The new season of Big Brother has been going here now for a few weeks. In the past, my wife and I have taken some guilty pleasure in watching this show. For the most part, I understand that it is a complete farce and at best, road-crash television. But I won’t lie and say I don’t enjoy it either. There is something to be said about this sort of vicariousness and I think I’ve always been a bit of a voyeur, though not strictly in the sexual sense.
Usually the first weeks of the show are tumultuous. Shoving 15 or 16 large personalities into a house together without any of the usual entertainments such as television, music or books, some of these people are bound to clash. When this happens, the first few people nominated for eviction from the house are the ones who have annoyed the other housemates the most. Usually this nomination process doesn’t happen in the first week, mainly to give everyone a chance to get to know each other.
This year was somewhat different. After one week, the housemates were asked to rank each other on who they found the most annoying. Two housemates were then ‘evicted’ from the house, only to be taken into a separate area. Once they were in here, ‘Big Brother’ told them they were in the Revenge Room. They would be given an opportunity to watch the footage of the rest of the housemates to see who voted for them and then would be able to take revenge on select housemates of their choosing. Up until that moment, Big Brother had been, as far as I was concerned, light entertainment at best. In one easy move, for me it turned into something altogether nastier.
Revenge is not a concept I relate to at all. It implies a mentality that doesn’t understand the idea of forgiveness. It implies two wrongs make a right. It implies the idea that revenge will make the avenger feel better. It implies it is okay to carry a grudge. It is destructive, callous and just plain wrong, as far as I’m concerned.
The concept of the Revenge Room is not new to Big Brother. Last year, in the English version of the show, the use of the Revenge Room led to housemates physically attacking each other and to the police being called to the production location by concerned viewers. Instead of leaving well enough alone, the producers of the Australian version decided to do the same here. While the use of the Revenge Room did not have the same results, it did expose the seedy underbelly of shows such as these.
Big Brother, despite what a lot say about it, has a large audience. Major portions of this audience are children. This tasteless addition to the current series is teaching and encouraging children to get their own back for perceived wrongs. It is teaching children is okay to be vengeful, it is okay to hurt someone else because they’ve hurt you and it is perfectly alright to feel good about it. No wonder children particularly are confused about how to behave when there are so many mixed messages out there today.
What say you, JU?