Big Brother 10

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First look inside the new house as countdown to Big Brother 10 begins

The latest incarnation of the Big Brother house has been unveiled today, but this year's contestants may be disappointed to learn it isn't exactly built for comfort. In an apparent effort to reflect the mood of the nation, the show's producers have done away with luxury items including the pool. But a few basics seem to be missing too.

There are rumours that the sixteen housemates will have to eat, sleep and play on the floor with not a soft furnishing in sight. There are no signs of any beds or couches, with only three wooden boxes placed in the corner of the living room. The house has been decked out in space-age style, including curved walls, fluorescent lighting and minimalist decor. This year's smoking area resembles a bus stop, complete with the uncomfortable metal seats.

This year auditions in seven cities saw a record number of applicants, and there were also online applications posted on an official channel created on YouTube. Tens of thousands applied in the hope of following in the footsteps of past contestants, some of whom have converted their 15 minutes of fame into a career.

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It's interesting to hear that they've had the most amount of applicants ever...

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All the Big Brother winners together - but who is the nation's favourite?
2nd June 2009

Depending on your point of view, they're either all winners - or losers. But out of all nine Big Brother champions, one has emerged as the nation's favourite. In a recent poll, camp Irishman Brian Dowling reigned victorious, with 29.5 per cent of the vote. Quirky Tourette's sufferer Pete Bennett came in second place with 17.5 per cent, closely followed by Essex boy Brian Belo at 15 per cent. In last place, was Orkney Islander Cameron Stout - the supremely forgettable victor of series four.

2001 winner Brian told Heat magazine, who conducted the poll, 'It's amazing to win, especially considering it was eight years ago. There have been so many colourful characters since then. Thank you to all who voted for me.' Since winning the second series of Big Brother, the 30-year-old became a TV presenter and now has his own series in Ireland called Do You Want To Be Famous? The former flight attendant also presented SM:TV Live and Brian's Boyfriends for ITV as well as appearing in reality cooking show Hell's Kitchen and narrating C4's The Salon.

Representing the earlier series is 2000 winner Craig Phillips, 37; 2002 winner Kate Lawler, 29; and transsexual Nadia Almada, 32, who won in 2004. Twenty six-year-old Anthony Hutton, the 2005 winner and last year's Rachel Rice, 25, complete the list.

The new Big Brother house was unveiled yesterday in preparation for the debut of series 10 on Thursday. More spartan than usual, it doesn't have the customary pool or countless sofas for lolling around on. In fact, the minimalist accommodation is in direct contrast to last year, when housemates enjoyed the biggest and plushest house ever.

Meanwhile, speculation about the contestants is mounting, with reports the show's bosses have lined up two rival beauty queens. Former Miss Wales Stephanie Holland, 22, and Karly Ashworth, 21, a finalist in the Miss Scotland competition, are both said to be in hiding ahead of the launch. However, a spokesperson for the programme would not confirm or deny the rumours.

[luke]

bring it on

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Davina McCall: 'I want to present Big Brother until I'm very old'
Big Brother should go on for ever, says the presenter, who talks about being a ‘wild child’ at 40 and missing her mother
Tim Teeman
timesonline.co.uk

Here’s how to annoy Davina McCall. Suggest that Big Brother, the tenth series of which starts on June 4, is in any way rubbish, past it, the root of the decline of Western civilisation. Then stand well back. “It isn’t. It’s great and I love it,” McCall says beadily, flexing her arms as if limbering up for a fight. “I know you’re a fan but you’re the first person this year I have had to defend the show to.” A deep breath. “That’s rubbish. It’s a fantastic show. At dinner parties, people come up to me and say: ‘You don’t really like it, do you?’ and I say ‘Yes I do, actually’. And naturally, they, and most of its critics, haven’t watched it.”

So despite the derision the show is held in in some quarters, despite all the criticism it has faced — most woundingly after the way producers handled the Shilpa Shetty race controversy in the celebrity version of the show in 2007 — its chief presenter is unapologetic in her support, despite recent reports that McCall was planning to quit the show the year after next when Channel 4’s contract with Endemol, which makes it, comes to an end. Commentators have speculated that the station might take the opportunity to pull the plug on Big Brother for good.

“It should go on for ever,” McCall, 41, says. She is smiling but the sentiment, if exaggerated, is genuine. “It’s a great basic format: lock up a group of strangers for the summer, isolate them, watch them interact, set them tasks, evict them. It’s soap opera, great entertainment. There’s no reason for it to end. Why should it end, as long as it attracts audiences and makes money for Channel 4?”

She says she doesn’t know who the contestants are until four days before launch day. What about her own future presenting it? McCall nods. “It’s good.” She does this a lot, little tics of answers which, when elucidation is required, are elaborated upon with an exasperated shout. “Yes, I’m staying with the show. I never said I wanted to leave. I don’t want to leave. If the show is recommissioned, and I expect it will be after the contract expires next year, I still want to present it. That show has been my constant for the last ten years.” But surely she’s had thoughts about moving on? She smacks my knee. “How clear can I make this? I love this show. I mean that. I don’t want it to end. I want it carry on for ever. For years. And I want to present it until I am very old. If I have my way they’ll have me on that stage on my deathbed.” She puts on a frail, mortality-beckoning voice, leans back as if looking up from the pillow of a hospital bed: “Heellllo, Big Brother house, this is Davina . . .”

McCall, in real life, is just as she is on Big Brother: sisterly, intimate, intense and candid, which is probably why she connects with viewers. She scoffs when I imagine her, the grand presenter, turning up for briefings. “Briefings? I’d lose the notes, forget what I’m told. I watch the show.”

Before Big Brother bought her fame she dated Eric Clapton, tried (and failed) to become a pop singer, worked as a booker in a modelling agency, a waitress in Paris and then got her break as a presenter for MTV, moving on to cult shows such as God’s Gift and Streetmate, then the first series of Big Brother in 2000.

Doesn’t she hate it when the boring contestants win, such as Rachel Rice last year? “Rachel wasn’t boring,” she says diplomatically, looking down. “Nor was Cameron [Stout, the winner in 2003].” Yes they were, Davina. “No, they didn’t, um, contribute as much as others. But they were nice. And the public votes for nice people.” The unspoken hope is that these winners, as well as being deserving, are colourful and odd, such as Nadia Almada, the transsexual victor in 2004, who emerged from the house on a tide of tears, skittering in high heels.

McCall accepts that the show has got it wrong: she thinks the producers should have moved to control the Shetty incident more quickly “before it got out of hand” — though she claims that Jade Goody wasn’t racist, she just didn’t like Shetty. McCall didn’t stay friends with Goody; the only ex-contestant she has stayed close to is the lesbian ex-nun Anna Nolan from series one: “I watched her and thought, ‘I want to be your mate’.” McCall doesn’t think evicted housemates should be allowed back into the house either, as has happened in the past (“They’ve had experiences of the outside world”) and also worried about the wisdom of showing one contestant apparently masturbating using a wine bottle. “But the producers spoke to me and said it was part of her ‘journey’ (that much-laboured reality TV word) and I think they were right.”

Doesn’t Big Brother take a group of people, ply them with drink and watch their combustible personalities explode and implode? “Ever since ‘Fight Night’ [when two contestants returned to the Big Brother house leading to a mass dust-up to which Hertfordshire Police were called in 2004], the contestants haven’t been overly plied with alcohol,” McCall claims.

Some of them seem vulnerable. “They have applied to come on a television programme. The producers choose engaging personalities but I know they don’t choose vulnerable people or people just to cause conflict. All of them get ‘the talk of doom’ at the beginning: ‘You’re not going to be famous very long, if you think you will be, think again. Treat it as an amazing experience’. And it’s not responsible for dumbing down. It’s an intelligent programme. It tackles issues like sexism and racism. You watch people evolve, relationships, personalities grow. It’s an optimistic show, not a degrading one. You learn such a lot about human nature. In fact, there should be more Big Brother on television. It should be on all the time. Seriously.” And she lets out a mock-villainous mwah-ha-ha laugh.

Has McCall thought about life after Big Brother? She visibly shudders at the prospect. “You see what you’ve done to me there? I don’t think it will end, I don’t think it should end, but yes . . .” So does she want to do another chat show? In 2005, she presented her own for the BBC, Davina, which was panned by the critics and crashed in the ratings. A quiz show on Saturday nights, He’s Having a Baby, also spluttered into extinction.

“It was awful and I was glad to have Big Brother to come back to,” McCall admits. “I honestly didn’t think the chat show was that bad. I fought so hard not to have my name be the show. It made me uncomfortable. I wanted it to be called Midweek McCall but the BBC said: ‘It may move to Saturday night’. They wanted it to be there in lights, like the Palladium. Then the critics savaged it. Every week I had to do the show as all that was going on. I prefer talking to ordinary people rather than famous people. It was crushing and the worst thing was the pity I got from people. I stopped reading the papers but whenever I went out, people hugged me, consoled me. I was weighed down by their insipid pity. So no, I don’t want to do a chat show again, I’m still fairly bruised.”

Contrary to reports, she counts herself out of the running to become Philip Schofield’s co-host on This Morning. “It’s a great show, but as a presenter, you are produced. I want some control in what I do next.” Through gritted teeth (“I really shouldn’t tell you”) she reveals that she is planning her own one-woman, “multi-platform” TV project. In fits and starts, she says it will be a daytime chat show, that it will have an online life as well as in print perhaps. It sounds Oprah-ish, I venture. She smiles broadly. “Well, I’m not Oprah Winfrey, but that kind of thing.” She is planning to film a pilot before the end of the year and hopes that the programme will go out on Five or Sky 1. There is no room on Channel 4, her home for the past decade? “No, not currently.”

The operator in McCall, far from the gurning, best-mate image of Big Brother (“that’s what my mouth does”), is apparent in the steeliness she exhibits when talking about this new show. She says that ever since she was a girl there has been the tension between “the sensible part of me and the out-of-control, wild me”. Her parents separated when she was 3 and she lived with her grandparents. If sensible Davina flourished with them, “wild” Davina bloomed in France where she went in the holidays to visit her mother, Florence. “When I was with my mother, I wore make-up, ra-ra skirts, high heels. I knew it was wrong one day when my mother left me outside a sex shop and I realised I wasn’t being perceived as a cool teenager but a Lolita.”

She started smoking cannabis at 12, then took Ecstasy, progressing to heroin when she was 16. She was an addict for eight years. “I was never the girl for whom one pill was enough. I had to take nine Ecstasy tablets. The strange thing is I kept my heroin addiction absolutely secret. When a friend of mine finally confronted me about it, I was offended by their intrusion before I finally got help.” If she hadn’t escaped addiction she says, “I would be dead now. Or living on the streets. I would definitely have gone on to crack.” Her only addiction now, she says, is chewing-gum.

McCall says that family is “everything”: she is very close to her father Andrew and his wife Gaby and she has been married to Matthew Robertson, former Pet Rescue presenter, for nine years and they have three children, Holly, 7, Tilly, 5 and Chester, 2. “I learnt everything about being a mother from my grandmother Pippy and my stepmother,” she says. What about her own mother? “She died last year,” McCall says. “We hadn’t really communicated in the last ten years. She sold stories about me to the Daily Mail, one about us attending a Narcotics Anonymous meeting together, which you just don’t do. The last time she did it I felt I just couldn’t speak to her. I was very hurt.”

McCall stifles a sob then begins to cry. “My biggest pain has been from those ten years. I think I wanted my mother to be Julie Andrews, either as Mary Poppins or Maria. But once met never forgotten . . . I didn’t get a chance to speak to her. I was told she was sick in a coma. I rang her stepson and asked him to pass a message on to her that I loved her. I don’t know if she got it. I lay on my bed and meditated and just wished all this love to her, I felt it whoosh out of my fingers and I honestly felt as if she received it.

“In the ten years that we didn’t speak, I didn’t stop loving her, I didn’t hate her. She never felt I fulfilled myself as her daughter and I never felt she fulfilled her role as my mother. I’m a lot less angry now she’s gone, but anything sets me off. A girl taking care of her mother in Casualty had me in floods. So does Sally Field in Brothers & Sisters when she has a scene with Calista Flockhart — that was my relationship to my mother. I used to worry if she had got my message but I’ve had to let that go.” Does she grieve for her? “No, my mother left me ten years ago,” she says plainly.

McCall lives with Robertson in West Sussex because she was fed up with the paparazzi stalking her day in day out. “You reach the end of the day and just think, ‘You know what, I’m going to flash my tits’.” She says she could never be in Big Brother herself. “I know I’m very public but then there are sides of me that are very private. Just like my naked body is for my husband only, my failings and my good bits and my insecurities are for his eyes only.”

But the sensible/wild tension is never far away. When McCall turned 40 last year, “a bit of my wild side reasserted itself. I danced on the tables at the party. I am determined not to grow old gracefully. My models are Jo Wood, Marianne Faithfull and Anita Pallenberg. There’s no reason I can’t rock and roll at 40, 50 and 60. I’m sure my children will grow up to roll their eyes at their mother’s atrocious behaviour. I am trying to live in the moment. I take my health very seriously and exercise a lot, but I do worry about my health, cancer. If a friend has a scare then suddenly everything is unstable again.” Will she have more children? “A categoric no. If you see me pregnant then it’s a glorious mistake. I can give the right amount of time to three of them and bedtime already takes two hours.”

McCall apologises for crying and then, having her picture taken, recalls meeting an actor from The Wire: “I told him he made a great junkie and I should know because I had once been one.” She roars with laughter: settled and wild, the winning Davina alchemy.

Big Brother starts on June 4 on Channel 4, 9pm

[luke]

Secrets of Big Brother 10
Big Brother 10 launches tonight with NO housemates for the first time in the show's history.

Although eight male and eight female contestants will enter the house, none of them will become official housemates until they have earned that status following a series of tasks during the first three days.

Each task has been designed to challenge their fears and pride and some will require them to go head to head against one another in a bid to become a bone fide housemate.

Only once they have successfully completed a task and been granted housemate status will they be allowed access to the 'real' Big Brother house. Until then they will only be able to access the living room, a toilet and the garden.

Hopefuls won't get access to their suitcases and will be forced to spend their first night sleeping on the living room floor. Bathing will be in a bath in the garden which can only be filled by carrying cold water in a hole-ridden bucket across the garden. Their diet for the first few days will consist of cold porridge.

Sharon Power, one of the show's executive producers, said: "After 10 years we are trying to come up with ways of surprising viewers and housemates.

"They (the would-be housemates) will arrive in a car and walk through the crowd as normal and go into the house. The first time they will realise something is up is when they walk in and find one room and a garden."

All 16 people entering the house have been in hiding for the past few weeks. All that is being revealed before the launch is that the 16 are the most diverse group yet, with hopeful housemates from a wide range of countries and backgrounds. The eldest is 40 and the youngest is 18.

[Twirley]

An interesting twist for the housmates this year. Was thinking I might not bother watching this year but my mind has just been changed.

Face - hope you're going to cap this, this year.

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This is Noirin on 'Real World Sydney', an MTV reality show from 2007.

[Kezza]

I KNEW I had seen her before.....she 'dated' housemate Isaac (pictured).

[luke]

https://twitter.com/MrKennethTong

thats out of order, he was always a cunt though. alright, i get people are gonna make a joke out of all sorts, but don't include the dad of the dead baby in your tweets!

and who the fuck are the nearly 180,000 people following him?!?!

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He was always a cunt for sure. But he seems to be wallowing in the hate. He's off his rocker - he can't even spell vilified correctly.