big brother

saw an ad for the next season of big brother...

can we call it a season? yes, i think we can.
so, the next season of big brother is coming up.
woo-hoo. i have oscillated in my affections for the show. i got keen the last couple of episodes of the first season. i like it when the number of housemates gets low. i can't remember how many seasons there've been, or how i felt about them all. but i did like the last one, mostly for the real-time stuff late at night. i just liked coming home from dancing and joining the housemates for a little sitting about or latenight shenanigans. i love the nothingness of it - they do ordinary stuff. i could see the dumb jokes developing.

it was just like when i was an undergrad hanging out with my housemates when we were all under- or unemployed. too much time, too little to do. lots of excellently stupid jokes. like the time paul said he'd pay jase (who was living on austudy for the grand sum of $120 a week. truly. thankyou howard - you are mr generosity) $20 to run up the street naked. just cause. we were all bored, jase was poor. it sounded cool. and you know, i can't even remember if jase did it. he probably did. he didn't have terribly strong nudity taboos going on. i often wonder if the wilsons ever miss his public displays of flesh.

yeah, right. just like that. sheesh. talk about buying into the whole big brother telly bullshit thing.

but anyway - big brother.
so i'm looking forward to the latenight stuff. i quite liked the adults-only show in season... um... 1?
but The Squeeze is Not Happy. he feels that almost all reality television (except iron chef) is amoral. a badnaughtywrong. i'm not allowed to watch any reality tv when he's about - he'll leave the room. he's not happy with popstar, survivor or those ones about whingey brits coming to australia. not that i particularly want to watch any of these things (especially not the temptation island ones - they offend even me). but if i was to watch them, i'd like to watch them with company. it's not the same on your own.

browsing the bigbrotheraustralia site, i noticed an interesting thing. check out that ad for the ybblue thing. so big brother sponsors are directly sponsoring research into depression. kind of ironic (or perhaps cause-and-effect-y) considering the stories about ex-survivors/housemates having post-traumatic stress syndrome, depression, anxiety, etc etc etc.
maybe we'll discover a few decades from now that pop culture's obsession with reality tv has led to widespread mental illness. perhaps it'll be useful in developing treatments and understandings of the causes...
ah fukk. maybe The Squeeze is right, and iron chef is the only acceptable form of reality television.