Yes, it’s official- Channel Ten have announced that they won’t be bringing Big Brother back for 2009. Hurrah!
I won’t go into my loathing of this show or Reality TV in general, but I will say I was surprised to see that the show has only bought in $8m for Queensland over an 8-year run. A reasonable-sized KFC* store anywhere in the state would be doing that every year, which basically makes me wonder why the hell the State Government didn’t tell Big Brother to fuck off a lot sooner, as from what I can tell it’s bought no almost benefit to the state at all.
I thought the first three years of teh show were really interesting and entertaining. But after that it rapidly turned to shite and became a “lets get the hot chick together with the hot guy” load of nonsense, and every person on the show were interchangeably bland and repulsive.
I’m glad it’s dead, and I hope it never returns (They’re claiming it will be back in 2010, but “retooled” but it hopefully won’t).
A quick post to agree with you. From the first few episodes of the first series I thought that this show was the worst thing I had ever seen on TV.
I hated it so much that if people mentioned to me that they watched it I would begin to question their intelligence. They may as well have said they were Scientologists.
Phew… For a second there I thought BB US had been canceled.
And BTW, BB is the single greatest anthropological experiment ever in my humble opinion. Take a dozen or so attention loving, undereducated, oversexed, individuals and lock them in a house with no outside contact for three months, and dangle a giant cash prize in front of them. If they tried to do in a lab no ethics board in the world would permit it. But, put it on TV and its an international hit.
All the other reality shows add layers of artifice. People on an deserted island, people dating the same chick, people eating bugs for money… BB is streamlined to give us what we really want: total psychotic breakdowns broadcast live 24 hours-a-day! God bless America.
Although they did axe celebrity BB after the stupid racism fuss. Celebrity BB was the best form of BB there was.
They should have just fixed the show rather than axe it. I.e. throw off and maybe refer to the police anyone who was racist on the show. And try not to put any racists on in the first place. It isn’t BB’s fault that some individuals chose to be racist. (I am of the opinion that they were very stupidly racist, and that Shilpa was naive to pretend they weren’t)
It would have to be one hell of a KFC to do $8 Mil a year. At $7 a meal that would be about 3000 customers a day and I imagine that’s pretty generous to assume everyone spends $7 on average. Oh, and that’s Gross Revenue. The Net Income would be dramatically less because you can assume that a fast food joint would be lucky to be operating at around a 25% margin. Based on your phrasing it seems that that $8 Mill is Profit for the producers (which I take to be the State, strange that), not Gross Revenue so for the analogy to hold water the KFC would probably need to grossing about $30 Million a year and serving over 12000 full meals a day, I’d hate to be that line cook.
In Australian BB, they effectively threw out the whole isolation angle. Apart from the Ninjas on Friday Night Games, they also have so many so-called “intruders” that it was like a revolving door had been installed. The guy who was responsible for this mess, Kris Noble, was not part of the show this year, but it’s too late. The premise has lost its audience.
I was exaggerating, but I think my point stands that the Australian BB contributed less to the State of Queensland in its 8-year run than an individual component store of one of the show’s sponsors…
