Eliana's Brazilian Big Night, and Those Big Brother Results

So, who won our Big Brother Fame-O-meter, then? Why, the excellent Brian of course. See?



A late surge from Brian helped him take the prize, picking up bonus multipliers for winning the series (25%), being our favourite (10%), having his own Wikipedia page (another 25%). Having his own page also helped Jonathan take a somewhat unlikely second place, just in front of the excellent twins. Sam and Amanda finishing joint second in Friday's final sees them gain a 15% boost, and the extra 10% for being our joint favourite with Brian sees them knock Charley unceremoniously into fifth place. Ha ha.

So, what have we learned over this series of Big Brother, the first 'normal' series of BB we've bothered with since the first one? Well, trying to wade into it pouring scorn on all the contestants for little or no reason is the act of a cad (or a slightly longer word beginning with 'C'), as a glance at the Sunday Mirror's TV review section (or BrokenTV's intro to BB2007) will attest. If you're going to take the piss out of Big Brother and you're not Sean Lock, just don't bother. You'll look bad.

The other thing we've learned from BB2007: it goes on way too long. And it really doesn't provide a lot of comic potential once you've made a concious decision not to simply slag off everyone involved. Which is why we haven't got anything remotely amusing to say about it here.

SPECIAL FEATURE!
SECRET TELEVISION: Part One - Massive Picture Special

But that's enough about Big Brother, because we've got a new favourite programme ever. Lurking in the Sky EPG stratosphere is a delightfully deranged Brazilian channel called Record TV (Channel 801). Generally, their output seems to consist of incomprehensible local news reports, variety shows hosted by a moustachioed man in a neck brace, telenovellas where absolutely nothing happens, and shows like 'Tudo é Possível'.

Now admittedly, we don't speak word uno of Portuguese, so we're not best qualified to judge, but luckily that's never stopped us spewing forth our judgement before now. Running on Sunday afternoons from 4pm until 8.30pm - yes, you read that right - the Sky infobox describes Tudo é Possível as "Eliana hosts a programme with lots of stuff and curiosity". Anyone able to resist the promise of a show containing over four hours of stuff and curiosity can only have a heart of stone. For the benefit of our listeners and the non-Portuguese-speaking population of Earth, here's a synopsis of what happened from the point we tuned into the show (at about 6pm, just after the football, the sport that we still haven't got to starting our blog about yet).

As we crash into the broadcast, there seems to be some sort of quiz going on. As far as we can understand, here's what happens. Two contestants each stand in their own perspex booth and answer questions. But! For each question they answer correctly, they are charged with the task of inviting another person, dressed in a ludicrous outfit, into their booth. Outfits seem to include but are not limited to: Giant frogs; men dressed as tomatoes; a ringmaster on stilts; a fat naked man in a barrel; an Egyptian mummy; a ballet dancer. As each new person is introduced to the stage, Johnny (or Jemima) Contestant has one minute to cram everyone into the confines of their booth o' fun. If they manage to do so, they are allowed to continue. If they fail, they LOSE AN ARM. Actually, we're making that bit up, because we didn't see anyone fail.

In tonight's show, it was Male Contestant who was best able to cram everything into his ker-azy cubicle, and so he goes on to the main event. As you can see by looking at the following pictures with your eyes.

But what of Female Contestant? What happens to her? SHE IS INTRODUCED TO A SLIGHTLY SINISTER JESTER.

Nooooooo! Oh, hang on. He is juggling some balls (as is the way of the harlequin). They seem to contain prizes. He wants Female Contestant to pick one of them. Or else.

Brr. It's like an unsettling combination of Golden Balls and Stephen King's It. Female Contestant picks a ball (not pictured here), and so lovely host Eliana shows the world what's in the balls she didn't pick. Hey, they've got over four hours to kill.

This is what she didn't win. Which is lucky, as Escolna Outra Bolinna is rubbish. We imagine. Babelfish tells the prize translates into English as... "Escolna Another Bolinna". Thanks, Babelfish.

This is what she did win. 1000 Brazilian Reals. A quick visit to xe.com tells us that the prize is worth £252.26. Boo, cheapskates! The tomato suit probably cost twice that.

Now it's onto some sort of pre-recorded outdoor thing. There are clips of a Radio One Roadshow-type event, which are displayed alongside lots of product placement. This is then followed by clips of various activities such as children playing, old people in a hall, and a dentist performing surgery on a woman. We hope those aren't the prizes. Suddenly, £252.26 doesn't sound so bad after all. You can probably get an Xbox 360 Elite and a copy of Bioshock for that in Brazil.

Ah, no. Here come the prizes. A television. A cooker. And a microwave. And, depending on what the caption means, R$5000 on top of that, or not.

To win, he needs to... well, we're not sure. Now all of the fancy dress people are lined up, wearing numbers, as if they're about to have a race around the TV studio, which would be ACE. That's the sort of thing that should happen in Television Centre every Saturday night. They could have lottery numbers stuck to their front or something. But now Lovely Eliana is holding up two envelopes, which mean... something. Not sure what.

Before Male Contestant gets to choose, we're shown a bit of his home life. A bit like they used to do on Families At War, except it's not Vic and Bob cavorting around someone's residence. Ah, Families At War, another show that ought to be on iPlayer. Sigh.

We're back in the studio, and he's picked an envelope. He doesn't want to change it. But before we get to see the outcome, it's MC Sapao, who does a nice rap for the ladies and gentlemen.

Top Tip: If you're trying a portray yourself as a bit of a gangsta, try not to be pictured performing in front of an identity line-up comprising of giant frogs, Frankenstein's monsters and bestilted ringmasters. It tends to dampen your impact somewhat. There's a reason Ghostface Killah never appeared on Doobie Duck's Disco Bus.

Now, back to the envelopes. After a metric ton of faffing around (over four hours, remember), it is opened. And it contains...

"Sem colher de cha". Or, "Without spoon of cha". Thanks again, Babelfish. All a bit of a comedown after all that. Instead he gets to pick a person in a costume, who he may possibly have to marry as some kind of consolation prize. Luckily for him then, that he picks the beauty queen.

But alack! Lovely Eliana has gone over to Male Contestant's girlfriend in the audience, and has asked her to pick a potential life-mate for him instead. Sensing a chance for revenge, she picks the berk dressed as a tree. Now, surely Male Contestant won't decide to marry...

Oh. Behind the numbers is a prize. He gets to pick one prize. Aah. He picks the tree. After much (more) fannying around, the prize is revealed.

It is a microwave. He doesn't look elated. He decides to gamble on the beauty queen. After another dose of fannying around, her prize is revealed to be...

a black dot. We don't need to be a polyglot to understand that this means he's won piss all. The beauty queen seems quite pleased by that, for some reason. It transpires that the lady frog contained the big money. Forlorn, Male Contestant walks away. All that took up forty-five minutes of his life. But at least he hadn't made a misguided decision to transcribe it all in minute detail, like us. That takes much longer. Of course, if he'd ever entered one of those 'pick the football team' charity raffle card things you get in pubs occasionally, he'd have known the prize is never under the most popular choice. The beauty queen is clearly Liverpool or Manchester United, whereas the female frog is the Tudo é Possível equivalent of Airdrie or Crewe. It's a no-brainer.

From the quiz segment, we move onto a dubbed clip from 'Breaking The Magicians Code' (or, 'A Volta Do Magico Dos Magicos'). The action split-screens back to the Tudo é Possível studio, where members of the audience are invited to guess how it's done. A bit like those nicely diverting Saturday night magic specials the BBC did a few years ago. A bit pointless, and it's lucky we'd Live-Paused it to write all this bumph, so we can skip past it.

Now you're talking: Brazilian adverts! We could do a long and unpopular update just about these. Mercifully, we won't. We'll restrict ourselves to the following pictures.

The last of these is a trailer for "Show Do Tom", which is on later. We're mightily tempted to compile another synopsis of that, but we'd quite like to have some readers left this time tomorrow.

After the break, they carry on with the Magicians Code bits for ages, merely cutting to Lovely Eliana asking an audience member how they think it's done, just before they reveal the answer (a false body switcheroo, generally). It's a bit like us just copying and pasting text from UK:Resistance and saying whether we thought each bit was funny or not, then claiming it's all-new content. Whereas of course, in reality, we just copy and paste it all into Blogger, but then replace the words 'Sonic', 'Sega' and 'Emily Booth' with 'ITV1', 'Big Brother' and 'Dark Haired One Out Of Tatu'. All this has also reminded us how 'Breaking The Magicians Code' could be very interesting, if only it didn't make the seemingly conscious decision to be irredeemably shit instead.

Suddenly, the show is hijacked by another programme called 'Sorria Voce Esta Na Record', where a bloke who looks a bit like a jolly Hugo Chávez and a bloke who's supposed to be an American (but who clearly isn't) are in front of a crowd.

Before we can understand what's going on, a man with a bag of potatoes wanders on, and begins to chuck spuds at 'John', with accompanying comedy sound effects. The man (called Shaolin, a caption handily tells us) is angry about some sort of misunderstanding. The jolly Chávez man calms it down, and everyone laughs.

Then, in accordance with the UN statute that states all non-English television stations must have a hidden-camera stunt show BY LAW, it's prank time. A man asks passers-by to start a sprint, by firing a starters pistol. This happens every day in Brazil, we imagine. Certainly, none of the passers by seem perturbed by this. But, when they fire the pistol, a dead pigeon falls out of the tree above them. Repeat several times. Ha-ha-larity ensues.

(Hilarity not pictured)

Cut back to the Tudo é Possível and Lovely Eliana. She tells us to, well, do one, as it's the end of the show. No credits, no end music, not even any applause, just a station logo and copyright notice. No messing about at Record TV. At this point, we can't help but feel they could have made a bit more effort here. Maybe have Lovely Eliana's comedy dad walking in and shouting "right, I want you all out of my house now" or something. Oh well.

The next programme (after Incomprehensible Local News which includes lots of old men in a field playing accordions) is a talent show called, quite magnificently," Successo!"

We make our excuses, and put the Spanish Football on. But we'll be back for more next week, Lovely Eliana. Maybe. If only to see what sort of thing goes on for the first two hours. We do hope it isn't just Lovely Eliana explaining the rules to the costume-stuff-box game.

NEXT TIME ON SECRET TELEVISION: Sitting through hours of TVEi, trying to find something to write about.

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BrokenBrother: Latest Underwhelming News

Erm, we've mostly stopped watching it. The Sky+ programme link has been cancelled, and we've only been dipping into it about once a week. We'd pretty much given up on the series when the halfway housemates were chucked in. It was a bit like having quite a good day at work, but then your boss tells you that you're going to have to work for another six hours. Actually, that's a rubbish analogy. It's like quite enjoying a TV show, only for a stupid amount of new characters to be introduced just as it was getting quite exciting, and you realise that you really can't be bothered investing an hour every single day in it, because while it's been quite enjoyable, there are limits.

The current series of Big Brother seems to be having that impact on everybody. Our contact at Betfair stopped contacting us around the time of the Charleygate 'scandal'. At the moment, Betting@Betfair aren't even bothering with their special BB Betting update page, and while they are still taking bets on it, it has long fallen off the 'Popular Events' list on the front page. The Big Brother's Black Eye website only made it past a few weeks, and we're guessing the tabloids are still only sticking with it because it makes for piss-easy copy.

Of course, all that hasn't stopped us compiling an up-to-date BB Fame-o-meter. And here it is. Definitely something we're not going to do again, because it's a great big pain in the arse to do, no-one really cares about it (do they?), and as each new vanful of bungalowmates is dumped into the Big Brother bungalow the whole thing becomes more unwieldy. But, our word is worth its score in Scrabble, so here you go. Feast on those numbers.

Brian and the twins are the big favourites, but if it weren't so obvious Brian is going to win we'd be tempted to put a few quid on Liam at 10.5. Except Brian is clearly going to win, from the episodes we have watched lately. And quite rightly, too. We suspect he could be the only winner of Big Brother who'll remain completely likeable outside the house since Helen from BB2 (and that was mainly because she pretty much scarpered from the public eye not long after, save for a failed attempt to become a part of Banzai).

Second-placed Ziggy and Jonathan are the recipients of a whopping 30% bonus multiplier to their scores, because they've earned their own pages on Wikipedia, but that isn't enough to beat the one woman infamy rollercoaster that is Charley.

Brian, buoyed by his bonus 10% for being our current favourite, currently sits in third place. Will he manage to overtake Ziggy and Charley to take his rightful place as Big Brother Arbitrary Fame King 2007? Time, or more accurately, the Final And Comprehensive BrokenTV Big Brother Fame-O-Meter Awards 2007 will tell, just after the current series of Big Brother finally, mercifully reaches some sort of conclusion.

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An Update About Big Brother That Isn't Really About Big Brother So Most Of Our Readers Might Want To Read It Anyway

This year it seems that the Sunday Mirror (and possibly the Daily Mirror, only we haven't looked at that for months because it's an especially poor read at the moment) have taken the decision that they "don't" like Big Brother. What this actually means is that they're still going to spend at least four pages of every edition going on about it, but delivering all copy in whatever the literary equivalent of a sarcastic voice is. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, of course - all tabloids like to do this sort of thing where celebrities are concerned (not that the bungalowmates really qualify as celebrities), and it's true to say that BrokenTV is massively guilty of the same thing from time to time.

However, the absolute nadir of this approach can be found on page 27 of this week's copy. Kevin "He's The Real TV Mr Nasty" O'Sullivan (erm, no he isn't?) is charged with keeping tabs on each one of the residents of the Big Brother Bungalow, and writing a little 'summing-up' of every one of them, every week. In order to cement his "The Real TV Mr Nasty" credentials, he really socks it to each one of the shameless BB wannabes. Except, as most people who've watched the current series will probably have noticed, the majority of tenants for this year aren't especially disagreeable. In some cases they might be flawed, self-conscious, emotionally fragile or a bit shallow, but in the main they're fundamentally decent enough people. But "The Real TV Mr Nasty" has a job to do!

So, Liam? He's tewwibly working class! The twins, Brian and Gerry? Stupid, "sensationally stupid" and a "greek tragedy"! Chantelle? "Coconut Head"! Laura? "Spends most of her time lying in bed being fat"! And, as you can probably imagine, so on. The last of these is an especially low blow, which almost tempts us into saying something along the lines of "Kevin O'Sullivan is the very worst kind of smug cunt; he's a fucking smug cunt". Luckily, as we're not about to start billing ourselves at The Real Internet's Mr Nasties and because our mum might read this, we're not about to descend to that level.

Personally, we'd happily go out and get drunk with any of the BB07 contestants, apart from Charley (because she'd start a fight) and Carole (because she'd start nagging us about ordering the drinks wrongly or tell us off for going on the fruit machine). Liam would pay for the drinks from his winnings, natch.

Of course, given that Kevin "He's The Real TV Mr Nasty" O'Sullivan is making a healthy living from giving controversial and insightful insights into television (Gillian McKeith is quite annoying, apparently. Who knew!?), while we're embittered loners swigging Somerfield Value gin whilst hammering away on a tawdry TV blog only read by other supermarket-own-brand-gin addled reprobates. Maybe we need to introduce more of an 'edge' by making needlessly controversial remarks about those that probably don't deserve it? Then the offers from Her Majesty's Press will start flooding in!

Fingers crossed!

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BrokenBrother: MicroUpdate

With Seany - who'd we'd jokingly stated would be next to leave the house because we'd just put a fiver on him to win - having been the next person to leave the house, it's quite clear that we'd never pass ourselves off as Big Brother experts. Each of the two people we've now backed as winners have left the house in disgrace at the very next opportunity, and we're flirting dangerously with relegation from Brig Bother's Fantasy Big Brother League (the bottom three quite possibly having to enter a fantasy league based on Castaway 2008). With that in mind, we're simply going to post up the figures, and restrict ourselves to five observations based on the last two weeks of Big Brother.

1. Our current favourites are now the twins. Yes, who'd have thought that after the launch show, eh? Despite initial revelations, along with Laura they seem to be the most genuine people in the bungalow this year. Coupled with the fact we've just realised that they both look quite a bit like Lauren Laverne When She Was Still In Kenickie, we've decided they must win.
   
   
2. Amanda is the current Betfair favourite to win. Somehow, Sam is languishing on 13, while Amanda is on just 5.8. We've no idea how, because we can't really tell them apart. Of course, in our imagination both of them are [the rest of this paragraph has been confiscated by The Taste Police]
   
   
3. Brian seems quite incapable of understanding that women need to go for a poo as well as men. We're not even making this up. That's almost as funny as him believing Laura and Seany telling him that there's no electricity or inside toilets in both Wales and Ireland ("Can't you ask Tony Blair to do summink abaht it?"). The fool - we've had indoor lavvies since 1997, although we do both still get our electric from a really long extension cable plugged into Blackpool Illuminations.
   
   
4. Unless every single Big Brother viewer PayPals one British pound to BrokenIndustries account in the next 36 hours, we're going to lay odds on Charlie winning, thereby ensuring she'll be in the house for the duration of the series.
   
   
5. We don't know who Russell Kay is (or whether that's the right way to spell his name), but we'd sure like to punch his face in.

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BrokenBrother: "He Looks Like A Clown!"

According to Wikipedia, a petard was a medieval small bomb used to blow up gates and walls when breaching fortifications. In medieval and Renaissance siege warfare, a common tactic was to dig a shallow trench close to the enemy gate, and then erect a small hoisting engine that would lift the lit petard out of the trench, swing it up, out, and over to the gate, where it would detonate and (hopefully) breach the gate. It was not impossible, however, that this procedure would go awry, and the engineer lighting the bomb could be snagged in the ropes and lifted out with the petard and consequently blown up. Thus to be 'hoist with his own petar' is to be caught up (and destroyed) by his own plot.

The phrase was coined by a Mr W Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon, who first used it in his play Hamlet. Two schoolfellows of the titular Dane, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, concoct a plan to see Hamlet executed. However, the Prince is too wily for them, and amends the death warrant to contain their names instead of his. Hence, "for 'tis the sport to have the enginer. Hoist with his own petar; and 't shall go hard"

That's quite handy for us to know, as right now modern day Rosencrantz-in-blog's-clothing BrokenTV finds itself dangling from its very own electronic petard. We go and get ourselves quoted in an online magazine, stating how that Emily off of that Big Brother think she all dead clever and that but she ain't, only to find they've used a section of text where we begin two consecutive sentences with the words "of course". Of course, we're suitably chastened by this, and have to face the fact that Victoria Coren will never want to join us down the Lamb and Thesaurus for a drink now. But then, we did only get a 'B' in GCSE English, so what can you expect, eh?

But anyway, there are new people in the bungalow. Seany seems quite interesting, and sure to raise the overall entertainment level in the house. Gerry hasn’t really done enough yet for us to think that much of him, and hopefully he’ll seem a bit less one-dimensional as time goes on. And Lesley has gone – a bit of a shame, but if you treat everyone else as if you’re some sort of public school headmistress, you can’t be too shocked if some light-hearted St Trinians type behaviour goes on.

As for the others, the number of dislikeable people seems to have been whittled right down. The twins, who’d initially given the impression they’d do little but squeal for the duration of their time in the house, seem to do little more than wander around in an innocent world of their own, electing to keep their mouths closed and just run around on the furniture if something important is going on. And more power to them for that. If there’s ever a British live-action version of Cutie Honey, the twins would be perfect.

As everyone seems to have pointed out, Shabnam looked a lot nicer without make-up, but if she prefers to wear it, then that’s fair enough. We’d guess her willingness to agree with whoever is speaking to her is more to do with an innate desperation to be liked by others (notice her frantic comment about make-up and clothing to Gerry, 0.5 seconds after he walked in the door), rather than any calculated cattishness. We should admit that as the fake PhD certificate in psychology we’ve ordered from eBay is still in the post, it’s not exactly a professional opinion. Meanwhile, Ziggy’s reaction to his ‘competition’ was quite funny. It’s the same reaction we had once we realised that Big Brother’s Black Eye is doing much better coverage of the show than we are.

It did seem a bit suspicious that Charley swiftly moved from not being too bothered about the whole Emilygate situation, to suddenly acting as if it affected her hugely. This could be because it’ll improve her chance of winning (“I’m going to be on the front of all the papers”), but it could well be because she’s had more time to think about it. Although there wasn’t any malice on Emily’s part when she said it, so: hmm. Of course, she won’t win because of this – it wasn’t just coincidence that Shilpa won CBB whilst being the nicest person in the house, you know.

Anyway, new graphs. We’ve added another clause in the calculation process, so that anyone not left in the house automatically takes a 15% hit to their total score. This should translate to a 15% boost for whoever wins at the end of BB’07, and for now it should help the people still in the house (and who don’t get the benefit of some extra Wikipedia text explaining why they’re not there any more). Finally, we’ve taken out the keywords clause, because it was a pain in the bum to calculate.

Emily storms into the lead despite not being in the house any more. Infamy and, erm, famy just being two sides of the same coin, of course. Gerry is helped to a decent score by having a very long full name. Somehow, and maybe we’ve missed something here, Laura has collapsed in the betting race, with Tracey now a somewhat unlikely favourite. Gerry has leaped into second, and Chanelle third.

Seany, who’d we’d say has a decent chance of winning, sits at a surprising 39/1. Expect him to get hounded out of the house very soon, as we’ve just buggered all that up, by putting a fiver on him to win.

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Now Available At Short Notice

It's okay, it looks like she won't go hungry. Skills include: Good public speaker.

Of course, it wasn't as bad as the transcript made it look, but really. Ironically pretending to be 'urban' in those circumstances, while not the cleverest thing anyone has done in the Big Brother house, didn't leave as bad a taste in the mouth as the whole Shilpa business, which was an actual personal attack, and much worse.

The highlight of the whole affair? One of the audience on ...Big Mouth berating Chris Moyles for doing much the same about gay people on Radio One, and garnering nowhere near as much negative press. Just a pity it didn't happen while Moyles was presenting Big Mouth, really. We're wondering how Channel Four would have handled it if this was the week Leigh Francis was hosting Big Mouth (19th to 21st June. Get ready to cancel that Series Link, folks!).

Maybe he could have done his Michael Jackson impression throughout.

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BrokenBrother: "The upholstery is smouldering gently"

"Emily Parr is a Tory voter and considers herself right-wing."

From Monty Python's Flying Circus episode 28:

(Sound of an explosion out of vision. Cut to reveal Mrs Nigger-Baiter's chair charred and smoking. Mrs Nigger-Baiter is no longer there. The upholstery is smouldering gently.)

Mrs Shazam: Oh, Mrs Nigger-Baiter's exploded.

Son: Good thing, too.

Mrs Shazam: She was my best friend.

Son: Oh, mother, don't be so Sentimental. Things explode every day.

Mrs Shazam: Yes, I suppose so. Anyway, I didn't really like her that much.

Hey boys and girls, can you count all of the stupid mistakes we made in the last update?

"We've noticed that there doesn't even seem to be an Official Big Brother I-Thought-Scousers-Come-From-Newcastle standard Thicko this time, almost definitely so there's less risk of overt racism."

"Lovely Emily is hopping along in at 30, so we've plonked a fiver on her"

"We can always lay the bet once her odds drop AS THEY SURELY WILL."

Pof. As well as everything else, we'd like to state we hadn't seem them doing the 'rank themselves in order of' task before placing that bet. And we'd wondered why the odds were so good. "I'm definitely in the top four of attractiveness", indeed. Of course, it's quite obvious that Emily isn't a massive racist, but really quite staggeringly thick. Of course, anyone who feels the need to introduce themselves to the nation by stating how intelligent they are before they say anything else, very probably isn't.

Of course, today's events have had quite an effect on our slightly tweaked Fame-o-meter. Slightly tweaked because having 'citation needed' as a bonus multiplier wasn't really worthwhile, so we've adapted it to account for the number of times each person has been Googled and found BrokenTV. A bonus of 2% added to their score for each search, limited to a maximum of 20%. That's good news for Charley, because of what we're inadvertently top-Google-ranked for (can't think why), along with Shabnam and the twins (we've given 50% of the bonus points for joint searches to each twin, who now merit their very own bar on the chart).

We're a day behind the highlights shows at the moment, because of a power cut last night, so our current favourite is Laura for displaying a little bit of quiet dignity, with Charley still in the relegation places. It's quite possible Emily would be bottom, but The Big BrokenTV Big Brother Rulebook states that only current bungalowmates are eligible for those positions. This gives us the following scores.

Name	Total
Amanda Merchant	39.90
Carole Vincent	78.00
Chanelle Hayes	36.00
Charley Uchea	100.80
Emily Parr	136.08
Laura Williams	43.20
Lesley Brain	58.00
Nicky Maxwell	57.00
Sam Merchant	39.90
Shabnam Paryani	62.40
Tracey Barnard	40.00
Zac "Ziggy" Lichman	115.00

But what does that look like in barchart form? In super 3D? This:

Woo, eh?

THE BROKENTV NON-BIG BROTHER THING CORNER

It's the DVD boxset we really, really want.

All 692 episodes. 174 discs. Plus, a signed photo of Val "Bea Smith" Lehman. Yours for just £702.68 (not including shipping from Australia). Cripes.

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Broken Brother: Part Three

We've finally got around to watching the highlight shows. All of them. In one evening. Including Friday's live show. For you. Because we care. And because we thought we'd better have something proper to say about it, given we've tried to squeeze a week's worth of updates out of the Wikipedia page for it, the Betfair odds and the Word Count extension for FireFox. Here are a few thoughts that thousands of people have already said on other blogs by now, so we'll keep it mercifully short.

As ever, there seem to be three distinct camps in the preliminary rounds of Big Brother. One contains the people who seem quite annoying at first, but after a while aren't that bad, such as Emily, quite rightly top of our Fame-o-meter, or Carole, who seems quite staggeringly different from her pre-bungalow montage so far. Another contains the people who'd seemed quite nice, but soon display themselves to be The Worst Person In Britain As Far As The Tabloids Are Concerned, namely the aggressively vacuous Charley (who doesn't seem to realise that being the first one to leave the bungalow rarely even garners a Conference South level of celebrity). The other, larger group contains the supporting cast who kind of blend into the background; the others, even including Sam and Amanda, who put the twee in twins (erm, does that work? Has anyone else said that yet? Oh).

For the most part, as ever, the contestants aren't in full-on Ooh, Look At Meeeeee, Davina mode and tend to relax into their everyday personalities, meaning they're generally quite difficult to dislike. Unless they're trying especially hard to be disagreeable like Charley. Even Tracey has stop saying "'ave it" every four seconds, thankfully. After watching the first highlight show, we'd prepared a comment along the lines of "how can someone who seems so determined to point out that she's more unique than everyone else be such a horrendous stereotype? Catherine Tate is very probably kicking herself for missing out on Middle Aged Clubber Woman Who Always Does The Same Thing", but that now seems callous and nasty. Bah.

We've noticed that there doesn't even seem to be an Official Big Brother I-Thought-Scousers-Come-From-Newcastle standard Thicko this time, almost definitely so there's less risk of overt racism. Despite initial appearances, the twins wouldn't scrape a Level 2 NVQ in Dimwittery, and Charley's more self-centred than anything else. Once The Blokes storm into the house this may well change, but for now it's reasonably well mannered. Which is a polite way of saying "pretty dull". Unless one of the next three bungalowmates to enter is a baboon with toothache, we might well get rather bored of all this.

So: graphs. It's not really worth updating the Fame-O-Meter right now, hardly anything has changed and it might well need a massive reimagining over the next few days. Luckily, galloping to the rescue on a numerical steed comes Ollie from Betfair, who has been good enough to supply us with spreadsheets of Betfair's daily prices since day one of the Big Brother Bungalow. So now, here in glorious Office-2007-o-vision (because we put them together at work) are some nice hot graphs. Hey, they're probably slightly less dull than watching Chris Moyles host Big Brother's Big Mouth.

Firstly, because having everyone on the same graph was like a car crash, the outsiders. Lovely Emily is hopping along in at 30, so we've plonked a fiver on her. We can always lay the bet once her odds drop AS THEY SURELY WILL. Charley is struggling in last place on about the same odds as Kieran Richardson signing for Inter Milan.

There's the middle bunch, squabbling for the middle ground like eejits.

And there are the favourites. Fairly surprisingly as far as we're concerned, Ziggy's odds have lengthened, despite him seeming more agreeable as the days have progressed. Carole at second favourite seems a bit of a shock, given that we're sure she'll get bored of it all by the end of the first month and walk, especially if most of the others devote most of their energy to cooing over any new male co-inhabitants. Chanelle seems quite desperate to become this years' Chantelle, and Laura seems like a nice person, but we're sure she's only in the house to give Justin Lee Collins someone to do a piss-poor impression of during The Friday Night Project.

Our prediction: Someone who isn't even in the bungalow yet to win it. But hopefully not before Emily's odds have dropped to single figures and we've made a killing.

Someone who knows what they're talking about's prediction: We've got permission to post the following bit of proper knowledge from Steve, the Betfair Betting Expert.

Keep stakes low. Don't be fooled into the 60% book on Betfair (the winner may not even be in the house yet). With 3 months of Big Brother anything can happen. It won't be as simple as picking the winner Pete from last year. I have managed to lock in (no loss) green book on the winner's market through some trading. Nothing big or worth shouting about but a green book of £45 always makes me smile. Backed Chanelle at 32 as soon as she entered the house and then layed her at 27 the next day. Then laying Ziggy at 7.4 when he entered the house and backing him at 7.8 the next morning.

I think this year's show will be one of the most interesting yet. Big Brother wants a love relationship to blossom and I think we will see it. Will it be Chanelle and Ziggy? Odds are shortening every day. I'd give odds of 1.1 they will kiss sometime in the show.

The two prices that have been affected most over the last 24 hours are those of Chanelle and Emily. Chanelle's price got significantly shorter throughout yesterday and she became second favourite at one point however this soon changed after a late night row with Emily over a pair of hair straighteners. Chanelle is back to being third favourite while Emily's price has drifted from 25 to 30.

Tracey and both the twin's prices have all shortened meaning Emily is now the fourth least favoured housemate.

The Big Bouncy Betfair BB Betting Blog is in full here, for anyone who wants to read it. And that's enough plugging Betfair for now. Other betting websites are also available, folks.

More BB07 fun next time, where BrokenTV shamelessly tries to sneak back onto the artistic roll-call, and we try to think about something to write about that isn't Big Brother or a graph.

Pop Fact: We were going to visit the Hay Festival this week. We've ended up doing this. Best laid plans, eh?

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Big Brother 2007 (With Graphs): Part Two

Day three in the Big Brother Bungalow (IT IS NOT A HOUSE, IT IS A BUNGALOW AS IT ONLY HAS ONE FLOOR), and there's a new resident. His name is Zac, he is a male man with a man's penis and testicles, and he isn't a woman.

Okay, we haven't had time to watch any of this (or indeed, any telly at all apart from the England vs Brazil match earlier) since the bungalowmates entered the bungalow. Don't worry, we're not about to become the sort of tiresome bores who wander around shouting at everyone how they don't watch Big Brother, we've got each highlight show and tonight's live show nicely SkyPlussed up for when we're less horrendously busy, and will report our findings in due course.

Luckily, we don't need to have watched any television at all to quickly flip to Wikipedia, Betfair, Photoshop and Microsoft Excel, so stat-hungry BB fans won't miss out on the latest edition of

Before we drop numbers, a few points of interest. Well, we say 'interest'.

• We haven't watched Big Brother for a couple of days. Therefore it would be criminally negligent of us to allocate any bonus multiplier score/penalty for our current favourite and anti-favourite bungalowmates. A narrow escape for the squee twins, we're guessing.
  
  
• Zak has jumped into first place in the betting, mainly because blokes tend to win Big Brother. This is reflected in the results, as he wins the 10% bump that goes with it.
  
  
• Those editing the Wikipedia entry on BB07 are either taking a lot more care and research in their uncovering of everybody's past (or they're just taking everything in the red tops as gospel), as there's a shameful solitary [citation needed] between everyone (for Laura, as it happens). This is clearly unacceptable, and we encourage our readers to add as many stupid claims as possible to the entries for all the bungalowmates.
  
  
• We've switched to the 'clustered bar with a 3-D visual effect' setting for the graph, as it'll give us room for the dozens of new people sure to be added in the next few weeks. And because it'll mean less fannying about with Photoshop to stop it spilling into the right sidebar on the blog. And yes, that was worth mentioning.

So, with no further ado, here come the numbers:

So, Emily and Nicki are still in the lead, but Zac (are we supposed to be calling him 'Ziggy'? Oh well) has zoomed straight into the bronze medal position. As he's a former boy band member, we're expecting lots more tabloid 'revelations' about him (mainly sourced from his agent, we suspect), so he could be a shoo-in for the big prize. Erm, that's the BrokenTV's Coverage of Big Brother Expressed Purely Via The Medium Of Not Very Complicated And Quite Possibly Incorrect Mathematics Special Winner's Certificate, not whatever you get for winning Big Brother, which of course is 'being quite famous for about three months'.

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE BROKENTV VIEWERS WHO DON'T LIKE BIG BROTHER? THEY'RE PEOPLE TOO!

Here you go. It's a test card. But wait, it's got Frank Sidebottom in it, and it's live action, and it's excellent.

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Big Brother 2007 (With Graphs): Part One

Now, we don't usually watch this, but in the interests of our viewer, we're going to try and stick with it for as long as possible. Our comprehensive review of the first instalment of the UK's most drawn out audition for fronting your own short-lived E4 series runs thusly.

Broadcasting equivalent of standing in front of the class and admitting what you just did aside, the show kicked off with a rundown of the rumours about the new series that aren't true (and which, presumably, had been leaked to the press by the production team in advance of the new series to maximise the viewing audience). Then we saw inside the house and... some other stuff happened and we kind of lost interest a bit.

What we need is to somehow distil each component (or housemate) into a series of numbers. It's the only way our fractured minds will be able to make sense of the screeching masses in need of a dignity transplant. That's why we've adapted our ranking system from the Celeb Big Brother to take in a whole new set of rankings, with bonus multipliers and everything.

Here's how it works:

As with our earlier system, the basis is the amount of words written in Wikipedia about each contestant. But! As a tribute to the way they keep on adding spurious trinkets to the house each time that everyone generally ignores because they're sunbathing instead, the following bonus multipliers are due to be applied to each word count:

+10% for each [citation needed] displayed in the contestant's Wikipedia rating – unverified facts are always fun

+20% for the current Betfair favourite to win

+10% for the second favourite

+5% for the third favourite

+10% for whoever we like the bestest of them all at any given moment

-15% for whoever's really getting on our tits

(You'll just have to imagine us reading the above bit out loud in a kind of faux-really-excited voice, just like Davina does on her tour of the house.)

We're really tempted to dock everyone an extra 10% for there being a new Trident Gum advert in the first ad break of the new series, but that would just be unfair. If you want to play along at home, our Excel formula for working out all of this is =SUM(B4+((B4*$C$2)*C4))+((B4*$D$2)*D4)+((B4*$E$2)*E4)+((B4*$F$2)*F4)+((B4*$G$2)*G4)+((B4*$H$2)*H4). Write that down. Of course, we reserve the right to add extra accumulators as the game progresses, especially if we can get an easy joke out of it.

So, what does that mean for the tenants of the Big Brother Bungalow?

Sam and Amanda Merchant

An annoying noise with four legs, the twins automatically won our vote as Most Annoying Person so far, docking them 15% of their word count of 47. Score: 44.65

Lesley Brain

Depending on whether the others see her as some sort of mother figure, or just some old woman with illusions of grandeur, will last a week, or ages. She still won't win, though. Score: 41.80

Charley Uchea

Despite getting booed, she seems relatively nice. Our current favourite, gives her points a boost all the way up to: 53.90

Tracey Barnard

Oh shit, it's Donny Tourette with a vagina. The bookies seem to like her, but we can't see her winning. We're betting she'll storm out of the house to make some sort of laboured 'point' within the first month, and claim it was something to do with a more pressing need to 'have it' elsewhere. Three [citations needed] give her score a boost, though. Score: 52.65

Chanelle Hayes

Who looks about as much like Victoria Beckham as we would if we just did our hair like hers. The second lowest score: 26.00

Shabnam Paryani

Quite extroverted, but in a way that isn’t too annoying. Yet. We suspect she could fall into the BrokenTV favourite column with the wind behind her. A bit of a shame that she’s currently last in the rankings, really. Score: 24.00

Emily Parr

Seems quite nice, although we’re not quite buying into the ‘indie’ personality until she mentions someone a bit more leftfield than Pete sodding Docherty. We’re tempted to offer her a bonus 25% if she can name more than one Pixies album, then we’ll see. The current leader, helped along by three [citations needed]. Score: 100.10

Laura Williams

Flying the flag for Wales. Seems okay, could turn out to be a ‘character’, which isn’t necessarily a good thing. Time will tell. Score: 66.30

Nicky Maxwell

Another relatively normal person who could well sneak into our favoured housemate category. It looks like they’re going for a controversy-lite series this year. Well, unless they chuck Freddie Starr in there at some point or something. Score: 82.80

Carole Vincent

Ah, there we go. It’s Millie Tant. Harsh, but fair, we feel. Score: 37.20

In summary then:

Expect regular updates when we get around to watching our Sky+ recordings of the highlight shows, or not if we get really ticked off with the whole idea of this. Hey, we’re not getting paid for this, you know. And if anyone’s expecting us to sit through Moyles, they can bally well piss off.

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