I watched bits of this last night. Just to address the gullibility questions:
To whittle down the prospective space cadets to only the most gullible and malleable people they ran a series of tests. One interesting one was they put a bunch of balls in a jar in a room and had the contestants enter one by one. The contestant would guess how many balls were in the jar (around 200) and state their guess out loud. They were then revealed a flipchart that showed previous contestants’ names and guesses and asked to write their guess down.
Now the clever bit was that the previous answers were all fake and artificially high (550, 600 etc). If the contestant changed their estimate after looking at the other guesses then they were deemed to be malleable. If they didn’t change their answer then they would be a risky prospect as they might challenge the information they would be fed during the “mission”.
I watched this and considering it’s a reality TV show (a genre I normally despise or at least try to avoid), I rate it quite highly.
The hoax is all about the preparation - by the time anyone realises that they’re not actually in space, floating around in microgravity, it’s too late because the hoax will have reached its conclusion.
They really have gone to some lengths to make the disused base look plausible, right down to refitting all of the electrics and buying in all of the supplies and consumables from Russia.
The shortlisted candidates (9 contestants and 3 stooges), whittled down from hundreds, were only told that they were to be space tourists on the tarmac at some civillian airport or other; they were given a minute to decide whether to continue (they were all enthusiastically positive), then they boarded the plane, flew in big circles over the North Sea for four hours, then landed directly at the mocked up site in Suffolk.
I do actually, but my room is too small (a VCR and TV would make a lot of difference, beleive me). I’ll be replacing my old VHS with DVDs for my PC eventually and scabbing digital TV viewing off friends and family whenever possible
The first UK series of Big Brother had potential as interesting television, because a lot of the situations that arose were just emergent from the interactions of the (doubtless carefully chosen) personalities in the house; subsequent series though have just been cynical attempts to engineer such situations, such as the glaringly contrived ‘first live televised sexual intercourse’, which was just stupid.
And here’s me having said I don’t watch reality TV. I didn’t watch much of BB series 1 - hardly at all, but the events that unfolded in the house (notably the ‘Nasty Nick’ thing) seemed a lot more honest.
The preparation has been amazing. Every single thing they encounter on base will be Russian - snack foods, shampoo, whatever. They spent thousands, even down to buying old Soviet space helmets for the mission commander to have as mementoes on his desk and so on. The people on the show are indeed gullible idiots. The zero-G thing would be my major concern.
I actually know an insider on the show, and while I won’t reveal all the things I’ve heard, one of the stories not on the programme is that they sent a vast team of people through the entire site to comb the area for any rubbish - crisp packets, bits of newspaper - that might be lying around.
I can’t help thinking that some of them might sue when they get their final humiliation, live on TV, in front of millions… Though I’m sure they signed watertight waivers.
This is live, right? What’s to stop the Sun (to pick a candidate at random) from spoiling the experiment by flying a plane overhead with a banner reading “You’re in Ipswich!”
From what I’ve heard both in the media and heard from my friend, it really is live. Something about a no-fly zone over the site - no Sun banners, no EasyJet Airbuses. I’m sure someone will try to screw it up, though.
Really? How could it be live when channel 4 has been advertising it for more than a month? They can’t have kept the shortlisted candidates away from the media all that time, can they?
I don’t know that it has been advertised for that long, has it? They’ve been on six weeks’ ‘training’, and until it was announced, when they were already out of circulation, there were dozens of deliberate pieces of misinformation buzzing around. E.g. until about a fortnight ago my mate was telling us they were to appear in a reality show where they had to write a sitcom, and at the end of ten days they had to perform it. (Now that’s entertainment.)
E4 will also be showing live feeds from the ‘camp’, though I suppose this could all be pre-recorded too.
I’m sure I’ve been seeing lots of teasers on channel 4 for more than a month, not to mention posters on bus shelters for at least a fortnight, maybe a month.
If they had taken steps to completely isolate the shortlist candidates during the last six weeks, then I could believe it was live, but they don’t seem to have mentioned much if anything about that. The only indication that springs to mind is one of the candidates whining about being frisked every day.
If it truly is live (now), then I’d say there’s a very real chance of stooge Steve fucking it up completely by throwing a tantrum when it gets tough.
There can’t ever be a ‘season 2’ of this show; I can’t believe the producers would risk revealing (to us) that it’s going to be a hoax until it was in the can - at least if they did that, they could quickly run the last 5 days again (the bit at the faux Russian base) with a different set of applicants from the same batch.
OK, I’ve consulted with my media expert (mrs jjimm and her copy of Heat), and they’ve already been on the base for about a month. The total running time of the show is 10 days, so what we see is initially pre-recorded, but at some point the timeline will catch up to a live broadcast - perhaps not until the ‘launch’ and the end. Total incarceration time will be just under 6 weeks.
Where did you get this information? My impression was that the game would be up sometime during/shortly after launch.
BTW, gravity is substantial in space; being in orbit just means you don’t feel it because you’re falling in the same way as everything else around you. If you built a really tall tower (a space elevator, even), you could stand at the top of the atmosphere and you certainly wouldn’t feel weightless.
Not that any of this is relevant to the topic in hand.
