Party Fears Two (Big Brother, days 51-54) by Grace Dent
It’s the morning after Big Brother’s eighth-birthday bash.
Big Brother has had a right old knees-up. He’s had the sort of party I guess most Endemol employees would love right now: one containing no sight nor sound of the housemates. A chance to get right royally clattered on booze with no need to warn anyone about their microphones. No need to listen to Chunnel, aka Chanelle, whingeing about period pains. No need to step in when Charley borders on violent. What bliss! No wonder Big Brother got so wrecked.
The house is in a right state. It’s been one of those mad parties that teenagers today truly believe they invented. There’s jelly all over the garden and damp bog roll strewn willy-nilly over the floors. There are fag butts all over the lawn and upturned glasses of sticky sweet liquid on work surfaces that will no doubt encourage ants. Carole’s internal ant-alarm is honking. Carole is obsessed with ants.
Oh, yes, it’s all very well having fun (if fun is your sort of thing), but don’t come crying to Carole when the entire cast of A Bug’s Life have moved into your larder. Don’t come crying to Carole when you’re feasted on alive in your bed by shrews. Don’t come crying to Carole when you jump in the pool and you’re blinded by a blob of shaving foam.
Carole stands surveying the post-party mess, blatantly dying to roll up her sleeves and get stuck in cleaning. But Big Brother bans her from helping. This is the worst punishment you could dole out to Carole. Imagine the martyr mileage she was going to squeeze from that one? Carole puts on the boxing gloves BB has given her and wishes she could punch herself unconscious to null the pain.
She’s not even allowed to clean up the stray poo on the toilet floor, which I guess was a dirty protest by an Endemol soundman who’d finally gone postal after 40 days of listening to Gerry lovingly describe the Bayeux Tapestry.
Elsewhere Brian is forbidden from cleaning up too. Brian isn’t so upset about that, though. Brian sits about on the sofa looking like the Fresh Prince of Badly Cut Hair. His ear is still bandaged with the blue plasters.
Endemol was forced to buy blue plasters just in case one of the housemates turned out to be a Smurf who might feel stigmatised and offended by beige ones. I rang Ofcom anyway and complained, cos it was the weekend and I was sort of bored. They love me at Ofcom. (Those cease and desist letters they send me are just them larking about. Great guys.)
Meanwhile Nicky, who knows she’s on her way out of the door on Friday, is scrabbling about on the grass for dog-ends to dry out and smoke. Charley is helping her. Heaven forbid the pair should go without nicotine in their veins for more than an hour. Even if it means hoovering up everyone’s second-hand saliva.
Nicky’s had some fine and funny moments over the past few days. Smiling and laughing in her frilly party frock and stuffing herself with cake and being silly. I really like her sometimes. Unfortunately Nicky’s basenote is always misery and pessimism.
It amuses me wildly when people mail me and say I’ve not picked up on the real, happy, fun-loving Nicky, as basically I’m a huge imbecile who has never heard of the concept of editing.
Of course I’ve seen Nicky being sweet. Nicky can be lovely. But she is also a massive pain in the ass. Call me picky but I don’t want to be around anyone for long who truly believes “Love is for losers”.
Love is NOT for losers, Nicky. If everyone thought like that and rejected love for their fellow man we’d all be in hell. Love, in fact, Nicky, is all you need. That’s why John Lennon wrote a song about it. “All you need is love,” he said. He didn’t sing, “All you need is fags”. That would have been a rubbish song. Although I’m sure you might have bought the 12″ extended electro version to play in your bedroom while scowling your way through a packet of duty-frees.
To be honest, it’s impossible to write anything about Big Brother this summer without outraging or disappointing someone. There simply aren’t any clear favourites or cast-iron villains.
If I criticise Charley, every single time people will write defending her to the hilt. In comparison, during The Apprentice, I didn’t get one single mail ever defending “villain” Katie Hopkins.
A lot of people may love Gerry but a lot of people HATE him. Some people are convinced Brian is a devious fake who is every bit as sly as Charley.
Whenever I say I don’t really mind Liam, then I’ll get mail ranting angrily about him. Liam hasn’t helped matters by bragging about his sexploits. Now people are calling him sleazy and sexist.
Liam seriously needs to stop telling folk about his threesomes, back-of-class fumblings and round-the-back-of-Bigg-Market knee-tremblers. Fair enough, his life is like one long Razzle readers’ letters page, but it’s causing a mixture of jealousy and revulsion. I still quite like Liam, though. He’s sort of OK.
The one big difference about trying to discuss this year’s Big Brother is the viewers’ all-consuming obsession with editing. Everybody seems convinced that Endemol is editing their favourite housemate to look bad or good. Nothing is ever as it seems and we are all being hoodwinked and manipulated and everything is crap and we’re all going to stop watching and never watch again (until 9:00pm tonight when we’ll be back for more).
If you ever hear someone moaning about the fact we’ve got no British plumbers or electricians and all our practical jobs are being done, quite necessarily, by foreign workers, then tell them not to fret. What Britain does have in abundance is people with just enough GCSE Media Studies knowledge to spot that Endemol is messing with our heads! Especially when it comes to Charley. Charley isn’t like that, y’see. In truth she is a more benevolent version of Mother Teresa of Calcutta. I’d see that if I wasn’t being controlled by propaganda! Sigh.
The truth is that Charley doesn’t need any help to look bad. She is that bad. It’s whether you find that badness entertaining that is the true question.
Despite an unspoken rule among the housemates that they would simply close down and try not to rise to Charley when she’s looking for a pointless fight, Gerry broke loose this weekend and decided to take her on.
At first I thought Gerry’s stance was quite noble. Why should one person be allowed to shout everyone into submission? Why should Charley be able to suck all the fun out of any room and replace it with anger, and no-one dares shout back?
The fact is that most housemates aren’t capable of taking on Charley, but Gerry can. He could turn Charley inside out with his mouth if need be, but so far he has chosen not to. So Charley and Gerry begin to bicker and this time Gerry won’t back down.
And at first he’s clearly enjoying himself, gently baiting her and dragging her around in verbal circles for hours on end and tripping her up and reminding her of stuff she’s said and done. Basically he’s just acting as badly as she does every single day.
And to begin with, it’s fun to watch. It’s interesting to see someone “do a Charley” on Charley and really get down to her level. But where does that leave you in the end? Down at Charley’s level. That’s never a great place to be.
As Charley sobs in the diary room, Gerry sits on the sofa feeling hollow and spent. Everyone in the house is as mad at him as they usually are at Charley. In fact they’re madder at Gerry as they know Gerry should have more brains.
In the meantime Charley has got so angry she’s accused Gerry of something that is right up there with the N-word in levels of being offensive. It’s not true. And she’s “warned” again, then she cries for the rest of the day while everyone comforts her – including Gerry, who feels the worst he has ever done since the day he arrived.
That’s the last time Gerry will be taking on Charley, I’m sure. But it’s OK, cos Charley has like proper learned from this whole prafetic experience and is turning over a new leaf and won’t be arguing with anyone ever again ever.
So if you see her being a nightmare this week, don’t be taken in, suckers. It’s all in the edit.
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