I think that's too simplistic to be true though. Siavash's nominations don't fit into any pattern; he nominated Freddie, Noirin (late on, after she had stopped being friends with Lisa), Angel, Hira and Bea as well as various non-'Amigos'. Rodrigo was a bit all over the place as well, going in the space of a week from Freddie/ Marcus to Lisa/ Karly. (I always thought he and Charlie were up for grabs, if Freddie and Marcus had taken any trouble to be nice to them). Angel, who most people put with Freddie, nominated Siavash twice before being evicted herself. Sophie and Karly were the most similar, but no more than one would expect of two people who were very close. The only real common factor is that almost no one liked Freddie.
You haven't given any reason to think it simplistic, or even to think it isn't true. I don't know what you're looking for as a "pattern". Identical nominations, week after week?
What I said was that there's "a rather natural division right about where many thought it was"; and there is. There are two groups of HMs who rarely (if ever) nominate members of their own group and who instead direct the majority of their nominations at members of the other group.
Look at Siavash, for example. The whole time he's there he nominated Freddie only once, and it was in week 1. He never nominated Marcus. Marcus nominated Freddie twice, but never Siavash. Freddie nominated Marcus once, but not until week 10; he never nominated Siavash. So there's very little of those HMs nominating each other. Most of their nominations are for HMs in the other group.
Lisa, on the other hand, nominated Freddie 7 times, Marcus 7 times, though Siavash only twice. Charlie nominated Freddie 6 times, Marcus 6 times, and Siavash 6 times. In the 6 times David nominated, he nominated Marcus 5 times, Siavash 3 times, and Freddie once. In the 6 weeks Karly nominated, she nominated Freddie 5 times, and Marcus 4. Kris nominated Freddie 5 times and Siavash twice. Even Sree, who nominated only 4 times, managed to nominate each of Freddie and Marcus twice, and Siavash once.
Meanwhile, none of Lisa, Charlie, David, Karly, Kris, or Sree ever nominated any of the others in that list.
Sophie nominated Charlie and Sree once (both in week 1), and she eventually nominated David in week 12, but that's it. She nominated Freddie 6 times and Marcus 8. (She was, however, friends with Siavash for much of the series and never nominated him.)
Rodrigo eventually nominated Lisa twice, and David twice, but he nominated Freddie 5 times, Marcus 6 times, and Siavash twice.
So the pattern pattern holds fairly well even when we add Sophie and Rodrigo to the group.
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The row seemed to be sparked by something she thought he was doing or saying to back up Angel in her hunger strike. The hunger strike seemed to make Lisa properly angry, and somehow (I am not sure we ever saw the start of it) that led to her being angry with Marcus.
But it was Lisa who started the aggressive behaviour, and Marcus who stood up to her.
Well I can't read minds. But you would have thought the perception that someone was bullying someone else might lead to a cooling in your relationship with them, or even a warming towards the victim. Either that, or you would have to think that everyone who preferred Lisa to Freddie (which seemed to be almost all of them) had a moral screw loose. I think Lisa was a victim here of BB's preference for always showing confrontations rather than ordinary conversations; we never saw the Lisa that they obviously saw. We saw, for example, her emotional tribute to Sree, who had always 'treated me like a queen'; but we never saw those presumably pleasant scenes. (Sree probably came off worse than Lisa, come to think of it; when Noirin was asked in her eviction interview who she wanted to stay in touch with, she said Sree, who was 'like my little brother'; but we never saw any of those scenes either).
We have, by now, seen quite a few cases of bullying in BB -- and of HMs who did not cool in their relationship with the bully.
Whether that's because they didn't see it as bullying -- which certainly seems possible, since views of what counts as bullying vary greatly -- or because they had a "moral screw loose", or for some other reason, I don't know. But for present purposes, I also don't care, because such things do not change Lisa's behaviour.
Re scenes we "never saw", how much of the live feed did you watch that year?
To his credit, Freddie stood up for Lisa after BB. He said that he had never been bullied, and asked people to leave her alone.
But as I've said before, that Freddie said she hadn't bullied him -- thanks for answering the "when did he say it?" question, btw -- doesn't mean she didn't. We saw enough to make up our own minds about something like that.
I do think the only evidence you have is what you saw personally. The other housemates (apart from Marcus) seemed to have no particular issue with her; no one came out of the house and called her a bully; she ended up on good terms with marcus, as far as we can see, and reasonably good terms with Freddie, and she never HAD been on bad terms with anyone else apart from Bea, whom of course she disliked very much. I can remember times when she shouted at Freddie, but his reaction was always to laugh at her and put her down.
What is that meant to mean, "the only evidence you have is what you saw personally"? I can't even see how it fits with the rest of the paragraph, which all seems to be about things we didn't personally see but instead have to infer from what various HMs didn't say, or from how they seemed.
Since I personally saw Maisy's tweets about Jay and the freezer, is that "evidence" because I personally saw the tweet? Or is it not "evidence" because I didn't see the actual incident? Suppose a reliable person told me about the tweet instead. Would that not be evidence somehow? Or would it be "evidence" because I personally heard it from the reliable person?
I didn't mean that. I just meant refusing ever to divulge any information about the voting. And I think it more likely that they saw Alex as possible competition for him for quite a while. She was, for example, given the charming and funny bit of the 'say yes' task, while Jay and Aaron got terrible tasks. (Though not as bad as Faye's. What was THAT about? "Have a large, unsightly tattoo"; I don't think so.) Only late on when it became obvious that Alex wasn't that popular they seemed to turn against her. And in the factory task and after Harry's shopping order, they were quite happy to show Jay in a horrible temper and coming across really badly.
In the rest of the paragraph you talk of other things, and in the original context you did too. It certainly didn't look like just meant refusing ever to divulge any information about the voting:
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I think there was a sharp change in the Rylan / Speidi BB, when BB seemed to realize that there were almost no limits to what they could do: they could simply decide that someone wasn't going to be evicted, and that someone was going to win, and could make that happen. That is quite different from the situation in BB12 when it must have been obvious to them very early on that only Aaron could win. All they had to do in BB12 was try to convince the viewers that there was still a competition. In that CBB they had to force a result by virtually excluding every housemate except 3 from the highlights. It was like losing the last vestiges of BB innocence: from then on, BB could do anything they wanted, happy to lose old viewers and collar a new young generation who didn't give a damn about whether the whiskery old show is fair or balanced.
I don't think "refusing ever to divulge any information about the voting" would normally be described as a way to "convince the viewers that there was still a competition". Why would someone who thought there wasn't a competition change their mind just because BB hadn't released voting numbers?
The crypt twist is often discussed as if it was a special privilege for Jay, but it really wasn't. It was only by chance that he was in at all; if nominations had been anything like the previous week, it would have been more likely to be Aaron and Anton in there (which would have been more interesting, definitely). From stuff said on BBOTS I am sure BB wanted Jemma to go, but they had no way of managing that; they certainly would not have allowed Jay and Anton to do straight save and replace to Aaron and Harry. People often said that 'if Jay and Anton had not been up they would have moved it to a different week', but that is surely nonsense; it was attached to an actual film premiere, which had to be on a fixed date. If it HAD been Aaron and Anton in there, maybe they would do a save and replace; they certainly waited to see who it was before the announced the terms.
And that's enough.
Aaron was always miles ahead of Faye though in the polls. Even half of Aaron's fans didn't seem to like Faye.
Yet not long before, Aaron's fans had been instrumental in saving Jem. Indeed, they over-saved her to the point where she was 2nd. They didn't seem to be trying to get Faye out, just not keen to save her. But how keen would they have to be, given Aaron's huge poll lead?
In week 8, when Faye went, Aaron had 66.22% in the [thread=1567174]favourite HM poll[/thread] here. Faye had 6.35% and Louise 3.57. Jay had 4.44% And Louise was ahead of Faye in the [thread=1568933]least favourite poll[/thread]. (Jay led that one easily at 36.98%.)
Faye going over Louise really does put a question mark over the idea that such polls accurately reflected the HMs' real popularities.
But it didn't make Jay look good at all. Aaron handled it gracelessly, but they could not have known that. If Aaron had just kept his cool and shrugged it off, he would have come across very well. We all saw that BB were being malicious in setting it up, and there would have been no shame in a cheerful 'no, it's silly'. As it was, Jay and Louise came across as foolish - Tom was barely even pleased by his pointless present - and Aaron (in his second fall of the series imo) lost his cool and became angrily defensive and a bit petty. (He was a fantastically good player a lot of the time, but no one is perfect).
So "didn't make Jay look good at all" means just that he and Louise came across as foolish. (To everyone? Presumably not.)
I don't think it's right to freely switch between "they may have guessed" and "they couldn't have known" (which, btw, can both be true.) In any case, I didn't say BB knew, just that "BB didn't pick just any old way to stir things up: they picked one they could have guessed would tend to make Jay look good and Aaron look bad." And they could have guessed even if the guess turned out to be wrong.
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But a public vote is far bigger than a poll. Poll total votes tend to run into the hundreds, if they are lucky. (And they can be pretty odd; look at the big facebook poll on Scottish independence where better together got 15%.) In the end, the only way we know who is popular is to look at who is getting the votes. In BB13, for example, I am sure most people were surprised to see that Luke A beat Deana in the eviction votes; he was never ahead of her in any poll. Helen was very unusual in never facing any public votes along the way. So BB never did get any proper feedback; we can see that polls are often wrong, sometimes very wrong, and the responses of the crowd/ BBOTS are no use at all. So they were as much in the dark as the viewers going into the BB15 final.
I don't know whether you just reject out of hand anything based on statistics, or what, but accurate polls can be far smaller than the vote they're trying to predict. That's why people bother to poll. If being far smaller meant that they couldn't be accurate, the practice of polling would have died out. Finding a random poll that was wildly off proves nothing, though I'd be interested in a link to something about the Facebook poll you mention, since it's result is such a strange one.
Some of the BB polls have more respondents than you think. For example, the bbspy poll for week 9 of bb15 had 4433, and for the final had 7688.
However, I am finding this part of out discussion quite frustrating. I said something I thought that was pretty clearly about how things looked from our POV, but your reply was about BB's POV. So I replied saying I'd thought it was pretty clearly about how things looked from our POV, and you've again replied about BB's POV.
I also have to say I don't see how this about the unreliability of polls is meant to connect to what we discussed earlier. Do you think it must be the case that BB wouldn't try to get Jay to win because BB had some actual vote totals (even though we don't know what those totals were)? But they might have tried to get Helen to win because they didn't have vote totals and might just ignore the polls and other evidence?
As I said in the post you quoted there, "you seem to be relying on an implicit argument that, since (as you suppose) it was obvious to BB that only Aaron could win, BB must not have been trying to stop him from winning or been trying to get Jay to win." You still seem to be relying on that argument, but since it's not stated explicitly, it's hard to be sure.
But it was Lisa who started the aggressive behaviour, and Marcus who stood up to her.
Do you mean on that occasion, or generally? Marcus had several occasions when he was extremely aggressive, but I wouldn't like to try and put them in chronological order after all this time. When did he start to pick on Sree?
We have, by now, seen quite a few cases of bullying in BB -- and of HMs who did not cool in their relationship with the bully.
Whether that's because they didn't see it as bullying -- which certainly seems possible, since views of what counts as bullying vary greatly -- or because they had a "moral screw loose", or for some other reason, I don't know. But for present purposes, I also don't care, because such things do not change Lisa's behaviour.
Re scenes we "never saw", how much of the live feed did you watch that year?
I never watch a lot. Couple of hours a week perhaps. But that is not really the point: the viewing figures for live feed were always minute for most of the time, so BB dictated the agenda by putting together the highlights show. So if you want an accurate rephrase, hardly anyone ever saw the scenes I have suggested.
I think re. Lisa/ Freddie, there is a combination of reasons why the other housemates did not cool towards Lisa. One is that no one else liked him either; the other is that he invariably responded to Lisa's attacks on him by braying with laughter, which made them think ( rightly) that he was jeering at her. He used to say things like, "yes, you're not very bright are you Lisa?" which sharply diminished the sympathy of those who, reasonably, thought he was thinking the same about them.
What is that meant to mean, "the only evidence you have is what you saw personally"? I can't even see how it fits with the rest of the paragraph, which all seems to be about things we didn't personally see but instead have to infer from what various HMs didn't say, or from how they seemed.
It just means that we have no other sources of evidence: no housemate has said or implied it, and there seemed no particular will to nominate her, other than from Marcus and Freddie.
Since I personally saw Maisy's tweets about Jay and the freezer, is that "evidence" because I personally saw the tweet? Or is it not "evidence" because I didn't see the actual incident? Suppose a reliable person told me about the tweet instead. Would that not be evidence somehow? Or would it be "evidence" because I personally heard it from the reliable person?
Maisy's tweet would be perfectly good evidence, yes. I have referred to Mark's tweets on the same subject. But I also think nominations are a useful source of evidence when we want to assess how intolerable other housemates find an action, and on this occasion the evidence of nominations is that they didn't care much (though Heaven presumably did.)
In the rest of the paragraph you talk of other things, and in the original context you did too. It certainly didn't look like just meant refusing ever to divulge any information about the voting:
BB have been offering or withholding voting information to bring about results for years. "It's very close at the moment". "There is less than 1% in it." And we used to wait eagerly to see the voting figures after each eviction. So it was quite a shock in BB12 to be given no information at all. Maybe there is quite another explanation, but it is surely possible that they realized very early on that it might turn out to be a coronation for Aaron, and didn't want us to know. And it was certainly the first series where we were NEVER given any voting figures.
It's not so much a question of people switching allegiance because they have the voting figures; it is a question of whether they bother to vote at all. Suppose - and this is speculation - Aaron had been absolutely miles ahead of the other three in the post friends-and-family eviction. Jay's fans would have known then that really it was all over. Would they have bothered to vote in the final? Would they even have carried on watching? Whereas a very close battle will tend to generate excitement and votes.
So "didn't make Jay look good at all" means just that he and Louise came across as foolish. (To everyone? Presumably not.)
I don't think it's right to freely switch between "they may have guessed" and "they couldn't have known" (which, btw, can both be true.) In any case, I didn't say BB knew, just that "BB didn't pick just any old way to stir things up: they picked one they could have guessed would tend to make Jay look good and Aaron look bad." And they could have guessed even if the guess turned out to be wrong.
Do you think it would have made Jay look good, or just foolish, if he had bought an expensive present for no reason and Aaron hadn't? If Aaron had only kept his cool, it would have been a victory for him.
I don't know whether you just reject out of hand anything based on statistics, or what, but accurate polls can be far smaller than the vote they're trying to predict. That's why people bother to poll.
Yes true, but there is an art to polling. Forum polls are often way off, because it would seem that forums are not a random cross-section of voters. One obvious problem is that they only allow one vote per person, so they don't allow for strength of feeling. But a bigger, though harder to quantify, factor just seems to be that people on the forums fall in love with big characters, far more than non-forum members who vote do. Compare the forum reception of Jon Tickle compared with Cameron Stout, or Emilia in BBCH compared with John Loughton. Aaron did not have this problem, because he was a big character and someone who seemed to appeal to the silent masses.
If being far smaller meant that they couldn't be accurate, the practice of polling would have died out. Finding a random poll that was wildly off proves nothing, though I'd be interested in a link to something about the Facebook poll you mention, since it's result is such a strange one.
I can't link it now, but I see that in today's Observer it says that on Facebook posts supporting the yes campaign outnumbered those supporting the Better Together campaign by more than 3 to one, and the same on twitter. Social media really did belong to the yes campaign, presumably because of the different age demographic.
I also have to say I don't see how this about the unreliability of polls is meant to connect to what we discussed earlier. Do you think it must be the case that BB wouldn't try to get Jay to win because BB had some actual vote totals (even though we don't know what those totals were)? But they might have tried to get Helen to win because they didn't have vote totals and might just ignore the polls and other evidence?
As I said in the post you quoted there, "you seem to be relying on an implicit argument that, since (as you suppose) it was obvious to BB that only Aaron could win, BB must not have been trying to stop him from winning or been trying to get Jay to win." You still seem to be relying on that argument, but since it's not stated explicitly, it's hard to be sure.
It's hard for me to be specific about anything from BB15, but I would have thought they might have a narrow preference for the younger, prettier girl winning, simply because she would look more ornamental in the Star and whatever other N & S titles covered, however slightly, the final. But maybe they thought Helen was the one with the marketable story.
I doesn't seem likely though that they were trying to get Jay to win. First of all, the editing was nothing like some of Aaron's fans seemed to suggest. The highlight shows constantly showed him running rings round Jay, with a charming swagger and humour. Jay came over, bluntly, as rather a loser. We saw him struggling to find words to express himself, and Aaron being quick thinking and dazzlingly witty. We saw him losing his cool, over and over again, and Aaron very rarely. We saw him trying to get his way through bluster, and Aaron through intelligence. That was in the highlights show, chosen and edited by BB. Maybe they were physically unable to make a show flattering to Jay, but there is no reason to suppose that they ever tried. And it's not as if Jay got special, flattering personal tasks, as some housemates have, or as if they manufactured extra drama for him.
The two things that might seem most anti-Aaron - putting Jemma in and splitting the prize money - can be explained away, in the context of BB, as the usual unscrupulous things they try to do to stir up drama. Splitting the money was wrong imo, but putting Jemma in was as likely to help Aaron as harm him: her role was so disagreeable (if it is true, as Aaron said, that she was told to interfere between him and Faye) that it was FAR more likely to harm her than him, as indeed it did. I bet she would give a lot to go back in time and not do BB. It could be argued that they were giving Aaron the chance to play the hero, at the expense of destroying Jemma's reputation.
I can't see any evidence. In CBB11 (I have finally got round to looking up the number), Rylan seemed to get a special task a day. And the other housemates were just invisible unless they were talking about Speidi, or doing something with Rylan. They obviously had a whole life of their own; Razor nominated Speidi because 'they never join in with the house activities and games'; and what were those activities and games? - we have no idea. It is always bad when peoples' best bits videos consist of stuff we have never seen. What was all that larking about between Frankie, Razor and Ryan (maybe others)? No idea. There was obviously some ongoing game that involved people being carried from place to place, but we never saw it. Basically, all the housemates were seen from Rylan's point of view, almost throughout. Did Claire EVER appear on screen other than when talking to Rylan? I don't remember it if she did.
There just isn't any equivalent for Jay. He got one dullish mini-task (the one where he and Tom had to not swear); Tom got three, others got bits and pieces, but special tasks were not a big thing in BB12. In the say yes task, Heaven got a bungee jump - woudn't Jay have loved that? - and Alex got a funny one. Jay's (eat a lot of chicken) was so dull that it wasn't even shown. His relationship with Louise was shown as very odd and unattractive. And no one was shown in relation to him; even Louise, who was quiet and not especially friendly with many of them had other sides of her shown (she was often shown with Alex, for example).
I think "evidence" is one of the words -- like "speculation" used to be -- that gets in he way. Is there some sort of technicality that means the things we're been talking about -- BB"s behaviour over the freezer incident, dubious edits, Maisy's tweets, BOTS attitudes, and so on -- somehow aren't "evidence"? What is the point of even having to discuss whether they're "evidence" (in whatever sense of the word you're using) or not?
Re the difference between what happened in bb12 and what happened with Speidi and Rylan, I thought something you said earlier covered that: your view that there was a "sharp change in the Rylan / Speidi BB, when BB seemed to realize that there were almost no limits to what they could do: they could simply decide that someone wasn't going to be evicted, and that someone was going to win, and could make that happen."
As I said then, sure, it seems BB hadn't yet realised that "there were almost no limits to what they could do", but that doesn't mean they couldn't have been trying (in bb12), using the things they already knew they could do, and taking advantage of the lack of live feed.
And it is debatable whether BB could do a Rylan/ Speidi on a 10 week series. Rylan's special treatment would surely have aroused ire if it had gone on for another 7 weeks. Giving someone 10 week's immunity from eviction was shameless even by late BB standards, but it might be the only guaranteed way of keeping someone in for an entire full-length series.
BB managed to keep Charley in until week 8 of bb8. (BB 12 was only 9 weeks long; bb15 was only 10.) It was quite near to being longer, since there were no nominations in week 9 of bb8, and week 10 might well have evicted one of the new HMs even if Charlie had still been there.
in any case, a longer series might require different tactics, or at least a different pace to their deployment. That bb12 was different from cbb11 doesn't mean BB's behaviour was completely innocent in bb12.
I can't say how outlandish it was that Helen ended up winning; I envisage her collaring some of the Denise Welch 'vulnerable woman with her heart on her sleeve' vote. (I mean I thought Denise came over terribly, but she did win.)
It's had to know how to express how outlandish it was that Helen won. Perhaps it wasn't quite as out there as if Conor had won bb13 or Denis bb9. Lesley Sanderson winning bb6? Sezer winning bb7? Something like that.
I'm not sure how relevant Denise Welch is, since that was CBB. It used to seem we were more out of touch with the general audience for CBB (which presumably had a somewhat different audience mix, compared to plain BB); but with Helen winning BB and Gary CBB, that's not so clear.
That is a fair and interesting point. I do think that BB knew by that time that Aaron was almost certainly going to win. And it brings to mind something that I have always wondered, which is whether the BB people liked Aaron or not. Because that is a quite different question from whether they wanted him to stay to the end or even win. We know (because he said so) that he was Marcus Bentley's favourite housemate, but he is only one person. And we can't tell anything from BBOTS because Emma and -->*forgotten her name*<-- (see below) seemed endlessly willing to let the panel and audience be almost infinitely insulting about all of them without ever intervening. (What a mess that show was that year). They obviously liked him enough to offer him the BOTS job next year. But I wonder whether they tend to dislike housemates who make it too obvious that they are playing a game and intend to make BB roll over and do their bidding. So maybe there was an element of payback in messing with the prize.
But of course the following year they simply gave away half the prize money, and manipulated it so that it could only go to someone on bad terms with all the possible winners. What was THAT about? No more, I think, than a desire to cause drama; in which case BB12 very likely comes into the same category.
Alice Levine?
Anyway, I don't think it works to divide BB and CBB series neatly into two groups: ones in which BB was trying to get a HM (such as Rylan) to win, and ones in BB is innocent of everything except trying to cause drama.
Do you mean on that occasion, or generally? Marcus had several occasions when he was extremely aggressive, but I wouldn't like to try and put them in chronological order after all this time. When did he start to pick on Sree?
Why do you think it matters how aggressive Marcus was?
It doesn't change anything at all about how Lisa behaved, how aggressive she was, and how she seemed to be trying to get her way through bullying and intimidation.
The only relevance I can see is that, when I said Lisa must be in the top 10 most aggressive HMs, you thought she wasn't even the most aggressive in bb10. Well, suppose I give you Marcus. That still leaves 9 possible places for Lisa in the top 10.
The other point about Marcus is that perhaps his standing up to Lisa when she was being aggressive, and showing she couldn't shout him down or intimidate him, might have been a reason for the great change in her behaviour. Marcus picking on Sree wouldn't change that.
I never watch a lot. Couple of hours a week perhaps. But that is not really the point: the viewing figures for live feed were always minute for most of the time, so BB dictated the agenda by putting together the highlights show. So if you want an accurate rephrase, hardly anyone ever saw the scenes I have suggested.
If you mean something wasn't in the highlights, it would be clearer and simpler and would avoid an otherwise unnecessary back-and-forth if it were described as "the highlights never showed" rather than "we never saw".
I think re. Lisa/ Freddie, there is a combination of reasons why the other housemates did not cool towards Lisa. One is that no one else liked him either; the other is that he invariably responded to Lisa's attacks on him by braying with laughter, which made them think ( rightly) that he was jeering at her. He used to say things like, "yes, you're not very bright are you Lisa?" which sharply diminished the sympathy of those who, reasonably, thought he was thinking the same about them.
Even if that is the explanation for their not cooling towards Lisa, why would it matter?
It just means that we have no other sources of evidence: no housemate has said or implied it, and there seemed no particular will to nominate her, other than from Marcus and Freddie.
We have the evidence we saw ourselves as people watching bb10. You seem to think we should ignore how we saw Lisa behave and instead go with indirect and questionable inferences from what HMs said or didn't say about her. No thanks.
Maisy's tweet would be perfectly good evidence, yes. I have referred to Mark's tweets on the same subject. But I also think nominations are a useful source of evidence when we want to assess how intolerable other housemates find an action, and on this occasion the evidence of nominations is that they didn't care much (though Heaven presumably did.)
So what if the HMs didn't care?
BB have been offering or withholding voting information to bring about results for years. "It's very close at the moment". "There is less than 1% in it." And we used to wait eagerly to see the voting figures after each eviction. So it was quite a shock in BB12 to be given no information at all. Maybe there is quite another explanation, but it is surely possible that they realized very early on that it might turn out to be a coronation for Aaron, and didn't want us to know. And it was certainly the first series where we were NEVER given any voting figures.
That gets another "so what?" None of it means that when you said "All they had to do in BB12 was try to convince the viewers that there was still a competition", all you meant was "refusing ever to divulge any information about the voting."
It's not so much a question of people switching allegiance because they have the voting figures; it is a question of whether they bother to vote at all. Suppose - and this is speculation - Aaron had been absolutely miles ahead of the other three in the post friends-and-family eviction. Jay's fans would have known then that really it was all over. Would they have bothered to vote in the final? Would they even have carried on watching? Whereas a very close battle will tend to generate excitement and votes.
That still doesn't mean that when you said "All they had to do in BB12 was try to convince the viewers that there was still a competition", all you meant was "refusing ever to divulge any information about the voting."
I find it an extraordinary position for anyone to take: that BB sometimes wants to convince viewers there's still a competition but all BB ever does towards that end is offer or withhold voting information. Or is the idea that BB might do more in other series but for some reason not in bb12?
How do you even fit it with the information BB didn't withhold in bb12? We knew, for instance, where Jem placed the week Anton went.
Do you think it would have made Jay look good, or just foolish, if he had bought an expensive present for no reason and Aaron hadn't? If Aaron had only kept his cool, it would have been a victory for him.
Why would it matter what would have happen in that counterfactual situation?
Yes true, but there is an art to polling. Forum polls are often way off, because it would seem that forums are not a random cross-section of voters. One obvious problem is that they only allow one vote per person, so they don't allow for strength of feeling. But a bigger, though harder to quantify, factor just seems to be that people on the forums fall in love with big characters, far more than non-forum members who vote do. Compare the forum reception of Jon Tickle compared with Cameron Stout, or Emilia in BBCH compared with John Loughton. Aaron did not have this problem, because he was a big character and someone who seemed to appeal to the silent masses.
But, since Helen was a big character, that would mean the forum polls overestimated her popularity. Which would mean there was even less reason to think she could win than the polls suggested.
I can't link it now, but I see that in today's Observer it says that on Facebook posts supporting the yes campaign outnumbered those supporting the Better Together campaign by more than 3 to one, and the same on twitter. Social media really did belong to the yes campaign, presumably because of the different age demographic.
Can you find that Observer article? (I can't.) I wonder what they were looking at, how how they know whether a post supported independence or not. How would they even know what people said to their Facebook friends?
Re the demographics, we don't really know. There's Lord Ashcroft's poll, but even there 18-24 year olds were against independence (52% "no" to 48% "yes") even though 16-17 year olds were 71% in favour.
It's hard for me to be specific about anything from BB15, but I would have thought they might have a narrow preference for the younger, prettier girl winning, simply because she would look more ornamental in the Star and whatever other N & S titles covered, however slightly, the final. But maybe they thought Helen was the one with the marketable story.
I think Helen was of FAR more interest to the Star.
I doesn't seem likely though that they were trying to get Jay to win. First of all, the editing was nothing like some of Aaron's fans seemed to suggest. The highlight shows constantly showed him running rings round Jay, with a charming swagger and humour. Jay came over, bluntly, as rather a loser. We saw him struggling to find words to express himself, and Aaron being quick thinking and dazzlingly witty. We saw him losing his cool, over and over again, and Aaron very rarely. We saw him trying to get his way through bluster, and Aaron through intelligence. That was in the highlights show, chosen and edited by BB. Maybe they were physically unable to make a show flattering to Jay, but there is no reason to suppose that they ever tried. And it's not as if Jay got special, flattering personal tasks, as some housemates have, or as if they manufactured extra drama for him.
The two things that might seem most anti-Aaron - putting Jemma in and splitting the prize money - can be explained away, in the context of BB, as the usual unscrupulous things they try to do to stir up drama. Splitting the money was wrong imo, but putting Jemma in was as likely to help Aaron as harm him: her role was so disagreeable (if it is true, as Aaron said, that she was told to interfere between him and Faye) that it was FAR more likely to harm her than him, as indeed it did. I bet she would give a lot to go back in time and not do BB. It could be argued that they were giving Aaron the chance to play the hero, at the expense of destroying Jemma's reputation.
That looks more like it's restarting the discussion rather than connecting to what we said earlier.
I think "evidence" is one of the words -- like "speculation" used to be -- that gets in he way. Is there some sort of technicality that means the things we're been talking about -- BB"s behaviour over the freezer incident, dubious edits, Maisy's tweets, BOTS attitudes, and so on -- somehow aren't "evidence"? What is the point of even having to discuss whether they're "evidence" (in whatever sense of the word you're using) or not?
Some evidence is surely better than others. Giving someone a lot of positive highlight attention and other housemates none is good evidence that BB want, at least, to keep them in the show. I don't know what Maisy said in her tweets. BOTS was pretty negative about everyone that year, it's just that people went mad every time it was Aaron and were perfectly happy if it was anyone else. (They were pretty harsh about Alex, for example, towards the end; did anyone on DS protest? Not that I remember.) And the 'dubious edit' really is something that you tend to spot if you are a fan and not if not. No one cared, for example, that we never saw Jay and Louise having any ordinary romantic conversations, because it pleased people to think they were being shown as weird and grubby. I can't go back in time and have a look at the tweets and clips (which sometimes give a different picture) but even if they showed a more positive side, it didn't make the highlights.
As I said then, sure, it seems BB hadn't yet realised that "there were almost no limits to what they could do", but that doesn't mean they couldn't have been trying (in bb12), using the things they already knew they could do, and taking advantage of the lack of live feed.
I don't think they can be accused of doing the same thing. No housemate was anything like as invisible as most of them were in CBB11. And immunity was not used as a way of removing someone from the slate who would otherwise have gone, as was done with Speidi. It would have been interesting to see whether they would have allowed an Aaron/ Jemma head to head if Jemma had not walked. Even though Jemma had no fans, a head to head can produce strange results. But it didn't happen anyway as Jemma walked.
BB managed to keep Charley in until week 8 of bb8. (BB 12 was only 9 weeks long; bb15 was only 10.) It was quite near to being longer, since there were no nominations in week 9 of bb8, and week 10 might well have evicted one of the new HMs even if Charlie had still been there.
Yes, BB8 was terrible for editorial interference, and Charley was kept for about three weeks too long imo. It is one of the reasons BB8 is always towards the bottom of my favourite series list.
It's had to know how to express how outlandish it was that Helen won. Perhaps it wasn't quite as out there as if Conor had won bb13 or Denis bb9. Lesley Sanderson winning bb6? Sezer winning bb7? Something like that.
It seemed to wrong-foot people on here. People had been saying for weeks they expected her to be first out on finals night.
Anyway, I don't think it works to divide BB and CBB series neatly into two groups: ones in which BB was trying to get a HM (such as Rylan) to win, and ones in BB is innocent of everything except trying to cause drama.
I think it is only once or twice that BB have so blatantly tried to make someone win. Jim Davidson was another one, where the other housemates were obviously amazed at how kindly he had been edited, and said so very plainly. And it there were what you might call external reasons for Rylan and Jim being given very favourable treatment: one of them was given a staff job (though we don't know when that was planned) and the other one was a close friend of the station owner and had obviously promised to do some work for Ch 5 after the series.
Why do you think it matters how aggressive Marcus was?
It doesn't change anything at all about how Lisa behaved, how aggressive she was, and how she seemed to be trying to get her way through bullying and intimidation.
I don't remember anyone finding her intimidating, or, apart from Marcus in a towering rage, accusing her of bullying. And since I must have forgotten a lot of her behaviour, since I don't remember much that could be called bullying either, I was forced to refer it back to you, as I have no other source of information about it.
We have the evidence we saw ourselves as people watching bb10. You seem to think we should ignore how we saw Lisa behave and instead go with indirect and questionable inferences from what HMs said or didn't say about her. No thanks.
I have absolutely no respect for what most people on this forum posted about Lisa. They were vile. She was constantly called 'dole scum', and accused of being dirty (even though her friends said she was freakishly clean); she was accused of having a 'gang' whom she ruled with a rod of iron, though she had no such thing; every single thing directed against Freddie, even if she was not in the room, was attributed to her. The worship of Freddie was absolutely nauseating and distorted most of the posts on the forum that year. I would far rather listen to what the other housemates said than stuff like that.
I find it an extraordinary position for anyone to take: that BB sometimes wants to convince viewers there's still a competition but all BB ever does towards that end is offer or withhold voting information. Or is the idea that BB might do more in other series but for some reason not in bb12?
I don't know why that is extraordinary. It seems to me a very good way of pretending that there is still a competition if there is not. As I said, if Aaron had got, say, three quarters of the votes the last time he was up (against, amongst others, jay), it might have had a disastrous effect on both viewers and votes to say so. Far better to disclose nothing if someone is too obviously in the lead.
But, since Helen was a big character, that would mean the forum polls overestimated her popularity. Which would mean there was even less reason to think she could win than the polls suggested.
I can't say whether BB expected her to win or whether they wanted her to win, but I think there is some evidence that they were not happy afterwards when she won. The Ch 5 questionaire was a unique venture, and more or less said, "We know it all ended horribly this year, so please help us to see what went wrong."
Can you find that Observer article? (I can't.) I wonder what they were looking at, how how they know whether a post supported independence or not. How would they even know what people said to their Facebook friends?
I don't know the answer to the second question, though you do occasionally get references to how often something has been shared on facebook, so presumably there is a way data is collected. It wasn't an article, just a sentence in one of the many articles they had on the subject on Sunday.
I think Helen was of FAR more interest to the Star.
You might be right, though I can't see why. She had already sold what marketable story she had, and even if she tried to sell it again it is hard to see that the Star would want it much. I can't believe that her Star 'column' will last long, though they are famously poor payers so perhaps people are not exactly beating their door down.
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You haven't given any reason to think it simplistic, or even to think it isn't true. I don't know what you're looking for as a "pattern". Identical nominations, week after week?
What I said was that there's "a rather natural division right about where many thought it was"; and there is. There are two groups of HMs who rarely (if ever) nominate members of their own group and who instead direct the majority of their nominations at members of the other group.
Look at Siavash, for example. The whole time he's there he nominated Freddie only once, and it was in week 1. He never nominated Marcus. Marcus nominated Freddie twice, but never Siavash. Freddie nominated Marcus once, but not until week 10; he never nominated Siavash. So there's very little of those HMs nominating each other. Most of their nominations are for HMs in the other group.
Lisa, on the other hand, nominated Freddie 7 times, Marcus 7 times, though Siavash only twice. Charlie nominated Freddie 6 times, Marcus 6 times, and Siavash 6 times. In the 6 times David nominated, he nominated Marcus 5 times, Siavash 3 times, and Freddie once. In the 6 weeks Karly nominated, she nominated Freddie 5 times, and Marcus 4. Kris nominated Freddie 5 times and Siavash twice. Even Sree, who nominated only 4 times, managed to nominate each of Freddie and Marcus twice, and Siavash once.
Meanwhile, none of Lisa, Charlie, David, Karly, Kris, or Sree ever nominated any of the others in that list.
Sophie nominated Charlie and Sree once (both in week 1), and she eventually nominated David in week 12, but that's it. She nominated Freddie 6 times and Marcus 8. (She was, however, friends with Siavash for much of the series and never nominated him.)
Rodrigo eventually nominated Lisa twice, and David twice, but he nominated Freddie 5 times, Marcus 6 times, and Siavash twice.
So the pattern pattern holds fairly well even when we add Sophie and Rodrigo to the group.
But it was Lisa who started the aggressive behaviour, and Marcus who stood up to her.
We have, by now, seen quite a few cases of bullying in BB -- and of HMs who did not cool in their relationship with the bully.
Whether that's because they didn't see it as bullying -- which certainly seems possible, since views of what counts as bullying vary greatly -- or because they had a "moral screw loose", or for some other reason, I don't know. But for present purposes, I also don't care, because such things do not change Lisa's behaviour.
Re scenes we "never saw", how much of the live feed did you watch that year?
But as I've said before, that Freddie said she hadn't bullied him -- thanks for answering the "when did he say it?" question, btw -- doesn't mean she didn't. We saw enough to make up our own minds about something like that.
What is that meant to mean, "the only evidence you have is what you saw personally"? I can't even see how it fits with the rest of the paragraph, which all seems to be about things we didn't personally see but instead have to infer from what various HMs didn't say, or from how they seemed.
Since I personally saw Maisy's tweets about Jay and the freezer, is that "evidence" because I personally saw the tweet? Or is it not "evidence" because I didn't see the actual incident? Suppose a reliable person told me about the tweet instead. Would that not be evidence somehow? Or would it be "evidence" because I personally heard it from the reliable person?
In the rest of the paragraph you talk of other things, and in the original context you did too. It certainly didn't look like just meant refusing ever to divulge any information about the voting:
I don't think "refusing ever to divulge any information about the voting" would normally be described as a way to "convince the viewers that there was still a competition". Why would someone who thought there wasn't a competition change their mind just because BB hadn't released voting numbers?
And that's enough.
Yet not long before, Aaron's fans had been instrumental in saving Jem. Indeed, they over-saved her to the point where she was 2nd. They didn't seem to be trying to get Faye out, just not keen to save her. But how keen would they have to be, given Aaron's huge poll lead?
In week 8, when Faye went, Aaron had 66.22% in the [thread=1567174]favourite HM poll[/thread] here. Faye had 6.35% and Louise 3.57. Jay had 4.44% And Louise was ahead of Faye in the [thread=1568933]least favourite poll[/thread]. (Jay led that one easily at 36.98%.)
Faye going over Louise really does put a question mark over the idea that such polls accurately reflected the HMs' real popularities.
So "didn't make Jay look good at all" means just that he and Louise came across as foolish. (To everyone? Presumably not.)
I don't think it's right to freely switch between "they may have guessed" and "they couldn't have known" (which, btw, can both be true.) In any case, I didn't say BB knew, just that "BB didn't pick just any old way to stir things up: they picked one they could have guessed would tend to make Jay look good and Aaron look bad." And they could have guessed even if the guess turned out to be wrong.
I don't know whether you just reject out of hand anything based on statistics, or what, but accurate polls can be far smaller than the vote they're trying to predict. That's why people bother to poll. If being far smaller meant that they couldn't be accurate, the practice of polling would have died out. Finding a random poll that was wildly off proves nothing, though I'd be interested in a link to something about the Facebook poll you mention, since it's result is such a strange one.
Some of the BB polls have more respondents than you think. For example, the bbspy poll for week 9 of bb15 had 4433, and for the final had 7688.
However, I am finding this part of out discussion quite frustrating. I said something I thought that was pretty clearly about how things looked from our POV, but your reply was about BB's POV. So I replied saying I'd thought it was pretty clearly about how things looked from our POV, and you've again replied about BB's POV.
I also have to say I don't see how this about the unreliability of polls is meant to connect to what we discussed earlier. Do you think it must be the case that BB wouldn't try to get Jay to win because BB had some actual vote totals (even though we don't know what those totals were)? But they might have tried to get Helen to win because they didn't have vote totals and might just ignore the polls and other evidence?
As I said in the post you quoted there, "you seem to be relying on an implicit argument that, since (as you suppose) it was obvious to BB that only Aaron could win, BB must not have been trying to stop him from winning or been trying to get Jay to win." You still seem to be relying on that argument, but since it's not stated explicitly, it's hard to be sure.
I never watch a lot. Couple of hours a week perhaps. But that is not really the point: the viewing figures for live feed were always minute for most of the time, so BB dictated the agenda by putting together the highlights show. So if you want an accurate rephrase, hardly anyone ever saw the scenes I have suggested.
I think re. Lisa/ Freddie, there is a combination of reasons why the other housemates did not cool towards Lisa. One is that no one else liked him either; the other is that he invariably responded to Lisa's attacks on him by braying with laughter, which made them think ( rightly) that he was jeering at her. He used to say things like, "yes, you're not very bright are you Lisa?" which sharply diminished the sympathy of those who, reasonably, thought he was thinking the same about them.
It just means that we have no other sources of evidence: no housemate has said or implied it, and there seemed no particular will to nominate her, other than from Marcus and Freddie.
Maisy's tweet would be perfectly good evidence, yes. I have referred to Mark's tweets on the same subject. But I also think nominations are a useful source of evidence when we want to assess how intolerable other housemates find an action, and on this occasion the evidence of nominations is that they didn't care much (though Heaven presumably did.)
BB have been offering or withholding voting information to bring about results for years. "It's very close at the moment". "There is less than 1% in it." And we used to wait eagerly to see the voting figures after each eviction. So it was quite a shock in BB12 to be given no information at all. Maybe there is quite another explanation, but it is surely possible that they realized very early on that it might turn out to be a coronation for Aaron, and didn't want us to know. And it was certainly the first series where we were NEVER given any voting figures.
It's not so much a question of people switching allegiance because they have the voting figures; it is a question of whether they bother to vote at all. Suppose - and this is speculation - Aaron had been absolutely miles ahead of the other three in the post friends-and-family eviction. Jay's fans would have known then that really it was all over. Would they have bothered to vote in the final? Would they even have carried on watching? Whereas a very close battle will tend to generate excitement and votes.
Do you think it would have made Jay look good, or just foolish, if he had bought an expensive present for no reason and Aaron hadn't? If Aaron had only kept his cool, it would have been a victory for him.
Yes true, but there is an art to polling. Forum polls are often way off, because it would seem that forums are not a random cross-section of voters. One obvious problem is that they only allow one vote per person, so they don't allow for strength of feeling. But a bigger, though harder to quantify, factor just seems to be that people on the forums fall in love with big characters, far more than non-forum members who vote do. Compare the forum reception of Jon Tickle compared with Cameron Stout, or Emilia in BBCH compared with John Loughton. Aaron did not have this problem, because he was a big character and someone who seemed to appeal to the silent masses.
I can't link it now, but I see that in today's Observer it says that on Facebook posts supporting the yes campaign outnumbered those supporting the Better Together campaign by more than 3 to one, and the same on twitter. Social media really did belong to the yes campaign, presumably because of the different age demographic.
It's hard for me to be specific about anything from BB15, but I would have thought they might have a narrow preference for the younger, prettier girl winning, simply because she would look more ornamental in the Star and whatever other N & S titles covered, however slightly, the final. But maybe they thought Helen was the one with the marketable story.
I doesn't seem likely though that they were trying to get Jay to win. First of all, the editing was nothing like some of Aaron's fans seemed to suggest. The highlight shows constantly showed him running rings round Jay, with a charming swagger and humour. Jay came over, bluntly, as rather a loser. We saw him struggling to find words to express himself, and Aaron being quick thinking and dazzlingly witty. We saw him losing his cool, over and over again, and Aaron very rarely. We saw him trying to get his way through bluster, and Aaron through intelligence. That was in the highlights show, chosen and edited by BB. Maybe they were physically unable to make a show flattering to Jay, but there is no reason to suppose that they ever tried. And it's not as if Jay got special, flattering personal tasks, as some housemates have, or as if they manufactured extra drama for him.
The two things that might seem most anti-Aaron - putting Jemma in and splitting the prize money - can be explained away, in the context of BB, as the usual unscrupulous things they try to do to stir up drama. Splitting the money was wrong imo, but putting Jemma in was as likely to help Aaron as harm him: her role was so disagreeable (if it is true, as Aaron said, that she was told to interfere between him and Faye) that it was FAR more likely to harm her than him, as indeed it did. I bet she would give a lot to go back in time and not do BB. It could be argued that they were giving Aaron the chance to play the hero, at the expense of destroying Jemma's reputation.
Well as I said two posts ago, hopefully from next weekend obwards
Lol, it SEEMED harmless enough to use an extinct voting thread to carry on a debate.
One I've been following with interest, although I can't claim to have read every word!:)
I'm sure every alternate word would be fine.
It's fine, I just couldn't resist the gag
I think "evidence" is one of the words -- like "speculation" used to be -- that gets in he way. Is there some sort of technicality that means the things we're been talking about -- BB"s behaviour over the freezer incident, dubious edits, Maisy's tweets, BOTS attitudes, and so on -- somehow aren't "evidence"?
Re the difference between what happened in bb12 and what happened with Speidi and Rylan, I thought something you said earlier covered that: your view that there was a "sharp change in the Rylan / Speidi BB, when BB seemed to realize that there were almost no limits to what they could do: they could simply decide that someone wasn't going to be evicted, and that someone was going to win, and could make that happen."
As I said then, sure, it seems BB hadn't yet realised that "there were almost no limits to what they could do", but that doesn't mean they couldn't have been trying (in bb12), using the things they already knew they could do, and taking advantage of the lack of live feed.
BB managed to keep Charley in until week 8 of bb8. (BB 12 was only 9 weeks long; bb15 was only 10.) It was quite near to being longer, since there were no nominations in week 9 of bb8, and week 10 might well have evicted one of the new HMs even if Charlie had still been there.
in any case, a longer series might require different tactics, or at least a different pace to their deployment. That bb12 was different from cbb11 doesn't mean BB's behaviour was completely innocent in bb12.
It's had to know how to express how outlandish it was that Helen won. Perhaps it wasn't quite as out there as if Conor had won bb13 or Denis bb9. Lesley Sanderson winning bb6? Sezer winning bb7? Something like that.
I'm not sure how relevant Denise Welch is, since that was CBB. It used to seem we were more out of touch with the general audience for CBB (which presumably had a somewhat different audience mix, compared to plain BB); but with Helen winning BB and Gary CBB, that's not so clear.
Alice Levine?
Anyway, I don't think it works to divide BB and CBB series neatly into two groups: ones in which BB was trying to get a HM (such as Rylan) to win, and ones in BB is innocent of everything except trying to cause drama.
Why do you think it matters how aggressive Marcus was?
It doesn't change anything at all about how Lisa behaved, how aggressive she was, and how she seemed to be trying to get her way through bullying and intimidation.
The only relevance I can see is that, when I said Lisa must be in the top 10 most aggressive HMs, you thought she wasn't even the most aggressive in bb10. Well, suppose I give you Marcus. That still leaves 9 possible places for Lisa in the top 10.
The other point about Marcus is that perhaps his standing up to Lisa when she was being aggressive, and showing she couldn't shout him down or intimidate him, might have been a reason for the great change in her behaviour. Marcus picking on Sree wouldn't change that.
If you mean something wasn't in the highlights, it would be clearer and simpler and would avoid an otherwise unnecessary back-and-forth if it were described as "the highlights never showed" rather than "we never saw".
Even if that is the explanation for their not cooling towards Lisa, why would it matter?
We have the evidence we saw ourselves as people watching bb10. You seem to think we should ignore how we saw Lisa behave and instead go with indirect and questionable inferences from what HMs said or didn't say about her. No thanks.
So what if the HMs didn't care?
That gets another "so what?" None of it means that when you said "All they had to do in BB12 was try to convince the viewers that there was still a competition", all you meant was "refusing ever to divulge any information about the voting."
That still doesn't mean that when you said "All they had to do in BB12 was try to convince the viewers that there was still a competition", all you meant was "refusing ever to divulge any information about the voting."
I find it an extraordinary position for anyone to take: that BB sometimes wants to convince viewers there's still a competition but all BB ever does towards that end is offer or withhold voting information. Or is the idea that BB might do more in other series but for some reason not in bb12?
How do you even fit it with the information BB didn't withhold in bb12? We knew, for instance, where Jem placed the week Anton went.
Why would it matter what would have happen in that counterfactual situation?
But, since Helen was a big character, that would mean the forum polls overestimated her popularity. Which would mean there was even less reason to think she could win than the polls suggested.
Can you find that Observer article? (I can't.) I wonder what they were looking at, how how they know whether a post supported independence or not. How would they even know what people said to their Facebook friends?
Re the demographics, we don't really know. There's Lord Ashcroft's poll, but even there 18-24 year olds were against independence (52% "no" to 48% "yes") even though 16-17 year olds were 71% in favour.
I think Helen was of FAR more interest to the Star.
That looks more like it's restarting the discussion rather than connecting to what we said earlier.
I don't think they can be accused of doing the same thing. No housemate was anything like as invisible as most of them were in CBB11. And immunity was not used as a way of removing someone from the slate who would otherwise have gone, as was done with Speidi. It would have been interesting to see whether they would have allowed an Aaron/ Jemma head to head if Jemma had not walked. Even though Jemma had no fans, a head to head can produce strange results. But it didn't happen anyway as Jemma walked.
Yes, BB8 was terrible for editorial interference, and Charley was kept for about three weeks too long imo. It is one of the reasons BB8 is always towards the bottom of my favourite series list.
It seemed to wrong-foot people on here. People had been saying for weeks they expected her to be first out on finals night.
I think it is only once or twice that BB have so blatantly tried to make someone win. Jim Davidson was another one, where the other housemates were obviously amazed at how kindly he had been edited, and said so very plainly. And it there were what you might call external reasons for Rylan and Jim being given very favourable treatment: one of them was given a staff job (though we don't know when that was planned) and the other one was a close friend of the station owner and had obviously promised to do some work for Ch 5 after the series. I don't remember anyone finding her intimidating, or, apart from Marcus in a towering rage, accusing her of bullying. And since I must have forgotten a lot of her behaviour, since I don't remember much that could be called bullying either, I was forced to refer it back to you, as I have no other source of information about it.
I have absolutely no respect for what most people on this forum posted about Lisa. They were vile. She was constantly called 'dole scum', and accused of being dirty (even though her friends said she was freakishly clean); she was accused of having a 'gang' whom she ruled with a rod of iron, though she had no such thing; every single thing directed against Freddie, even if she was not in the room, was attributed to her. The worship of Freddie was absolutely nauseating and distorted most of the posts on the forum that year. I would far rather listen to what the other housemates said than stuff like that. I don't know why that is extraordinary. It seems to me a very good way of pretending that there is still a competition if there is not. As I said, if Aaron had got, say, three quarters of the votes the last time he was up (against, amongst others, jay), it might have had a disastrous effect on both viewers and votes to say so. Far better to disclose nothing if someone is too obviously in the lead.
I can't say whether BB expected her to win or whether they wanted her to win, but I think there is some evidence that they were not happy afterwards when she won. The Ch 5 questionaire was a unique venture, and more or less said, "We know it all ended horribly this year, so please help us to see what went wrong." I don't know the answer to the second question, though you do occasionally get references to how often something has been shared on facebook, so presumably there is a way data is collected. It wasn't an article, just a sentence in one of the many articles they had on the subject on Sunday.
You might be right, though I can't see why. She had already sold what marketable story she had, and even if she tried to sell it again it is hard to see that the Star would want it much. I can't believe that her Star 'column' will last long, though they are famously poor payers so perhaps people are not exactly beating their door down.