Big mother

 

Mark Simpson on his summer romance with Channel 4’s heavy-breasted, ball-cutting reality TV show.
(marksimpson.com exclusive, Aug '04)

 

 

This Summer I found myself doing something I never thought I would – unless at the point of a shotgun.  I got married.  To Big Brother. 

 

Now, I’m someone who has never watched two consecutive episodes of a soap because I was afraid of the commitment.  I’m not even sure when the news is on these days.  But for ten weeks hardly missed a show and spent most evenings snugly-smugly cuddled up on the couch with my new affair oblivious to the outside world.  (Though I have to admit that I did cheat a little – I only watched the edited coverage and never the ‘live’ stuff of people snoring under their duvets in green nightvision).

 

Why this year?  Why did BB 5 finally snag me where all the others had failed?  Well, maybe it was because this time I happened by chance to see the very first night when the contestants made their excruciating entrance into the BB house and so felt implicated.  Maybe it was because the contestants themselves seemed so compellingly extreme – Marco, for example, was not a human being at all but rather a German expressionist animation.  Or maybe it was Jason’s pectorals.  But mostly it was, if I’m honest, because this year, as the all-conquering pre-publicity blitz announced, Big Brother was getting ‘evil’.  Gone was the sub-Warholian boredom of earlier series, watching idlers making porridge and loafing around, generally pretending to be Australians living in a shared house in Willesden.  This series was about real drama and conflict and real psychological abuse.  In fact, it was infinitely more gripping than any scripted TV soap or drama could ever hope to be.  Even though soaps are relentlessly sadistic these days, they’re still played by actors.  And as we all know, actors aren’t real people, particularly when they clock off.

 

‘Reality’ is different.  You see, having people imprisoned inside your telly just waiting for you to switch it on is a really heart-warming experience.  It gives you something to come home to.  Especially when your televisual hostages are being so badly treated.  The infamous Baghdad prison Abou Ghraib had nothing on Big Brother 5.  Okay, so the Salo-esque scenes of degradation in the BB house involved more-or-less consenting adults, but that only made them all the more shocking.

 

But however badly BB5 treated this year’s contestants, nothing can compare with the malice of the audience.  I mean, do any of the millions who voted for Nadia, the Portuguese post-op transsexual with the serious nicotine habit seriously think that winning Big Brother was what she needed or what the doctor would have ordered?  Her response to winning looked like the beginning (or perhaps the final stages) of a nervous breakdown.  Or how somebody would look if they smoked an entire packet of fags in one go.

 

But then, we know that the winners of Reality TV, being the most modern, most vacuous kind of celebrity, are treated with a smiling, casual contempt by their ‘fans’.  Almost everyone I know who watched BB felt obliged to tell me how much they ‘loved’ Nadia.  A patronising smile would cross their face at the mere mention of her name, head half cocked, as if discussing a favourite spaniel.  Hardly any of them bothered to disguise the nature of that ‘love’.  A female friend of mine told me how she ‘wept’ when Nadia won, but a few drinks later was talking about how funny ‘it’ was.  Others told me how they ‘loved’ her because of the way ‘she really made a complete fanny of herself in the Diary Room whenever she ran out of fags.’

 

Nadia won because she was the easiest contestant to pity, which is of course the most vicious human emotion.  Yes, she also won because she was the udders of BB5, the great, heavy-breasted usually horizontal She-Elephant that most of the female and both gay contestants loved to suckle from – and hide behind – and TV is nothing if it isn’t a matriarchal medium.  Because, like many trannies, she lives every waking moment as if in front of a camera and so was perfectly, glamorously equipped for reality television.  Because she proved to be the most hysterical contestant, both in terms of her behaviour (e.g. that armour-piercing laugh and that winning night impersonation of someone entered by the Holy Ghost) and her entertainment value. 

 

But mostly she won because the public decided that Nadia had chopped off his/her cock for them – the ultimate sacrifice that a man can make for TV, and in fact what TV sometimes appears to want to do to all men.  Even her famous obsession with cigarettes became for the audience an unconscious dramatisation of the sacrifice she had made (whenever she ran out of phallus-substitutes Nadia became comically less and less ladylike).

 

Her scheme to keep her transsexuality from the other housemates for as long as possible was no doubt encouraged and quite possibly dreamt up by BB.  It provided Davina with a shock-horror trump card whenever one of the other housemates was evicted: ‘Did you know that Nadia used to be a man?’ ‘No!  You’re kidding!!’).  Which meant that BB had every interest in making sure she stayed to the end, turning the other housemates into (removable) extras in the Nadia Show.  When the housemates with birthday-shaped genitalia went into the Diary Room they were talking to a camera.  When Nadia went into the Diary Room she was communing with her-co-conspirators: Us.  It made her instantly, if spuriously, sympathetic with the viewers: we were in it together with Nadia.  The others stood less of a chance than Nadia’s penis after she took the pre-theatre sedative.

 

The drunken lads who one evening shouted over the BB wall ‘NADIA IS A MAN!’ were quite possibly motivated as much by a sense of fair play as bigotry, but their intervention only served to increase Nadia’s popularity with the viewing public, as they fell over themselves to vote for her, ‘protect’ her, and prove that they weren’t like those nasty oiks shouting over the wall.  In ‘reality’, winning BB is of course a much, much crueller thing than being called what you once were over a garden wall.

 

The explanation that she didn’t tell the other housemates because she ‘wanted to live as a woman’ never made any kind of sense, since the only people in the whole country who didn’t know that she was a tranny were the handful who were stuck in the BB house.  If you are a transsexual and you go on BB you know very well that however convincing you are as a woman you will never be a woman, you will always be ‘that transsexual who was on Big Brother’.  After winning the ‘Portugeezer’ as the tabloids ‘affectionately’ dubbed her told the world she ‘just wanted acceptance’.  Oh right, so you won’t be needing the prize money then, or the mooted record deals, or the magazine interviews, or sponsored appearances then. 

 

Jason the male-to-male transsexual

Whatever your feelings about Nadia, BB5 really was inarguably the year that BB went tranny.  Not only was the winner a transsexual, but also the runner-up.  Jason the vain working class Scottish bodybuilder was after all a male-to-male transsexual, who with his fake tan and big (probably steroid enhanced) tits and elaborate grooming and preening rituals was also a thing of glamour and artifice and hormones.  His pneumatic entrance into the BB house in leopard-skin thong was a triumph of exhibitionism and briefly made him favourite to win.  Nadia and Jason were clearly lined up to be the Jordan and Peter Andre of BB (the ‘tranny’ stars of ITV’s I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here).  No doubt Channel 4 were praying that that Jason would shag Nadia.

 

Alas, it wasn’t to be.  After a promising start, it rapidly became apparent that Jason wasn’t playing along and, despite appearances, wasn’t prepared to be tranny enough.  He wanted – how tiresome! – to hold onto what was left of his masculinity.  He initially flirted with gay Dan and then blonde Vanessa, provoking much disapproving discussion of his ‘sleazy’ ‘bisexuality’ in the popular press (male bisexuality is still as unappealing as female bisexuality is appealing, apparently).  Then he had a famous showdown with gay Marco, the Gollum-like creature of distilled campery and spitefulness who, like Nadia his Dungeon Mistress, was fascinated by Jason’s body – who wasn’t? – but resentful of its lack of interest in him, and also of Jason’s paternal role in the house. 

 

Marco taunted Jason with all the annoying shrieking effeminacy he could muster – and let’s face it taunting masculinity/dad is exactly what male effeminacy is designed to do.  Jason, who like everyone that night had had a few, threatened him in the language of a drunken Saturday night in Glasgow, but, disappointingly, didn’t actually hit him (Marco was, after all, literally asking for it).  Instead, Nadia slapped Jason.  This was the end of Jason’s chances of winning BB.

 

One gay man, when I asked him what it was that he loved about Nadia, replied: ‘Well, at least she wasn’t Jason!’  ‘And’, I asked, ‘just what was so awful about Jason?’  ‘He was a thug!’ came the reply.  ‘Erm, lantern-jawed slap-happy “WHATAREYOUGONNADOABOUTIT!!!!” Nadia was rather more of a thug than Jason,’ I huffed.  (Of course, I was somewhat biased as I have a weakness for beefy Glaswegian ex-submariners.)

 

Many, myself included, may have wanted Jason to be a thug, but sadly he wasn’t.  Actually, Victor was the closest thing to a thug in the house, which is precisely why no one in the house challenged his appalling behaviour, except batty, feisty Emma, who was attacked by him and then thrown out by BB for her pains, and, in the final days, a sorely taxed ‘Wedding Night’ Shell.  Jason got it in the neck because he didn’t have anything to hide behind except his ornamental biceps: he wasn’t a woman, he wasn’t gay, he wasn’t black, he wasn’t an asylum seeker.  He was just a working class male narcissist from Glasgow who should never have sent his application in to Channel 4.  Jason was, as Dan said, ‘a big pussycat really’.  (Probably this is why he never stood up to Victor either, and in fact allowed himself to be dominated by him.)

 

In the final weeks Jason stopped playing the game.  He stopped trying to seduce/manipulate people.  He stopped pretending to be anyone’s friend.  His auto-eroticism became really auto – one day he spent an astonishing 4 1/2 hours in the bathroom.  He spent much of the rest of the time sleeping, or pacing around the garden by himself.  Even his exercise routines, which once seemed for our benefit, a one-man Chippendale show, took on a very self-involved, almost religious, Mishima-like quality.  His body became a fortress rather than the bouncy castle it initially promised to be.  Jason shut us out.  This made the viewers very angry.  Why won’t he humiliate himself for us anymore?  Why won’t he emote?  Why won’t he talk shit like everyone else?  Why won’t he play?  What a boring bastard!  In fact, Jason, through his withdrawal, had turned himself into easily the most interesting BB contestant.

 

Jason’s final exit from the BB House to loud boos and his awkward interview with Davina afterwards was embarrassing to watch (Jason was the most hated runner up in the show’s history – probably most of his votes came from his fellow Scots who felt sorry for one of their own being picked on by the Sassenachs.)  He refused to look at the clips of himself inside the house that Davina was so keen to show him, covering his eyes and turning away, and seemed unable to answer her questions.  He appeared, shy, bashful, cowed.  Jason, like everyone else in the house wanted to be liked.  It’s a sign of our hardened times that nowadays this is literally the definition of ‘pathetic’.

 

His response was nevertheless perhaps the least pathological response that evening.  This was after all nothing less than a modern version of a public execution, with Davina as Madame Guillotine, efficient, polished and ever-so humane, grinning at him invitingly, egged on by the crowd waving placards and baying for blood.  Jason had every reason to refuse to put his head on the block and watch Davina’s ‘clips’. 

 

As for the whole ‘Was Jason bisexual?’ issue.  Clearly Jason was not bisexual.  He was metrosexual.  In fact, he was a textbook example of my definition of a metrosexual as a young man ‘who may be officially gay, straight or bisexual but this is utterly immaterial because he has taken himself as his own love-object.’  Jason was also an illustration of the way in which metrosexuality can stand in for homosexuality.  The intensity of Jason’s relationship with his own body looked very much like it stood in for all other male bodies; as far as the male sex was concerned, he was passionately monogamous and faithful to his own reflection (literally: he spent more time with it in the bathroom than with any of the housemates).

 

Jason wasn’t the only metrosexual in the house, however.  There was also pretty boy Stuart the costume-fetishist who loved dressing up and making up and generally pleasing people.  Unfortunately for Stuart, Michelle the shark-eyed Geordie man-eater decided that she was going to accessorise him.  He never stood a chance.  The ensuing ‘relationship’ between them was an on-screen high-speed deconstruction of heterosexuality in which Stuart was infantilised and emasculated in a matter of weeks rather than the more customary years.  (Though admittedly Stuart didn’t have much in the way of balls in the first place).  This was probably the chief reason why Michelle, once a favourite to win, became so hated and was soon evicted.  Her ruthless, almost vaudevillian manipulativeness (and violent, Miss Piggy-ish temper when this failed to get her what she wanted) threw the female role in heterosexual relations into terrifying only slightly exaggerated relief.

 

But, then, what do I know about heterosexuality?  Or women?  Or for that matter relationships?  Now that the ruthlessly manipulative man-eating BB5 is over I’m terminally single again.

 

© Marksimpson.com 2004

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