When Davina McCall asked me in her bright, overenthusiastic fashion why I called Big Brother a bully, there was not a hint of irony in the presenter’s intelligent brown eyes.

People who have read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four will already be aware, however, that the whole point of Big Brother is that he is a bully.

They will also know that the language spoken by Big Brother’s “Inner Party” bureaucracy is called Newspeak. In Davina’s Newspeak, Big Brother is a force for good and the abuses that he designs are “challenges” — character-building exercises, not degrading ordeals.

Both Kenzie and Lisa, two of my former housemates, can be heard regularly intoning Big Brother’s mantra, “It’s all good” — which is Newspeak for “It’s all bad (but we musn’t complain).”

The bullying began the day before we entered the Big Brother house, when the eight of us were sequestered overnight in different hotels. To keep secret our identities, our rooms had been booked in the names of employees of Endemol, the company behind Big Brother. My first taste of Big Brother’s incompetence was that I had not been told about this. The hotel denied all knowledge of any reservation and insisted on charging the room to my credit card.

Once I succeeded in getting into a room, gangs from the Endemolian Inner Party arrived to take photographs, ask more and more intrusive questions and to repack my things in my Big Brother suitcase.

One Endemolian held up each item, scrutinised it and described it; another wrote down what she said. The only thing to be confiscated from my bag was my kohl eyebrow pencil, in case I should write with it. I would be eyebrowless for the duration.

Big Brother allowed us to bring in no electrical appliances of any kind. An electric shaver would be supplied for the men, but no hair drier for anyone and no Caprice Ceramic Hair Straightener either — so Caprice, my former housemate, must be hoping to quit before her hair does.

I was the second housemate to arrive, after John McCririck, who had already entertained viewers by bouncing off the walls as he tried to walk through the set. He told me that he was there only because he was a failed punter, failed journalist, failed broadcaster and really needed the money, and my heart went out to him.

I was to become more concerned for him as it became increasingly obvious that he didn’t understand the game and didn’t realise that Big Brother would regularly deceive and disappoint him. And so began his epic battles, all of them misconceived, against the routine ill-treatment of the housemates. Again and again he would ask, “What are they playing at?” Strangely, for an experienced television performer, John didn’t understand just how many cameras and microphones there were around him and just how much editorial control Endemol had over the way that the housemates would appear to the watching millions.

Endemol chose to show footage of John asleep with his hand in his underpants and of him picking large bogies from his nose and eating them. Equally revealing and embarrassing images of other housemates would not have gone to air unless Endemol willed it.

What this means is that Endemol has huge scope for influencing public perception of the housemates, almost to the point of being able to pick its own winner. I would not be at all surprised to find some housemates had caveats in their contracts to protect them against the more humiliating kinds of intrusion. The rest of us had to keep a guard on our behaviour day and night.

The housemate who understands this best is Caprice Bourret, who will never allow herself to be seen sleeping or in any unflattering posture whatsoever. Beneath a soft and yielding exterior lies stern self-discipline and a will of iron.

The tabloids described the work-out routine she did on day three as “raunchy”; in truth, it was gruelling and Caprice didn’t even break sweat. As if. Caprice is in the Big Brother house to advertise her brand of lingerie and swimwear; for her it is a win-win situation. Not only is she getting a few million quids’ worth of free advertising, she is also being handsomely paid for being there.

As we waited for the next housemates to arrive she told me she was afraid of Brigitte Nielsen because she was more like a man than a woman. I was not to see her make such a tactical error again.

Enter Mark Berry, better known as Bez, hero of the Happy Mondays’ 1986 hit single Freaky Dancin’, who is fast winning his way into the nation’s heart as people get used to his Manchester dialect.

At first I thought he was going to get up my nose because he insisted on taking the only upper-level bunk bed: mine. I was a bit miffed but thought it better to submit. Just as well, because the bed broke on the first night. Bez is a flyweight; if I’d been sleeping in his bed, Brigitte, who sleeps underneath, would now be history. The broken bed followed the general rule of the Big Brother house that everything supplied for the housemates must be as trashy as possible.

As the days passed I realised that Bez is a man who makes light of his own pain while showing concern for the pain of others. He is compassionate without being lugubrious, genuinely well intentioned and lighthearted to the point of sunniness. This apparently is what enormous amounts of E can do for a person; unfortunately for the rest of us E-use is much more likely to result in chronic depression than lifelong glee.

When Brigitte insisted on playing Spin the Bottle and that all the truth or dare questions be about sex, Bez confessed that he masturbated three or four times a day.

WHENEVER technicians come onto the set, which is quite often, the housemates are “locked down”, shut in their sleeping quarters with the blind down. If it’s day-time the lights will be left on, and a cacophonous alarm will be sounded repeatedly if anyone should fall asleep. Or at least this used to be the case before the unfortunate importation of Jacqueline Stallone, Brigitte’s former mother-in-law, who was still on LA time and could not be made to stay out of bed for more than an hour or two at a time.

During lockdown the bathroom and lavatory are also locked, in case housemates should come face to face with a technician. As two of the female housemates seemed to have a urinary problem, barring access to the lavatory resulted in real and completely unentertaining suffering which might go on for hours. It would have served Big Brother right if housemates had wet their beds and daubed the walls with shit.

The bathroom and lavatory needed to be locked because access to the toilet during lock-down was through the bathroom, and the external bathroom wall is glass, which brings us to Big Brother’s principal bullying tactic: the removal of all privacy. “Big Brother is watching you” even when you shower, so housemates had to wash their private parts with their pants on. The alternative was to bleach their pubic hair in the Jacuzzi, which contained so much chlorine that the towel Brigitte wore on the first night in lieu of a bathing costume went in blue and came out pinkish-orange.

The one unseen space in the house is the lavatory, but even there Big Brother could hear housemates grunting and the splash as they took a dump. A good example of Big Brother’s not-so-unique combination of cruelty with incompetence is that the external door to the lavatory had no bolt. Although housemates tried to remember always to knock, every single one has been surprised on the lavatory several times.

The point of this is either deliberately to disrupt bowel and bladder function, or it has no point at all. It is moot whether Big Brother’s incompetence is greater than his cruelty or vice versa. The lavatory had a weak flush and was often blocked. It was more than Big Brother could do to fix it.

Housemates had been told to “expect the unexpected”, but there is no surprise value in such mundane and insulting squalor, of which viewers could know nothing unless Caprice decided to do one of her two lavatory routines. She loves to talk about farting, which she calls “flagellation”. She also becomes strangely excited when she finds a floater or “log” in the lavatory bowl and runs about looking for someone to blame.

Dirt doesn’t show up on television. Although the Big Brother kitchen might look okay, it is anything but. The housemates graze constantly and the single sink is often full of dishes either weltering in their own grease or stewing for hours in lukewarm water.

Dirt from the last Big Brother series still lines the oven. None of the cleaning products in the cupboard is capable of removing this burnt-on fat or the ancient grime that has accumulated in the gaps between the floor tiles.

When Big Brother replaced all the ceramic plates with wooden bowls and spoons for a “medieval court game”, the only way to make these safe would have been to boil them after each use. This was not done. Some of the bowls are split. The longer they are left in dirty water the more dangerous they become. Serving food on wood in restaurants is illegal; in the Big Brother house it is compulsory.

The housemates need a bigger refrigerator. They need kitchen towels, clingfilm and greaseproof paper. And they need fresh food daily. Prolonged negotiations resulted, we thought, in Big Brother’s providing fresh milk, but he could never remember to deliver it. When I left we had been without milk, tea and sugar for 18 hours.

As the refrigerator was too small to hold more than a day’s rations for eight people, we had no option but to keep food, including cooked food, uncovered on the countertop or in a cupboard so hot that sweetcorn fermented in an unopened tin.

Even in the refrigerator the food decayed. The mushrooms I had to make a pasta sauce with were covered with slime; Another dish I cooked had to be made with fermenting peppers because I thought Brigitte had asked for them to be replaced. She had forgotten.

ALTHOUGH the janitorial role quickly became mine by default, I was damned if I was going to ask for everything we needed. Part of the strategy is to induce each housemate to believe that Big Brother is his or her sole confidant and friend. My instinctive response was to withhold as much as humanly possible. I went to the diary room to talk to Big Brother only when summoned. I’m claustrophobic and the hot red padded space quickly made me feel sick. I’d been nauseated since the food trial on day three anyway.

I still don’t know how much of the vomiting in the food trial was visible to the public. There were three vomiters: Bez, Kenzie and me. Was it cruelty or cock-up that meant that we were all cold and hungry before beginning the “challenge”? We were ordered into lockdown just as I was cooking lunch and kept there for more than three hours. We were already low on blood sugar and soon all of us were shivering violently. We vomited because we were sat on a revolving merry-go-round which was rotated at 17rpm or above for 15 minutes.

I won’t bore you with what it felt like to vomit helplessly and repeatedly on prime-time television. Suffice it to say that the three of us sprayed human bile all over the Big Brother “garden”.

Despite the dirt, housemates have no way of washing clothes, let alone ironing them, so they have no option but to appear increasingly dishevelled as the ordeal wears on. Furthermore, everyone in the house is using the same stock of blue towels, which cannot be told apart, and the same bathrobes. By now both will be crawling with bacteria promiscuously collected from all eight bodies.

The entertainment value of these entirely avoidable health hazards is absolutely nil, especially as Big Brother has no intention of sharing his cock-ups with the public.

Viewers have no way of knowing that the housemates are all becoming increasingly dehydrated or that because the climate control system can blast only super-dry heated air, the dry-mouthed, wheezing housemates keep asking for it to be turned down, which Big Brother interprets as off. Housemates must either shiver or sweat.

As viewers know, the Big Brother house boasts one double bedroom and one dormitory; what they may not realise is that both are supposed to be hermetically sealed at night and supplied by air circulated through ceiling vents. Lisa l’Anson brought kennel cough with her and barked through most of the first night and part of every night since. Now everyone coughs, off and on.

John fought a heroic battle against being forced to breathe recycled air all night and illegally placed his bag between the one exterior door and the jamb to let a little fresh air in. This Big Brother would not allow; when Kenzie obeyed the order to remove the bag, John insulted him in unforgivable terms. Kenzie quite properly went ballistic and Big Brother had what he wanted.

If Kenzie had disobeyed the order, it would have been repeated until it was obeyed. Kenzie doesn’t know that viewers are disappointed that he hasn’t apologised; viewers don’t know that Kenzie has nothing to apologise for.

For the infrared cameras to work properly, the bedroom must be completely dark. When the blind comes down there is not a chink of natural light. Housemates may not be sure whether it is night or day; they are allowed no watches.

As Mussolini’s enforcers found, it is easy to break a prisoner by turning day into night and jumbling mealtimes. So severe is the false night effect that some housemates thought the one clock in the house was being tampered with and that what seemed to be morning was actually late afternoon.







BY the end of Nineteen Eighty-four, Winston Smith has come to love Big Brother. If I was supposed to come to love Lisa or Brigitte or Caprice, I had little chance. None of them made any attempt at contact with me or tried to involve me in any of their activities, which was fine with me.

At one point, when I was sitting alone by the Jacuzzi, Lisa wandered within earshot. I took the opportunity to apologise for my ignorance of her brilliant career and asked her to tell me about herself. For a heartbeat she looked as if she might not be able to resist the opportunity to talk about her favourite subject, but then she backed away and said with sweet condescension that normally she’d love to stop and chat but she really needed to put tiger balm oil on her temples, and off she went to join the girls.

I have now seen footage of Lisa and Brigitte musing in a hurt kind of way on why I didn’t like them. It shouldn’t have come as such a surprise; there’s not a lot to like. Brigitte has a certain kamikaze charm which is part and parcel of her astonishing selfishness. As far as I can tell, Lisa has no charm whatsoever.

If Lisa spoke to me at all, it was in dismissive tones and over her shoulder. She was giving me orders long before the game in which she was queen and we were all “cortiays”, which was the best she could make of “courtiers”.

By the beginning of day three I had been so completely ostracised from the group of girls that if I entered the space where they were bonding, they would fall silent or loudly change the subject. If they had not, I might not have felt as sorry for Brigitte as I did. For in these gab sessions the girls shared highlights of their lives so far and I might have known that Brigitte had already willingly surrendered her right to any shred of dignity or privacy.

Brigitte’s has been a strange and mostly ignominious career which is now reaching its nadir. In a television reality show called The Surreal Life she was happy to walk about naked and indulge in public dalliance with the rap star Flavor Flav. Three days after she entered the Big Brother house, a follow-up programme called Strange Love, in which Flavor Flav pursues her to Italy in an attempt to win her back, premiered on the VH1 channel.

Now that I know Brigitte makes a career out of exhibiting her life on television, I feel a bit of a fool for refusing to be involved in Endemol’s attempt to outflank VH1 by invoking the only really interesting and faintly classy episode in Brigitte’s life, her brief marriage to Sylvester Stallone two decades ago.

I believed her when she complained that bringing Stallone’s mother into the Big Brother house, as Endemol did last Monday, would result in newspaper coverage that would jeopardise her position with regard to custody of her sons in her current divorce from her fourth husband.

If I’d known, I’d have thought that her readiness to get the bazongas out for the boys in the house would be much more likely to alienate a divorce court judge than a hostile encounter with a woman who was briefly her mother-in-law.

Although I was and am sorry for Brigitte, she is quite right that I don’t like her. It’s hard to like someone who insists on taking a handful of spaghetti out of the one 500g pack that you have to feed eight people, cooks it for herself, seasons it with your second to last chilli pepper, and then eats half of it and leaves the rest. (There was pasta that I had cooked on the table, but she preferred her own.) Damn right I don’t like her or her habit of grabbing her store-bought breasts, banging them together like cymbals and shouting “Hot diggity!” at the top of her lungs, by way of signifying that she is having a good time.

At no time did Brigitte ever display the least respect for me, not as a woman, an older woman or even a human being. The guys were different. They talked to me. They sometimes asked me genuine questions and would even listen when I replied, if they could. More often, Lisa or Brigitte would simply interrupt and talk over me. In real life I wouldn’t have let it happen. In the Big Brother house you roll your eyes and let the viewers decide who is a cow and who isn’t.

Kenzie had been afraid that he would be the odd one out in the house because he was only 19; with his sweetness, simplicity, mental suppleness and capacity for fun, he’d never be the odd one out anywhere. The difficulty with Kenzie was to get enough of him. Unlike Lisa and Brigitte he seldom took centre stage. When he did, unlike them he had something to say.

Neither Caprice nor Lisa nor Brigitte ever said a witty thing. Kenzie and Jeremy often did, Jeremy in so deadpan a fashion that the girls didn’t get it. John, on the other hand, invariably laughed at his own jokes, which were often nasty and seldom funny.







CELEBRITY Big Brother is now a shambles. When Mama Stallone refused to play the “cortiay” game, the scenario for the following days fell apart. Deprived of the joy of watching Brigitte warm the lavatory seat for the woman who made her life a misery 20 years ago, viewers must be finding life in the house rather flat.

The housemates are still eating with their pestilential wooden spoons. They have been delivered far more food than they can store, so botulism will still be stalking the kitchen. Brigitte and her former mother-in-law were still talking to each other occasionally until Mama was voted off the show on Friday night — probably a great relief to both of them. It’s all good.

As for myself, what did I learn under the eye of Big Brother? First, there is no such thing as reality television. Very little that is seen to happen actually happens and a great deal of what actually happens remains unseen.

Second, while it is understood that Big Brother is a bully by definition, the housemates have a choice as to whether to replicate and amplify his unreasonable and sadistic behaviour. Take the incident of the Diet Coke. When John said he could not function without it, Big Brother chose to torment him by denying it to him while offering it to all the other housemates. Not only did they all drink it but they taunted John, as children might taunt an unpopular child in the playground.

Did viewers notice that I didn’t join in? If the Endemolian Inner Party had decided to point out my non-compliance, they would have. As it didn’t, they didn’t.

As reality television series multiply across the networks they will become increasingly sadistic and prurient. The only way forward for ordeal by television is down, which in Newspeak is of course up, towards maximum exploitation of vulnerable people.

In my estimation both John and Brigitte were vulnerable. I walked out because I didn’t want to be part of their undoing, not because I was afraid for myself. As long as there was a possibility that the housemates could be got to revolt against Big Brother, I had a reason to stay. If they had taken off their microphones, refused to join in the humiliation of Brigitte and the manipulation of her mother-in-law and told Big Bugger to go stuff himself, we could have made a difference to the mindset of the British viewing public — who so enjoyed the anguish and humiliation of Nicole Appleton in I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out Of Here! that they voted for her to undergo bush tucker trials five times.

We’ve watched the rise of bullying at school and the attempts made to combat it. Big Brother is bullying in all its forms writ large. It is the politics of the playground projected back to people as entertainment, and it gives children in particular and people in general absolutely the wrong idea about what is acceptable behaviour.

It would be pompous to suggest that the proliferation of ordeal television is actively promoting a bullying culture in Britain without a lot more work being done on the extent and nature of bullying in schools and workplaces. But it is now up to the British public to decide what should become of cruelty television, and to turn their thumbs down.

I went into the Big Brother house to raise money for my charity and to finance my regeneration work in my Australian rainforest. If someone else were to offer me a similar amount of money for burying myself in muck and derision for a few days, I would probably do it again. What I wouldn’t do is be drawn into complicity with the degradation and humiliation of others who I consider, rightly or wrongly, to be weaker than myself.