Big Brother 9 (IF YOU DONT LIKE IT, DONT READ IT!)

[flammableBen]

Exactly, it's because BB is frowned upon by the masses, yet the Apprentice (who one of my mates has been told to watch by his company to pick up business tips) is meant to be at somehigher mental level, which it's clearly not.  It's an entertainment show end of.

Yeah that's right, everybody who watches The Apprentice and not Big Brother is just watching what everybody else says it's ok to watch. Despite more people watching Big Brother anyway. I can see why you could make comments like that if you thought both were shit and didn't watch either but it seems silly way of justifying watching both. But they are different enough to like one and not the another, lots of things can be entertainment shows and different.

There's something much more exploitative about big brother, not just of the contestants, but of the public, trying to get them to love/hate people enough to pick up the phone and vote. The apparent ease in which they do it is a bit wrong. I don't think watching the big ball of Exploting is entertaining anymore. Harshly, I doubt that the contestants get much of their promised 15mins of fame any more do they? Probably about 3? Rack that up on the Exploit Scale.

The Apprentice isn't free of the exploitation brush, but it a bit more constructive with how it's set up. It's got the slightly nice pretence of a proper prize at the end of it, and a series of tasks which at least have a slightly contrived relation to the goal of the programme. It does do a fair bit of clever editing to make people look good / bad / mean / nice, but it's a lot more toned down. Without the public vote the aim of it all just reverts to making amusing telly. Which it does.

I mean neither are ever going to be top class telly, but in my head one is much more watchable than the other,  And that's not because "BB is frowned upon the masses". People who make overgeneralising comments like that enjoy eating poo whilst getting raped, proper exploited like.

Look at "exploit" enough times, maybe trying to say it occasionally, and it's one of those words which looks wrong. I'm still not convinced I didn't made it up.

[Chubbs]

even im not watching it this year ...

your probably in it

[Power to people]

I usually watch it, this year could be interesting though as the producers have to clamp down on a lot with all these do gooders complaining about things that go on.....how far in then until some fit bird in there get's her
t!ts out like they normal do in there.....

[JPC82]

i watch most years, and will watch thursday, prob watch most of it

[Reg Smeeton]

Never having seen any of this, nor any of these other shows mentioned, I'm probably not  best placed to pass comment on their quality.....it must still get some decent viewing figures though, otherwise it would get the hook.

  I do like the  sporadic works of Jonathan Meades, though, his series Magnetic North is presently showing on Beeb 2.

  He's also writen a few books......Incest and Morris Dancing should interest SY.

[yeo]

Exactly, it's because BB is frowned upon by the masses, yet the Apprentice (who one of my mates has been told to watch by his company to pick up business tips) is meant to be at somehigher mental level, which it's clearly not.  It's an entertainment show end of.

Yeah that's right, everybody who watches The Apprentice and not Big Brother is just watching what everybody else says it's ok to watch. Despite more people watching Big Brother anyway. I can see why you could make comments like that if you thought both ere shit and didn't watch either but it seems silly way of justifying watching both. But they are different enough to like one and not the another, lots of things can be entertainment shows and different.

There's something much more exploitative about big brother, not just of the contestants, but of the public, trying to get them to love/hate people enough to pick up the phone and vote. The apparent ease in which they do it is a bit wrong. I don't think watching the big ball of Exploting is entertaining anymore. Harshly, I doubt that the contestants get much of their promised 15mins of fame any more do they? Probably about 3? Rack that up on the Exploit Scale.

The Apprentice isn't free of the exploitation brush, but it a bit more constructive with how it's set up. It's got the slightly nice pretence of a proper prize at the end of it, and a series of tasks which at least have a slightly contrived relation to the goal of the programme. It does do a fair bit of clever editing to make people look good / bad / mean / nice, but it's a lot more toned down. Without the public vote the aim of it all just reverts to making amusing telly. Which it does.

I mean neither are ever going to be top class telly, but in my head one is much more watchable than the other,  And that's not because "BB is frowned upon the masses". People who make overgeneralising comments like that enjoy eating poo whilst getting raped, proper exploited like.

Look at "exploit" enough times, maybe trying to say it occasionally, and it's one of those words which looks wrong. I'm still not convinced I didn't made it up.

Totally disagree.The Apprentice is essentially a "white collar" BB that Broad Sheets readers can watch without feeling guilty.I'd argue that The Apprentice exploits the contestants more than BB, surely these people must be subject to some serious editing to make themselves look such complete and utter tools.Apprentices are set up to look like mongs and the whole 100k job with Mr Sugar is there to try and give the program some bizare type of gravitas.
BB is what it is,a freak show and a pantomine.It doesnt pretend to be anything else and is no better or worse than the Apprentice.
I watch both,I like trashy telly.

[oxford_fan]

ooooh interesting points

when the apprentice first came about it was a little more high-brow, with some genuinely promising contestants capable of some worthy business acumen, and a proven track record at a corporate level.

now it has descended into picking a complete bunch of numbnuts who will make the biggest and most frequent glaring errors so as to provide the most flashpoints. couple this with choosing a bunch of decitful backstabbing fools and you have the recipie for a TV entertainment success. exactly along the lines of BB, depending on how much attention you pay to the dressing up of it all.

fB not sure about the "proper prize" - Sugar normally hides the winner somewhere within one of his splinter firms on a dogsbody job, for them to leave within 12 months. it's considerably harder for an Apprentice contestant to get the media coverage of a BB participant. and doesn't the winner of BB get £100k or so? plus all the extra media fees.

you could say the apprentice is to BB as the Daily Mail is to the Sun.

both utter shit but entertaining nevertheless, one slightly more frank about its shitness and superficial nature than the other.

[flammableBen]

Totally disagree.The Apprentice is essentially a "white collar" BB that Broad Sheets readers can watch without feeling guilty.I'd argue that The Apprentice exploits the contestants more than BB, surely these people must be subject to some serious editing to make themselves look such complete and utter tools.Apprentices are set up to look like mongs and the whole 100k job with Mr Sugar is there to try and give the program some bizare type of gravitas.
BB is what it is,a freak show and a pantomine.It doesnt pretend to be anything else and is no better or worse than the Apprentice.
I watch both,I like trashy telly.

I don't care if it was made exclusively for Jewish members of the royal family. It doesn't mean they can't make a show that other people can enjoy.

I completely stand by my point on the exploiting thing. I'd argue the Apprentice is set up in more of a Give them enough rope sort of way, whilst BB just brute forces it with the 24/7 fimling. You can make anybody look however you want if you recorded them all week.

The Freak showness of BB, especially over recent series, is one of the reasons I won't watch it. Yeah The Apprentice has it's own share of freakness but I still think BB takes it a couple of steps further.

Also, a factor about 100times bigger than any of this, is that last years Big Brother seemed to go on far too long, and what I watched was pretty boring anyway.

I'm not saying people shouldn't watch Big Brother if they enjoy it. I just felt I had to justify why I won't after Jan made a bit over generalising twat face cunt comment.

I need a cigarette.

[Lumps]

I think the main problem with BB now is the way the wider media profile of the show and it's contestants has impacted on the pool of applicants.

In series one you had a fairly interesting cross section of people, with different motivations for applying. By the start of series 2 though you started to see that the short lived media careers of some of the series one competitors was attracting an increasing number of slightly desperate wannabees. By the last series I saw any of ( I have no idea what number but it was the one in which security had to go in to split up a massive fight) the whole group was composed of

* completely cynical "look at me give me a job presenting on Babestation" tarts
* gay men desperately trying to get jobs presenting kids TV or fashion programmes
* really thick chavvy blokes thinking they'll get jobs on MTV or record contracts
* a small number of people who didn't seem to have a clue they were on TV and who seemed to have some significant learning difficulties and / or psychological problems and who seemed to only be there to provide some drama when they had their inevitable spectacular breakdown.

As far as the first three groups are concerned, then fuck em, they know what they're doing, what they're getting into and why. But I stopped watching because, even after supposedly having psychological profiles of these people done, they kept putting these really quite vunerable people into the house and then deliberately putting them in situations of conflict with other competitors. Then when it all blows up the producers would stand back shaking their heads as if they hadn't engineered the whole fucking mess.

All that sounds like I stopped watching from some sort of principled moral position. But the main thing was I couldn't keep watching a group of self obsessed morons arguing about who ate all the bread.

I don't think there's ever been more than 2 people on that show that I wouldn't have minded having a pint with. But at least early on there were people that if I was sat behind them on the train I might have been amused by evesdropping on their conversation. Now all of them seem to be the kind of annoying vacuous idiots that drive you mental unless you can drown them out with an Ipod.

Why would you choose to watch them show off and bicker like children?

[flammableBen]

ooooh interesting points

when the apprentice first came about it was a little more high-brow, with some genuinely promising contestants capable of some worthy business acumen, and a proven track record at a corporate level.

now it has descended into picking a complete bunch of numbnuts who will make the biggest and most frequent glaring errors so as to provide the most flashpoints. couple this with choosing a bunch of decitful backstabbing fools and you have the recipie for a TV entertainment success. exactly along the lines of BB, depending on how much attention you pay to the dressing up of it all.

fB not sure about the "proper prize" - Sugar normally hides the winner somewhere within one of his splinter firms on a dogsbody job, for them to leave within 12 months. it's considerably harder for an Apprentice contestant to get the media coverage of a BB participant. and doesn't the winner of BB get £100k or so? plus all the extra media fees.

you could say the apprentice is to BB as the Daily Mail is to the Sun.

both utter shit but entertaining nevertheless, one slightly more frank about its shitness and superficial nature than the other.

I agree with most of that OF. I don't think that the apprentice hasn't quite gone down the drama road as far as BB has yet though. Although there's a good chance that this will be the last series I watch, this series is definitely at the tipping point. I'm probably in the minority that I prefer the straight boring stuff to the overblown back stabbing madness. I'm tend to think that if you're going to go that way you might as well just write a drama or something. Maybe it is all scripted?

As far as the Prize thing goes, I think the thing I was trying to get at is that in the Apprentice the structure still exists with the aim of the prize; the way the contestants approach the tasks and the way it is all judged (sort of, they definitely play the keep more interesting people in) still has some relevance to the show as a whole, even if it is mostly pretend. Big Brother has become more of a big mess of psychological drama, humiliation and public hatred with the promise of a week or two in heat magazine at the end of it.

[Colin Todd]

I think the main problem with BB now is the way the wider media profile of the show and it's contestants has impacted on the pool of applicants.

In series one you had a fairly interesting cross section of people, with different motivations for applying. By the start of series 2 though you started to see that the short lived media careers of some of the series one competitors was attracting an increasing number of slightly desperate wannabees. By the last series I saw any of ( I have no idea what number but it was the one in which security had to go in to split up a massive fight) the whole group was composed of

* completely cynical "look at me give me a job presenting on Babestation" tarts
* gay men desperately trying to get jobs presenting kids TV or fashion programmes
* really thick chavvy blokes thinking they'll get jobs on MTV or record contracts
* a small number of people who didn't seem to have a clue they were on TV and who seemed to have some significant learning difficulties and / or psychological problems and who seemed to only be there to provide some drama when they had their inevitable spectacular breakdown.

As far as the first three groups are concerned, then fuck em, they know what they're doing, what they're getting into and why. But I stopped watching because, even after supposedly having psychological profiles of these people done, they kept putting these really quite vunerable people into the house and then deliberately putting them in situations of conflict with other competitors. Then when it all blows up the producers would stand back shaking their heads as if they hadn't engineered the whole fucking mess.

All that sounds like I stopped watching from some sort of principled moral position. But the main thing was I couldn't keep watching a group of self obsessed morons arguing about who ate all the bread.

I don't think there's ever been more than 2 people on that show that I wouldn't have minded having a pint with. But at least early on there were people that if I was sat behind them on the train I might have been amused by evesdropping on their conversation. Now all of them seem to be the kind of annoying vacuous idiots that drive you mental unless you can drown them out with an Ipod.

Why would you choose to watch them show off and bicker like children?

Fucking hell.  I agree 100% with lumps post.

[Lumps]

I think the main problem with BB now is the way the wider media profile of the show and it's contestants has impacted on the pool of applicants.

In series one you had a fairly interesting cross section of people, with different motivations for applying. By the start of series 2 though you started to see that the short lived media careers of some of the series one competitors was attracting an increasing number of slightly desperate wannabees. By the last series I saw any of ( I have no idea what number but it was the one in which security had to go in to split up a massive fight) the whole group was composed of

* completely cynical "look at me give me a job presenting on Babestation" tarts
* gay men desperately trying to get jobs presenting kids TV or fashion programmes
* really thick chavvy blokes thinking they'll get jobs on MTV or record contracts
* a small number of people who didn't seem to have a clue they were on TV and who seemed to have some significant learning difficulties and / or psychological problems and who seemed to only be there to provide some drama when they had their inevitable spectacular breakdown.

As far as the first three groups are concerned, then fuck em, they know what they're doing, what they're getting into and why. But I stopped watching because, even after supposedly having psychological profiles of these people done, they kept putting these really quite vunerable people into the house and then deliberately putting them in situations of conflict with other competitors. Then when it all blows up the producers would stand back shaking their heads as if they hadn't engineered the whole fucking mess.

All that sounds like I stopped watching from some sort of principled moral position. But the main thing was I couldn't keep watching a group of self obsessed morons arguing about who ate all the bread.

I don't think there's ever been more than 2 people on that show that I wouldn't have minded having a pint with. But at least early on there were people that if I was sat behind them on the train I might have been amused by evesdropping on their conversation. Now all of them seem to be the kind of annoying vacuous idiots that drive you mental unless you can drown them out with an Ipod.

Why would you choose to watch them show off and bicker like children?

Fucking hell.  I agree 100% with lumps post.

I think you need a quiet lie down for half an hour

[DiV]

I think the main problem with BB now is the way the wider media profile of the show and it's contestants has impacted on the pool of applicants.

In series one you had a fairly interesting cross section of people, with different motivations for applying. By the start of series 2 though you started to see that the short lived media careers of some of the series one competitors was attracting an increasing number of slightly desperate wannabees. By the last series I saw any of ( I have no idea what number but it was the one in which security had to go in to split up a massive fight) the whole group was composed of

* completely cynical "look at me give me a job presenting on Babestation" tarts
* gay men desperately trying to get jobs presenting kids TV or fashion programmes
* really thick chavvy blokes thinking they'll get jobs on MTV or record contracts
* a small number of people who didn't seem to have a clue they were on TV and who seemed to have some significant learning difficulties and / or psychological problems and who seemed to only be there to provide some drama when they had their inevitable spectacular breakdown.

As far as the first three groups are concerned, then fuck em, they know what they're doing, what they're getting into and why. But I stopped watching because, even after supposedly having psychological profiles of these people done, they kept putting these really quite vunerable people into the house and then deliberately putting them in situations of conflict with other competitors. Then when it all blows up the producers would stand back shaking their heads as if they hadn't engineered the whole fucking mess.

All that sounds like I stopped watching from some sort of principled moral position. But the main thing was I couldn't keep watching a group of self obsessed morons arguing about who ate all the bread.

I don't think there's ever been more than 2 people on that show that I wouldn't have minded having a pint with. But at least early on there were people that if I was sat behind them on the train I might have been amused by evesdropping on their conversation. Now all of them seem to be the kind of annoying vacuous idiots that drive you mental unless you can drown them out with an Ipod.

Why would you choose to watch them show off and bicker like children?

Fucking hell.  I agree 100% with lumps post.

So do I, think hes got it spot on.

[yeo]

Well if I remember correctly last year an Apprentice was all over the Papers,Hello and the like for being a right bitch and shagging in a field.The winner the year before that was all over the papers and quit the job because she was up the duff.
People from both programs are offered good money by the Tabloids and rightly or wrongly cash the Cheques for their 5 minutes of fame.Im not saying ones better than the other ,just that as a rule both sets of contestants are equally odious and there is little difference in the two programs.

[Jamiesfuturewife]

eugh you have made me think of that vile Chanelle creature that was on it last year - seeing her frollicking about semi naked trying to sell her "pop single" the other day made me want to stab rusty pins in my eyes

The new thing is as well they all have to get into a "relationship" with someone in the house so they can try and milk there 5 minutes of fame even further by getting into OK magazine and alike