an opportunity for life. There are church posters that bear the hyperbolic inscription “You’re one in twenty million” – each one of us is a lottery winner before we subdivide, the product of the fastest, strongest sperm. And that applies to proper little weeds like myself, not just Jesse Owens or Michael Flatley. Whether the sperm riverdanced out of the testes or crawled out on its belly, we’re all champions.
I cherish and exalt these moments of sexual bliss, because but for them my life would be an unpunctuated scroll of unremarkable sludge. I’m not given to fist-pumping displays of triumph in my daytime activities – even when they may be warranted – so these nocturnal displays are prized.
When I was informed that I’d got the job hosting Big Brother’s Big Mouth – which changed my life and rescued me from the post-rehab routine of brittle bike rides and underpaid stand-up – I did not cleave the sky like Jimi Hendrix or Thor, I said simply, “That’s good. Thanks.”
The relationship between the British tabloid press and Big Brother is fascinating. They need yet devour each other, like Duncan’s horses in Macbeth, which similarly is a forebear of the apocalypse. Without the tabloid interest, it wouldn’t be the phenomenon it is. In America, where it is denied the tabloid fanfare, Big Brother is an also-ran TV show. A pertinent indication of the distinctions in national character is that in America Survivor, where contestants are stranded on an island and forced to do battle with the elements or be destroyed, is a must-see programme among the descendants of the pioneers. But in England we are drawn to a show where people seldom stray from stifling domesticity and the most incendiary conflagration is likely to be an altercation over the last teacake.
The concept of Big Brother is: twelve or so normal folk live in a camera-saturated house for several months and are voted out by the viewers according to their whims and the way the “housemates” have been edited.
It is titled in tribute to the dystopian Orwellian prediction that in the future we will be observed at all times. The fact that Big Brother can rise to such cultural prominence without its audience acknowledging the source novel, 1984, is one of the show’s greatest achievements – similar credit must go to the programme Room 101 for ignoring the titular implications of their show. In Orwell’s novel, Room 101 is not a receptacle in which to glibly discard pop-cultural trinkets, but the setting for each individual’s personal hell.
It’s very exciting to work on Big Brother in the UK precisely because of the relationship it has with the national press. Every year there is a scandal of some kind, usually trumped up by the ravenous media but often interesting regardless, particularly if you’re me in 2005 and about to embark on a career in which scandal is a key component. My time working on the show forewarned me of the appetite in the British media for salacious tales and the famed maxim that the truth will never get in the way of a good story.
The first scandal came about on the very first series I worked on, which was Big Brother 4. One of the genuinely intriguing aspects of the show is the social disparity between the housemates and the conflict that can elicit. In the house that year were Victor, a south London gangsta, his chum Jason, a Scottish bouncer, a Portuguese pre-op transsexual – eventual winner Nadia – a couple of gay lads and a few women with remarkable boobs, notably Makosi, of whom more later.
I worked on the show for three years, which encompassed seven seasons. Each one had a scandal which drenched the British papers and several which went international. The debut scandal was built around a violent confrontation between Jason and one of the gays, Marco, who Jason – brilliantly – had accused of taunting him with “a dance of disrespect”. The phrase has stayed with me, as Jason used it as if it were culturally loaded, like it was his own personal N-word. As if his people had been taunted by dances of disrespect from time immemorial by despised oppressors across the border. “At the battle of Culloden the hated British troops mocked their brave Celtic captives with a sickening dance of disrespect in which they camply jiggled their pert little bum-bums at the manacled Scots.”
This daft provocation led to an unbroadcastable brawl that was fucking brilliant to watch – the house boiled over into a riot of slamming doors and screams, cameras couldn’t keep up with the action, it was like watching CCTV footage of a 3am liquor store robbery. It was the actualisation of the unspoken incentive for watching the whole damn shebang – you wanna see ’em fight and fuck. It was primal and exciting and obviously too good to go on telly in an unedited form. I got to watch a pre-sanitised version which they sent to my flat so that I could write jokes about it. When an executive producer realised that this sensitive material had been allowed out of the Elstree studios where the show was made he rightly flipped. “What!! That new presenter, ex-junky lunatic, who had to sign a special contract with a ‘sack on sight of substance abuse’ clause, is in possession of a tape that could get the whole show cancelled??!! Get it back NOW!!”
Tiptoeing around my perspective on the footage and hoping to discover what I might likely say, Shed, an exec from the channel and a lovely quirky bloke, asked me what I thought. “It was amazing,” I blurted, “like when it kicks off on the terraces at football or at a protest and chaos reigns supreme and your blood surges and your gut churns. Also it calls to mind the wise words of the World War One general who said, ‘You cannot rouse the animal in man then expect it to be put aside at will’ – I loved it.” He paused. “Could you not say anything like that on tonight’s show, please?” he said firmly.
He needn’t have worried – when the show began I was a tentative little worm in distressed T-shirt and pumps. I’d yet to transmute into the spiky, lacquered Jack Frost sex sprite that would soon, after a princess’s kiss, a saint’s curse and a chat show godfather’s approving nod, adorn the tabloids like a Big Brother winner. I was still but a squirt sat behind a desk all neat and meek.
The show evolved in time, due to the recruitment of two very funny men, Mark Lucey (Irish blood, QPR heart, all sensitive with a sixth sense of humour, like most people I love) and Ian Coyle (giant Elvis Costello, scouse and dour yet suddenly lachrymose). They infused the show with a Reeves and Mortimer-type joy and with me created some of digital TV’s most memorable catchphrases.
Distinctive and puerile idioms sprung up that assisted us in making a show that went out live and was on five nights a week. Under those conditions you need to evolve a structure and a grammar or it’d never get made. We were fortunate in that we were in tune with an appetite to see the by now huge, phenomenal show undermined from within. We didn’t view the main show with disdain but saw in the minutiae of the disputes and tiny travesties endless domestic humour.
Big Brother was always a rich source of comedy for us. Every day something ridiculous would occur and, over the period we worked together, there were events and characters that made a monumental impact: Kinga, who publicly masturbated with a wine bottle, Pete, the Tourette’s sufferer and unlikely heart-throb, the romance of Preston and Chantelle ... But Big Brother also spawned an icon of such magnitude that she rocketed from the confines of the house and its transient, scratch-and-sniff celebrity and into true stardom – Jade Goody.
When my mum first got cancer I must’ve been around six years old, the age Jade’s eldest son is now. Too young, in fact, to properly comprehend what was happening, but old enough to sense the tingling presence of fear, the averted looks, the stifled, thin-lipped sympathy and muddled, neighbourly compassion. My mum, thank God, did not die, and whilst her cancer returned several times, each time more frightening for me as my innocence waned, to be replaced with dread, she lives still, so I can but imagine the sad confusion of the two bereaved boys.
I knew their mother, Jade Goody, not especially well, but Jade’s defining characteristic was her easy warmth that ingenuously enveloped folk, so perhaps like many people
