ULTIMATE BIG BROTHER
Channel 4
August-September 2010
When they look back and chronicle the many ups and downs of British civilisation, one moment that will stand out is when Josie 'Farmyward Boogie' Gibson looked away from the 2010 Big Brother diary room camera with wet, puffy eyes and wept 'I'm not a celebrity. I'M NORMAL!!!'
Once, everyone wanted to be a celebrity. No one strictly knew what a celebrity was, other than a kind of pliant attention whore with no or little talent, or a glorified freak show performer with added douchebaggery thrown in for good measure.
The long and the short was - they were Faces and Heels, pointless, but successful. And they appealed to a culture where actually having enough individuality or talent to be properly successful was sneered at because it was too much hard work, and we were all too afraid to admit that maybe we didn't have what it took, and we were condemned to be non-entitites. It's a bitter truth to accept in today's narcissistic, shallow hellhole culture. 'Slebdom' was the ultimate expression of that, where you could aspire to succeed without actually having to earn that success or face up to your shortcomings.
The net result of this was a whole culture driven towards the flicker of dozens of cameras or hateful, mind-numbingly bad celebrity magazines that obsessed with women's bodies in that hideous way that only other women could stoop to. You too could be a success as long as you looked malnourished and had no noticeable human flaws that reminded others of your or their own humanity.
And then came along Josie, a somewhat well fed, non-airbrushed and mundane, yet charismatic and likeable individual in a Big Brother house of mainly nice people (for once). Tellingly, most of them weren't celebrity material because they seemed too real, not shallow enough to really be celebrity fodder, and too human to really want to be one of those shrieking cardboard cutouts. The show's last series ended not as a casting couch but more like the contest between everymen that it was originally meant to be.
Sam Pepper came close to the sort of utter prat cum performing monkey that used to prosper under the old system, but he was evicted and didn't even make it into the final. Instead, the dwindling 'sleb' faithful subscribed to that most niche of outlets - his Twitter feed - leaving the rest of the country to vote for someone they actually could empathise with.
And what then did this year's winner, Josie, do when she then found herself in a house full of 'classic' Big Brother contestants, those shrieking and empty yet loud and ostentatious shallow Gods of a preposterous age? She wigged out, and left. She wasn't one of them, and - most importantly - she didn't want to be. She chose anonymity and mundanity over a fake and glittering life under never-ending scrutiny. Reality TV yielded to reality. It was a turning point; the real had triumphed over reality. Celebrity lost to humanity.
