'Hell', Jean-Paul Sartre once memorably observed, 'is other people'. I've frequently remembered that while dipping into Channel 4's summer block-buster, Big Brother.
The theme of the show is simply ten people, locked up in a purpose-built house bristling with concealed cameras and microphones so that no detail of daily life goes unobserved. The five-million-plus TV audience sees life in the lounge, the bedrooms, the showers. (An early sign of how the participants would handle this publicity was a graphically-filmed episode where several used their naked bodies to paint the walls. If you happened to miss the painting, you could still watch a man and a woman showering together afterwards.) Each week the participants vote by secret ballot for two of their number to be evicted. The viewers then choose one of the two., As I write, three contestants remain. A final vote will determine who wins the £70,000 prize. So popular is the show that those evicted so far as busy selling their stories, usually for more than the prize money.
It's been called voyeuristic. It certainly is. Oddly, the conversations are often more titillating than the nudity and the occasional media-hyped suspicion that some participants have managed to have sex without anybody noticing. One participant, Anna, is a lesbian ex-nun, whose sex life has become a media epic; another two, Craig and Claire, groped each other under the blankets. The blankets are to be auctioned when the show is over.
