January 7, 2005


Big sister could be a winner

BIG BROTHER is on - and for the first time, I'm intrigued.

The series has run numerous times on Channel 4 television in the UK, featuring both 'ordinary' people and 'celebrities'.

Newspapers have welcomed the start of this latest celebrity version by saying that they have never heard of some of the 'celebrities' who have been incarcerated in the specially-built house on a television production lot about 20 miles north of London.

The papers are largely right; I had not heard of two of the young men joining the house. One is a former dancer, the other is an actor who has appeared in two medical soap operas.

The baby of the house, a member of a teen band unknown to anyone other than their contemporaries, began his imprisonment on his 19th birthday.

But it is in the older women where the producers may have found their biggest audience hooks.

My interest has been caught by the involvement of Professor Germaine Greer.

The awesome academic - who came to public attention with a bang around the world with the publication of The Female Eunuch - is now in her 60s.

She is confident, forthright and an intellectual powerhouse, self-reliant but still human, and seemingly intolerant of fools.

Quite why she agreed to take part in a television entertainment programme that previously attracted such intellectual heavyweights as Vanessa Feltz and Claire Sweeney is itself a reason for watching.

Germaine may have grey hair and dress in comfortable, stretchy, grey fabrics, but her personality certainly isn't grey. She is a sexy and sexual woman.

The Danish model and film actress Brigitte Neilson seems to have been longer than the 40 years her online biographies claim.

She made her entrance in a short, skin-tight black dress, flaunting a gaudy necklace and even air-kissing the rather butch female security guard tackily making a worthless gesture of frisking some of the eight as they entered the house.

With them are the unreconstructed John McCrirrick, a flamboyant horse-racing journalist whose names appears on internet 'hate' lists, and radio disc-jockey Lisa I'Anson, who lost her job on BBC Radio 1 after missing a live broadcast from Ibiza in 1998 because she had allegedly been 'partying too hard'.

Another former model, Caprice, completes the line-up. Although she has the business acumen to have lent her name to a brand of lingerie and has been on the stage, she is more renowned for her physical rather than intellectual prowess.

Professor Greer is no doubt the alpha personality of the eight. McCrirrick would probably like to think he is, but while his television persona has represented one of the most theatrical heterosexuals of recent years, and his mind is sharp, he does not have the academic stature of Germaine.

Will they clash? Obviously the producers hope so. Their predecessors persuaded the caustic Janet Street-Porter to take part in I'm a Celebrity, get me out of here in an obvious attempt to provoke arguments.

Germaine Greer is too wise to succumb to such ploys, isn't she? Each participant will be coming away from the show with a hefty fee.

Just as Professor Greer's presence intrigues, one cannot help but ask what the producers have commissioned each of their paid guests to do.

Germaine has a following and fans; they may be quiet, and respectful, but she truly does attact viewers and listeners. She can sell newspapers, perhaps not in the quantities of the late Diana, Princess of Wales, but readers will pay to read what she has to say, even if they then disagree vehemently with her analyses or opinions.

She could bring new viewers to Celebrity Big Brother. Probably the producers are banking on that hope.

Whether she succeeds, and however does end up leading the pride - after all, BB is no more than a human version of the Big Cat animal behaviour series produced by the BBC's Natural History Unit that documents the dynamics of championing a small group - will all be revealed (minute-by-minute online) within the next couple of weeks.