Andrew Bullock: The Box
CELEBRITY BIG BROTHER
Last summer I wrote a piece about the incident that happened on Celebrity Big Brother’s Bit On The Side when Farrah Abraham chucked a flute of champagne across the studio at Aisleyne Horgan-Wallace after she called her a skank (or whatever). You can’t really imagine how – as each season comes and goes – the stuff that goes on in that house can get any worse.
So with a bit of trepidation the nation settles down to watch the newest, post-Christmas season as a means of curing the January blues. Watching famous people behave like drunken idiots on national TV makes us feel better about how we behaved when we’d been on the sherries over the holidays. But will it be as good as the last season? Maybe not – but there’s nothing else to watch this month apart from Dragon’s Den.
But then someone slaps someone around the face and is dragged into the diary room, and the Gods of fate smile upon us once more. So far this season there’s been homophobia, inferred racism, security guard interception and death!
Last Tuesday’s episode was possibly the most uncomfortable/cringe-worthy/hilarious/tragic episode of Big Brother I have ever seen. The producers must have thought all their Christmases had come at once when David Bowie sadly passed away at the same time his nutty ex-wife was a contestant on their show. Press attention galore. I’m sure they didn’t foresee how wonderful the subsequent sequence of events would be – that Angie Bowie would decide not to tell anyone other than John Partridge and David Gest that her husband of 10 years had died; that she couldn’t help but then tell the first person she saw next about the death; how that person would be the loudest most unaware woman in that house, Tiffany Pollard; that she would misunderstand that it was in fact David Gest who had suddenly developed cancer and dropped dead in the diary room; that the whole house would descend into chaos, ultimately making the death of a national treasure all about his ex-wife.
This all came after Winston McKenzie had declared to the house that gay adoption is a bit like child abuse. But alas! Things can get worse!
In Thursday night’s episode, Megan McKenna of Ex on the Beach fame rose the bar even higher by basically doing what she did best on Ex on the Beach and allow a droplet of booze to pass her pouty lips. Cut to later on and she is being cornered by security guards with stun guns in the diary room attempting to sort her out (prozac?).
I’m aware that all this is just an atrocious display of human decorum (and famed humans at that) but as uncomfortable Celebrity Big Brother has become to watch, I can’t wait to see what happens next! Thank God Alan Rickman’s ex isn’t in there as well!
Andrew Bullock is a producer, presenter and writer. You can read more at www.drewjbullock.wordpress.com