Belly aching (Big Brother, days 76-78) by Grace Dent
For a moment it felt like the revolution was going to be televised. A rumble was heard from the caravan. No, it wasn’t Jonty’s eerily quadraphonic bum hole. It was Liam, Ziggy and the twins talking about Carole’s Pol Pot-style regime of culinary communism.
Carole was unaware that people were bitching. This is unusual because Carole usually knows everything. She reminds me of that song Take That Look Off Your Face by Andrew Lloyd Webber. “I knew beforeeeeeee!” is Carole’s motto. I love to turn on the live feed and listen to all the things that Carole either knows or would know much more about if she had her book, which is indoors (ie behind a pile of rubble in her front room in Leytonstone).
Anyway, Carole was happily making dinner. It was a tempting, succulent smorgasbord, bound to have the people of Britain casting aside their lazy ready meals and returning to good home cooking. Roughly chopped carrots fried in cheap margarine with a tin of supermarket-brand watery, acidic spaghetti in tomato sauce chucked in, with Dijon mustard and two-day-old bread served on a dusty dustpan, as it had been on the floor.
In fairness, Carole’s dinner looked like something the BBC prop people mix up in bins before shooting a plot about Holby being struck by the Ebola virus. But it was made with love, and that’s the main thing. OK, Carole’s sort of love. Brooding, malevolent love that might send you to Coventry at any moment.
But the kids had had enough. They wanted a different world. A world where they could eat fajitas and go wild and have a bread roll now and then.
A world where they didn’t have to ask Carole’s permission before eating a branflake. “Yer-nah, I’m finking we’re gunna have to say something,” says Liam, who looked set to lead the troops.
“What did he say? I divvent understand what he’s gan on aboot?” shout people all over Newcastle and Sunderland, who also can’t understand Liam’s accent as it edges day by day into Klingon. “Um, er, yeah, um, that would be, wow,” said Ziggy. In Ziggy-speak this is massive unequivocal support.
“Oh, noooooo, you’ll make her cry!” said Brian, “Don’t make her cry!” Brian and the gang are the only people in the country still taken in by Carole’s crying. Oh, boo hoo, someone has eaten some bread. Oh, Carole’s so hurt and disappointed. Oh, the sky has fallen in. Oh, she tries her best, she does. God knows she tries, but this is all the thanks she gets.
At least Carole has Kara-Louise, who is apparently very “courteous”. Actually the word you’re looking for is “compliant”. When Carole says that people should ask permission from everyone before touching the cereal box, she doesn’t mean everyone, she means her. She couldn’t give a damn about Brian or the twins’ opinions.
Kara-Louise is just a massive pile of wet toilet rolls in a Monsoon shift dress. Oddly enough, she still manages to get the point across that she thinks she’s slightly more saintly and pious than everyone else. I started disliking her when she threw the crying fit on her second day when someone dared say her name and the words “game plan” in the same sentence.
“I can’t belieeeeeeeve you said I had a game plan,” she howled as if she’d never ever set eyes on Big Brother before. That’s all that anyone ever talks about, bloody game plans. What’s so wrong with having a game plan? You’d be an idiot not to have a few set rules in your head before you went in. Or to watch the dwindling numbers of housemates and think, “I need to get rid of that person there if I want to be here in the last week as they wind me up.”
Kara-Louise is so wet that she even managed to have some sort of attack during the assault course. I’m not sure what it was; it didn’t look like asthma or hypothermia or exhaustion. But never mind, because Gerry sorted it all out by doing a Tibetan version of the chicken dance beside her head while Brian shouted “Go away with your weird maaaaadnesss, Gerry, you weirdo!’
One person I do quite like is Liam. Now, I’m alone here, I fear. Some people who watch Big Brother avidly and have gone to the dark side believe that Liam is some sort of evil necromancer. They think Big Brother should dub in an evil slide trombone every time he appears, a bit like the Hooded Claw from The Perils of Penelope Pitstop used to have. Then Liam could stand by the pool twirling his Victorian curly moustache, wondering which of the twins’ bums to thwack next.
I’m not so sure Liam is that exciting. From the moment I saw Liam I wrote him off as a normal, slightly boring, “lad”. And that’s exactly what he is. According to Liam, he likes going out on Saturday night, getting tanked up, meeting birds and going home with them. Some of them he doesn’t even know!
And Liam likes having a laugh with his mates. Liam’s default sense of humour is laddish ****-taking and slightly cruel jokes, but over all his heart is in the right place and he can be a softy sometimes in the right company. His hero is Hugh Hefner, on account of all them lasses and that. Liam can’t be doing with lasses crying and all that, he doesn’t know what to say.
Liam would rather be on his own, just going out and having fun than saddled with some bird he doesn’t really like just for the sake of having a girlfriend. Liam’s opinion of women is that they’re all a bit mad, but he loves his mother with all his heart and would do owt for her. I think I’ve just described almost every single lad I ever knew up north from the ages of 18-25.
We don’t see much of Liam’s like on television. It’s almost unpalatable to some people that he refuses to be a Renaissance man and talk about his feelings. I quite like it when Liam picks the twins up like a caveman and chucks them in the pool. And you know something, the twins bloody do too.
Of course, the twins are the women that emancipation also forgot. “Ooooooh, nooooo, not the pool! Hee, hee! Ooh, I don’t know anything about polly-ticks or anyfink! Is Tony Blurrr still the king? Does he like pink?!!!!”
And where has all the simpering and giggling got the twins? The pair are virtually bulletproof on their way to £100,000. Oh, yes, I’d have gone in with my women’s lib and strong opinions, spouting Elaine Showalter and chinning Liam if he tried to thwack my arse, shouting, “Don’t oppress me, you b*****d!” and where would that have got me? Well, at least I’d have been able to put the kettle on and get the Endemol green room ready for Shabnam.
“Eet isn’t fair,” cried clever Gerry, who is being picked on right, left and centre, “They say I’ve got a game plan! But I’ve not got one! What a horrible place for me to choose to spend my summer.”
Gerry cried and talked to himself in the loo. His upset would have been more convincing if he’d been talking in Greek and not translating his outrage at being called a game player into English so that viewers could understand. Cos that’s the thing about Gerry, he might be a pain sometimes, but he certainly isn’t stupid.
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