Monday 15th February
Walworth Road
“Hello Jim”
“Jim!”
- “Oh hello Arthur how are you?”
“Not bad thanks, how about you? You looked like you were in another world just now.”
- “Oh yeah I’m okay”
“What were you thinking about? Pussy?”
_“Oh, ho yes I suppose I was”
“I tell you mate at our age that’s all the women ever do – think about it”
-“Ah ha”
“So where have you been this morning?”
-“I was just up the Cut and at the market”
The chit-chat turns to post offices and continues as I take my cash from the ATM and head smiling to a newsagent to buy a chocolate bar.
Sunday 7th February 2010
Wembley arena, London
My friend and I have been queuing for almost an hour and haven’t spoken in the last few minutes. Suddenly he turns to me and says, “They will get found out” what? I ask him “They will find out that these people aren’t as interesting as they pretend to be” the girl in front turns round and smirks. The queue is made up of a melee of young people predominately in their late teens and early twenties. One wears a top hat and dinner suit with black Doc-Matins, a lot have their hair gelled into that style. There’s a girl dressed in cheap fancy dress garb as Alice in Wonderland, she is flanked by mini-skirts and mini-dresses. A black girl wears a pink wig and green lipstick but many just wear their Saturday night best, pretty boys in their fake tans. This all equates to nothing extraordinary, it could be a line outside any nightclub in England, although this particular one would have to be a super club because I can see around 500 people here wanting to get in.
We are all waiting to be auditioned for the final series of Big Brother, the TV game show where you live in a communal house constantly being filmed and vote out your fellow housemates until the winner is decided by the nations viewing public. There is a cash prize for the winner but I don’t think that the money reward is the true motivation for many of these wannabe contestants. My friend has never applied for the TV game show Who Wants to be a Millionaire where the prize fund is larger and challenge less time consuming. “Look at my leggings and trainers” he say and I do “it’s a better look than anyone else’s here” my eyes scan other feet and legs and don’t disagree. I overhear conversations from all directions, it seems that the real rewards these people crave are reassurance and recognition. They want to prove that they own personalities that others can only aspire to and want their shining individuality and charisma acknowledged by televisions viewers. They seek a stage to show everyone their talents they have not yet been sufficiently congratulated upon. And as we wait they congratulate each other, and I can hear how hollow each complement is. I ask my friend what he thinks of a girl in a gold sequin jacket and shiny shoes, as I know he is a fan of gold jackets “Yeah great, just hope she doesn’t ruin it when she opens her mouth” I laugh even though he is serious.
Finally we get to the front and warm up by playing the kind of games found on team building days, at summer camps and evidently here. Swiftly we are directed to the first audition, a group of me four other males and five females line up in front of a Big Brother employee (I wonder what her job title is). We are each allowed 30 seconds to tell the others why we should be in the Big Brother house. The first guy is raring to go “I love joking around and playing practical jokes, I’m always doing that, yeah, I want to have fun in the house have a good time” he carries on in a similar vain, never stumbling on his words, until his time is up. Nobody seems too tickled but he does get a round of applause. We hear how a fat lady with pink hair likes the colour pink, how a girl adorned with beads would dance the hokey-cokey and bring roly-poly’s and rainbows to the house. Next up is me, the trouble is I don’t want to stay in a house that is near enough a prison especially in the middle of summer. However I also don’t want these people to think I have just been wasting everyone’s time so I blabber out some stuff about being “a calm person who could bring some ambiance to the mansion” My audience smile when I refer to it as a mansion but the Big Brother representative asks if I have watched the program “Not recently” Not since that first year it came out when I was lead to believe it to be some sot of mad scientific sociological experiment. Now a decade later the once popular show is losing ratings and rumours are circulating that this will be the final series.
After we have all tried to sell ourselves we are put into two groups and told to decide on somebody from the other group we want voted out. It’s a hard decision for our group to come to but not because we think they are all so amazing. The other group who obviously don’t want any of my ambiance votes me off. Finally The Rep. makes us all put a hand out and says the people she stamps will go through to the next stage. Baffled faces look on as after stamping solely the practical joker she steps back and says thank you and goodbye.
I had come here to keep my friend company but now walking out into the harsh cold air I felt dejected and unwanted. After queuing for over three hours I showed them what I had to offer and it was wrong, to them I was worthless. I was not special, not the chosen one, not a superstar. I was just normal, equal at best. This must be the exact opposite to the feeling that so many contenders seemed to seek. Big Brother is not watching me. Big Brother is not watching you!
And soon nobody will be watching Big Brother either. And maybe then people will be content on common ground, somehow however I very much doubt it.
Christopher GJ Cooley
Big Brother is not watching you. by Christopher GJ Cooley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
