Tit Launch

Big Brother, the show that launched a thousand tits, literally and metaphorically will be returning to our screens this week, brimming with more desperate souls willing to sell their past, present and future for a Heat front cover and five minutes of our attention, bless, it’s almost flattering really.
It’s strange to remember but when the show first appeared on our screen ten whole years ago, it was considered quite trendy. It was the summer of 1999, the world was a different place, we were still giddy from the marriage of Prince Edward and Sophie (do you remember your street party?), Liam and Patsy were the coolest couple in the world and the only terrorist threats were the IRA and the odd dirty nail bomb in a gay bar in Soho- halcyon days! Remember Anna, the Irish lesbian skateboarding nun, Nasty Nick, officially the most evil man in the world (he wrote names on pieces of paper! Try explaining how wrong that was to people too young to remember, they’ll laugh in your face, but at the time, he was our Joseph Fritzel) and Craig, the large muscular scouse man child the last, lonely voice of reason in a house gone mad. But slowly the flatmates have slid from people we’d aspire to be friends with to people we’d cross the road to avoid, even if it meant being run over. Remember how excited we got back in BB2 when Paul and Helen started holding hands? They were falling in love before our eyes, we swooned! Now days in, hitherto strangers are willing to sweatily rut in the diary room chair, like insecure mating pandas, with only the dream of their own OK spread glimmering in their squinting eyes. Live in front of Big Brother, their friends and family and everybody they’ve ever know, or will know, they will vomit up every dark secret, display every personality quirk and oddity, all with the same confused desperate look in their eye, is this right? Will this make you like me? Love me!! Again, it’s almost flattering.
Their lives post Big Brother also hints at the decline in standards. Anna (BB1) now has a successful career in Irish television as a respected broadcaster, Brian (BB2) appears now and then on obscure digital channels, and Kate (Winner BB9) can’t even afford a television set. She has to look in the window of Currys if she wants to see anything or follow the soaps by reading magazine covers in WH Smith. That is a fact.
A bit like soldiers who faced action, contestants never seem the same after the experience, especially on the later "Celebrity Specials". Take Jodie Marsh. Poor girl, she just wants love, or it’s poor relation, a little bit of attention, but she’s like that annoying girl at school who used to fake panic attacks to try to get people to like her. She briefly appeared on Celebrity Big Brother three years ago, but was so nauseatingly unlikeble and unpopular with the other housemates, she emerged even less likeable than when she entered the house to booing mobs. Since, up until that point she was chiefly famous for having slept with Calum Best, this is not faint praise. Her acclaimed autobiography "Keeping it Real" ("A modern day Pepys…but with better tits" Nuts magazine) reads like a who’s who of men whose job it is impregnate girls from Atomic Kitten. The sort of men who view Lee from Blue as the governor. The most interesting aspect of her time on the show was her friendship with pre fame Chantelle Haughton. Jodie promised to take the skinny unknown under her wing; she’d show her how to pose for the lads mags, she’s bring her to the sort of nightclubs where footballers get accused of sexual assault in the toilets, even a personal audience with Abi Titmus was hinted at.It was like watching "Faust" but the devil was bright orange and looked a bit like a duck with beast implants. Now Chantelle, post an OK marriage and divorce, has her very own fake boobs, orange skin, fish lips and footballer boyfriend and Jodie after a brief but very public flirtation with lesbianism, has now decided she’s going to be a bodybuilder. Will somebody please just give these girls some attention, so they can quietly go away? Maybe this year’s Big Brother twist will be that the show will be based in southern Lebanon, or the West Bank, and housemates have to use their natural attention seeking tendencies to work as part of the UN peace keeping missions. Yes, there might be a few casualties but think of the break we’d be giving their families. We could tell the housemates that for every village they defend against gorilla attack, they’ll get an appearance on The Friday Night Project. Jodie, don’t pretend you’re not interested.