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BROTHERLY LOVE September 03 2000 For the three of you who haven't heard of the TV show "Big Brother" or live in countries where it hasn't yet been broadcast, a brief explanation: "Big Brother" is a gameshow-meets-soap-opera which forces ten complete strangers to live with one another for something like two months. Their antics are recorded via TV cameras in every nook and cranny of their abode (which gives new meaning to term 'studio flat') and shown to the nation via a daily TV show and 24/7 webcast. After nomination within the house and a public telephone vote, one by one the housemates are evicted. The "winner" gets a £70,000 prize and presumably a presenting job on the childrens' TV show of their choice. Given that it's a groundbreaking show (and one of Channel Four's most popular transmissions ever), people are talking about Big Brother the whole time. Well, at least the cretins that I surround myself with are talking about it the whole time. The newspapers are too: "Who do you think will be the winner?" has become the water-cooler conversation of 2000. Built upon a recent trend for using "real people" in TV shows (they're cheaper, one assumes), "Big Brother" extends the docusoap format made famous first by Australia's "Sylvania Waters" and lately by Britain's "Driving School." Yet, with its suitably Orwellian title and undeniably questionable ethical position, "Big Brother" realises the horrifying possibilities of television as envisaged by books such as Stephen King's "The Running Man" and movies such as "The Truman Show". All this has meant that critics and culture-vultures scorn "Big Brother" as dumbed-down, high concept, low-content voyeurism. But watching "Big Brother" has been one of the few events which made me feel like I'm living in the 21st Century. Unlike the BBC's "Castaway", an anachronistic "social experiment" which looks more decrepit than the decades-old Granada documentary "Seven Up", BB couldn't have been made at any other time. It's more perverse - and therefore more futuristic - than the Dome, the London Eye, the Tate Modern or any of Britain's other Millennium landmarks. Can there be any other period in history in which stars are more disposable, their celebrity more short-lived? As more channels of entertainment battle for control of our senses - digital TV, the Web, broadband, so we must gorge ourselves drunkenly at our shallow pool of talent and originality, sinking lower and lower to find grist for the mill. comment on this article e-mail this to a friend start a discussion 
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