostile. But fibbing has got Charley this far in life and she’s not stopping now at any price
or c) She’s neither stupid nor clever. She simply lives in a parallel universe. It’s a self-preservation tactic she’s honed over the years. The bad things didn’t happen and if the good things aren’t happening, just say they did anyway.
Oh, dear, this is a ridiculous amount of time to devote to pondering the psyche of someone I don’t even like. Imagine if I’d done something useful with the time, like mentoring a real person or walking the Brecon Beacons in a tutu in aid of Help the Badgers. Oh, never mind, I’ll do that next summer. I won’t be watching Big Brother next summer. Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no. (Sigh – OK, then, just the highlights and a bit of live feed.)
What we do know for sure is that Fake Week and Fake Eviction Night hasn’t altered Charley one jot. If anything, she’s more repulsive than ever now she’s experienced the buzz of walking through a crowd with the occasional person slapping her hand. I honestly worry for her when she gets out and realises that in two weeks’ time no-one will care any more.
Elsewhere Carole, Liam and the rest of the gang took Fake Week in good humour. I thought convincing them all to wear “Warmth Not Waste” T-shirts and sing an idiotic song about “saving a piece of peace” was hilarious.
I was going to write that it was possibly one of the funniest insincere public displays ever, but then I remembered Live Earth, where Tom from Kasabian lunged at the crowd during Club Foot squealing in faux American, “Woooooo-hooooo! C’mon everybody, we gotta save the polar bears! Save the poooooooolar beyyyars!”
Saying that, this wasn’t as bad as P Diddy at the Diana Concert battling back tears yelling, “C’mon, everybody, make some noiiiiize if you miss Diana!”
Carole wasn’t convinced by Warmth Not Waste. It wasn’t in Carole’s Peace Diary and every important piece on info in the world ever that’s needed to be known is in Carole’s Peace Diary.
I’ve put in an order for the 2008 diary. Then maybe I’ll be as clever as Carole. I want to read the section at the back with handy info about what aardvark semen tastes like and how to do Klingon sign language and how to speak fluent Greek and how to bring peace to Iraq through the power of psy-trance and what time the bus to Grimsby via the park and ride goes and what everyone’s having for their tea and which twin doesn’t like pasta.
I’m sure once I’ve leafed through this weighty, voluminous tome I’ll feel a lot more confident about life. Or alternatively, like the twins, I could let the space between my ears be just a vacant chasm which occasionally houses thoughts about “fluffy-wuffy-kittens-in-sparkly-collars-weeeeeeeeh!”
How can two people educated to almost degree level go into a room, pick up a piece of paper with a sentence containing words like “burger” and “pommes frites” on it, and still believe it’s Swedish for “We support warmth not waste!” How? Bearing in mind that an entirely fake housemate, Pauline, had been stuck in there earlier that week, so you’d think their antennae for bulls**t might have been working.
Other news in brief includes:
Latest conspiracy theory news to reach me is that Brian is in no way as daft as he makes out. He is acting dumb to win the prize ‘cos he is a “BIGGG FAYKKER who waunts the money!!”
Reports have been submitted to me about Brian using the words “bourgeois”, “bohemian” and “niche”. He also has a fairly strong grasp of how a trade union works and seems to know the ins and outs of BBC1′s Question Time. More importantly, when the shopping task needed to be won, Brian calmly knew how to manipulate Pauline into being too “fake” without hurting her feelings or alerting the suspicions of the other housemates.
I quite liked this theory, until someone emailed me and accused Brian of wetting himself in a sleeping bag on purpose to win money. And then I had a load of emails claiming that Nicky is being unfairly edited to make her look miserable and that if I wasn’t such a lazzzy jurnalist I could see that she’s in actual fact a happy person, in fact a bit like Ken Dodd let loose in Jane Norman, being oh-so-very-tickled to be there all day bloody long.
Probably the saddest thing about Fake Week for the housemates was the dawning realisation that there isn’t another house. “The other house” is something they like to dream about all day long.
It’s actually quite moving if you stop and think about it. The housemates are so starved of stimulation and freedom that just the possibility that somewhere behind the MDF board there are MORE rooms made of MDF board, filled with more uncomfortable furniture, more ovens in bedrooms and social misfits, possibly worse than Charley, is exciting. In their minds, the “other house” sounds like pure heaven.
In a way I hope they do send Charley to the other house. I hope she gets there and she’s locked in for another 60 days with her bessie mate R Kelly (doing a very long extended a cappella version of Trapped in the Closet Part 1 – 765). I hope Grace Adams-Short is there too. And Posh, who she met in the players’ lounge. And ex-housemate and peacekeeper Pete Burns.
Please fix that for me, Big Brother. From now until August, for me at least, heaven would be a place on earth.
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