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(by Sam Maxfield 2001) © Touch Nottingham (internet magazine and What's On guide)
Oh, forget the Brains. He'll never get the girl. But, shucks, underneath it all... well, darn it we're just the same. When you scratch the surface we all have the same insecurities, the same pressures. The Jock's not as thick as he seems, the Princess has a social conscience, the Brains... Forget the Brains. Anthea can't possibly be as irritatingly false as she appears on television. She can't be that buttock-clenchingly clean and perky. Can she? Jack Dee must be caving under the constant expectation for him to be a miserable bastard. Keith Duffy just wishes he could read Sartre in public. What makes Celebrity Big Brother ghoulishly like The Breakfast Club is that because the contestants are celebrities we immediately identify them as a form of branded stereotypes, just as the opening sequence of the eighties film identified the Jock, Princess, Weirdo, Bad Boy and Brains. It's a problem that wasn't as initially apparent with the original show. Although the producers clearly took the time to pick easily labeled characters e.g. the Lesbian Nun, the Flirt, the Farm Boy, the Yuppie, the Scally and so on, we didn't 'know' them prior to the series. Much of the fun of the original was getting to know these 'ordinary' people. But like the film Celebrity Big Brother opens with charicatures not people. The images we are presented with by the media are only ever caricatures because it is with broad strokes that we recognise celebrity. HELLO magazine appears to give us the details when only really offering 'myth'. Houses that don't look like any house ever lived in, swimming pools that don't have veruca footwash pools or municipal changing rooms, kitchens with cookers so huge you could have basted and baked Vanessa Feltz in one.(Even prior to her weight loss). Celebrity can only be celebrity while it caters to the yearning to 'know'. It will ultimately lose its lustre if the tidbits of salacious speculation become bare-faced facts. Especially if those facts reveal a rather cheap material beneath the glamorous veneer. Magazines such as Heat, Now, Hello and OK promise to reveal all but reveal nothing. Celebrity Big Brother reveals a little too much, and not just of Keith Duffy's bum. What makes it seem a grotesque parody of the aforementioned Breakfast Club is that the film's sentimental angst and teeth-gnashing 'Ill show mine if you show yours' (go Dawson's Creek) opening up of soft-beating hearts beneath protective guises is fiction. Big Brother is not. I hesitate to call it reality - no TV show could be - reality comes without editing or narration. Seeing Anthea Turner's desperate bid to patch her career up is painful, but to see her chipmunk face jittering madly on the edge of nervous breakdown is horrifically compelling the way a bad accident is. And Vanessa. Well, much has been said of Vanessa this week, but what a corking episode Monday night was. Vanessa as sensitive as a bunny, and just as scared, caught in the unforgiving headlights of the Big Brother cameras. Now Vanessa, it has always seemed to me, is a woman who resembles a spoiled and petulant child, and she acted like one. Tears, sulks, tantrums and finally an attempt to seek comfort from Daddy Jack, as I'm sure she has done with dominant male figures all her life. Not that Jack responded - he is after all the Bringer of Doom - the Grim Reaper would take prozac after a day with Jack, but there was an eerily Breakfast Club bonding moment, when Jack told Vanessa he'd wished he'd seen her like this earlier, and by the way, while we're bonding can I just say I really haven't liked you at all. They 'shared' a disclosure of mutual dislike in an oddly touching way, and all the time they could see the cameras. Feel the cameras. I think they grew, you know. Really. Keith and Claire have played the game, and have done themselves no harm. A minor soap-star and a minor pop-star, they were the least well-known, and had less to gain, and thus less to lose. Jack's retained his public persona of funny, no-bullshit, miserable git, while revealing a basic humanity and sensible decency we all knew were there anyway. All for charity. Yes. It's been very successful, and I'm sure has raised a lot of money, but it seems an irony that an organisation seeking to bring relief to pain and misery should have so exposed such fragile and tortured egos. The Breakfast Club, after all is not so much remembered now for its shallow message, but for the failed careers of the actors and actresses who starred in it. A Who's Who of the 'where are they now' Brat Pack generation. Jack will be fine. Keith and Claire might benefit. But Vanessa and Anthea? I thought such public humiliation went out with the stocks. As for Chris Eubank. Well he was just being "extheedingly selth indulgent." read more rants and raves |
