In addition to the earlier question whether John was treated unfairly in BB11 (I'm not convinced he was . . . . other than relative to Josie), the question whether Josie was treated unfairly in UBB is another interesting one.

Many of course (outside the JJJ universe) felt she had been treated preferentially in bb11, so you would think Endemol would have been concerned not to exacerbate that general feeling.

They will also have known that she had one built-in advantage in that her troops were highly mobilised and motivated to vote for her to win, whereas Brian had no "uber" fanbase ready to do the same for him. I note Khyra thinks Brian would have beaten Josie in any event, but I'm not so sure. Undoubtedly imo Brian is more widely popular in Britain (notwithstanding # twitter followers, lol), but I doubt there were that many people voting in ubb and it may well be the case that the uber vote would have been the deciding factor.

So perhaps it suited Endemol for Josie to find it tough going in UBB and certainly bringing back John would have led to even further anger amongst non-JJJers (including all the Shabby fans who had been campaigning for her to be sent back in after she'd changed her mind about "walking").

That's what I think too. May develop into something more serious . . . and equally may not.

Haha, one of my pet hates - a tool which changes "fact" into "drama". Classic case of "more is less", imo.

On topic, rather like how Endemol turned reality TV into soap opera!

Afternoon JJAT we are spending quality time gutting half my names bedroom and re wallpapering carpeting and getting her a new bed!!So time is brief on here twitter and FB at the moment! Have enjoyed reading the posts from the weekend ! I thought the twitter person was a friend of the mum!
Finally HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO LENA J ! never been 21 before Off for a nosey BBL

Happy birtyhday Lena.

Welcome to the JJAT coli99.

wrong thread, keep doing that!

I did think John was unfairly treated by the producers in BB11. particularly in the last couple of weeks, ok on one level he didnt help himself by being a bit awkward and a bit stroppy.....
but the whole thing with Josie got so distorted when he refused to play along.....and on one level, even if he was in the house he should have had the right to refuse to talk about his feelings and be left in peace to work out how he felt about Josie. It was a very Big Brother situation, but that didnt make it morally right .........

And in the last week, the whole thing about Ben entering and the massage with Rachel, and then the meal with Corin and Nathan, was so badly engineered for John.

By then I think the producers wanted him out and were setting him up for a bad edit, so a bad edit he got.......The way he was portrayed in those last couple of weeks on the Highlights show, and even in the press, was so different to the way he was actually behaving on the live feed......


I think that the producers of BB11 seem to have lost interest in this show towards the end, cos they were too busy preparing for UBB.
They realised that the actually winners of BB11 wouldnt be needed for any publicity cos of UBB, so they got some of the most interesting characters out the week before, ie John, Sam and Corin...and just virtually ignored the 4 left in the house at the end.

I dont think they cared at all about the last 4 in there, and I do think they were ridiculously unfair to Josie in UBB, for so many different reasons.....
from not giving her a day out to get her hair dyed and to renew her wardrobe and get some new clothes and buy some new cosmetics and lotions and potions.
from not giving her a proper chance to talk to John privately.
and it was more than that, inasmuch in BB, John and Josie were clinging to each other emotionally to survive the experience and were so closely bonded....they almost physically needed each other....the day before John left, I dont think John or Josie left each others side, all day. It must have been a huge wrench to go from leaning on someone 24/7 for almost 3 months to going it alone....under the glare of hundreds of cameras watching....


I also think BB were cruel to not give Josie the opportunity to talk to her family especially her mum, who she had mentioned on numerous occasions within BB11, that she was estranged from.


and for not realising that she had been isolated from the real world for nearly 3 months and that she would need to be debriefed and given a chance to come back to reality outside the house.... before just throwing her back in in front of the cameras again.....

After she came out Josie said she left because she had had a mini breakdown in UBB, and watching her on live feed the day before she left, I would agree.......
the girl sobbing in the shower the night before she left...was desperately unhappy.....and in pain....

I thought Josie ended up with a terrible dilemma, she had won BB11, and so had reason to be very grateful to Endemol, but she was so badly stressed in UBB, she had a mini breakdown from the experience and had the right to be very angry with Endemol and channel 4...
.because they treated her so badly and so inconsiderately at the end...

in my opinion, she was extremely lucky that John was there to support her and that they could help each other get through the next few months....
Having seen what she can be like now, can you imagine how self destructive she could have been last september, without the stablising influence of John?

Interesting post augusta

I think the last task was done to rile everyone up,create tension,make a dramatic last week of BB,John unfortunately didn't help the situation,he gave BB what they wanted, a reaction,he could have easily not raised to the bate.

I don't think BB cares about the HM,after all,they're just puppets in a game show.



http://twitpic.com/2glk35/full

Love the pics lol

Interesting. So, in short, you feel there was a lot of unfairness to John and Josie from the producers. My take is different:

John: he was at the centre of most of the house drama so if Endemol wanted to ratchet up the drama in the final fortnight, he was the obvious cog to wind up. Was it being done to settle scores, I'm not convinced. There are other credible reasons why they would do it. Not least, they needed him out before the final if, as I believe, they wanted Josie to win the final BB and help them attract C5 as buyer to help preserve some of their jobs. Arguably what they did to John was unfair, but equally the bad edit likely coincided with his agenda to "abdicate" in favour of Josie. And after all they'd both been beneficiaries of laughable punishments for mics off convos . . . so it wasn't all 1-way traffic.

Josie: What you see as unfairness towards Josie, I see as avoiding preferential treatment as against other HMs. I don't see she should have been given any special treatment for UBB, she signed up expecting to be in a house for 13 weeks and that's all she was being asked to do if she wanted to win UBB as well. That's a rare opportunity she was being given. Imo, her inability to adapt in UBB was more connected to the fact that she'd become complacent in the strength of her own position in the BB11 house (helped immensely by John) and couldn't cope with suddenly being outside her comfort zone. But for Endemol to have done some of the things you suggest would rightly imo have been seen as giving an unfair leg-up to a potential winner of UBB. And in any event letting her speak to family before going back in could easily have had the opposite effect to the one you're implying, certainly it would me.


. . . . just as she had been when Govan was evicted. Surely that's a big part of what BB is all about, you have to ride with the ups and downs, or leave if you can't hack it. And really BB11/UBB was quite tame relative to some earlier ones (BB5 and BB6 most notably).

A very interesting and thoughtful post augusta. I agree with you about most of the post. I agree John was badly handled and also Josie when she won. I never understood why she had to go right back into the house with no time to at least speak to her family and John. Dreadful. I thought she would crack up and she did. I remember contacting BB asking them to please allow Josie to speak to her aunt or John.

I also agree that Endemol lost interest in the program. UBB was a damp squib imo. I think I watched the day Josie left and that was it.

I do agree with you about John being a stabilizing influence on Josie but the influence didn't last too long sadly. She seemed to go back to her old life just before Christmas. I also don't know how long she would have stayed in the house without John. She just wasn't that interesting without him.

Hello.

Everyone OK? Everyone safe?


BIB 1: Was John treated unfairly. I think it was unfair to bring Ben back and have him say the things he did. I think it was out of order for them to include the housemates having to call him crabeyes while he had the crab suit on. The suit itself I thought he was being a bit of a brat, he should have put it on and had a laugh. But the name calling was not on. Rachael massage she baited and he bit, imo that was made out to be worse than it was. After Corin came back from the meal with Nathan and started mouthing off about John needing security at the wrap party I thought BB should have stepped straight in. [Obviously we don’t know what was said in the diary room] At the time I wanted John to walk out, there was no point him staying if he was worried about his mum, worried about himself, not going to do the interviews with Davina and so on. In hindsight I am glad that JJ had that talk with him the next day in the hut. the interviews and BBLB and BBBM are part of the BB experience and I think if John had missed that part of the show he would have looked back now on his BB experience and regretted it.


BIB 3: I stick by this view as well.

For me on a whole when you compare their characters his over all character makes him a better housemate than Josie. He is much more quick witted than Josie is. He is more comedy entertainment in the tasks than Josie is. The problem Josie had was the John James business. She was sitting around worried about him all the time, what was he doing? Does he still want to be with her? etc, if she would have stayed longer then the other housemates and viewers would have got fed up with her whining away while Brian would have carried on being Brian. I know she had momentum from her BB11 win but I still think her character next to Brian’s would have fallen short for the win. Would her fans after seeing her so miserable actually want to vote to keep her somewhere where she is totally unhappy? I know she has a lot of Twitter fans but that doesn’t mean they will all vote for her. At Christmas she had 136,000 followers on twitter yet only 20,000 of them brought the perfume. [I know 20,000 is a lot but it is not many out of 136,00 that followed her on Twitter] Same with John’s calendars. He had 150,000 followers and sold no where near that amount of calendars.

BIB 2: Did BB treat Josie unfairly?: I think they did. Imo whoever won BB11 were at a disadvantage. UBB was a totally new game from BB11. The other housemates were able to openly talk about things that had happened in BB11 putting them at a huge advantage. Ulrika told Josie things that John had said in the diary room, she told her what had been said in his post BB interviews. Nadia also said thing. Preston told her he was an underwear model which was not true, Josie knew none of that. Why were the other housemates allowed to pass on information about that? Imo BB should have given Josie a few days off. There is no reason as to why she couldn’t have gone into the bed-sit on the Friday with Victor. Ok you could say that Josie would have benefited hugely from this, she would have had time with John, she would have known exactly where she stood and it wouldn’t have mattered what Nadia or anyone else thought because she would have had that feelings talk with him. But also and maybe just as importantly she would have had a chance to freshen herself up, get some new clothes and start a fresh just like all the other housemates were and then I think she would have felt like she was on a more equal footing.

I agree they couldn’t bring John back into the house, a lot of viewers wouldn’t have like it and I don’t think it wouldn’t have helped Josie at all. Do you think if they had played his message into the house it would have helped her or made matters worse?

Khyra

Dean Friedman thread - 3rd on the right next to the Marty Feldman Appreciation thread.

Enjoyed reading this post Augusta - very interesting - now thinking about it - yes I certainly liked Josie much more while she was with John - as the relationship appeared to break down we started to see the real Josie - from an observers point of view your right Josie did seem nicer and more stable under John's influence.

Good Evening to all the lovely people on the JJAT
and to all the friendly lurkers, don't be shy post
Well Thats it
I'm exhausted
shall just sit in the corner and put my feet up
while i,m having a little read back

best wishes
georgyx

P.s Hands Norman back to Augusta , by the way his eaten one of my earrings , if it not to much trouble , could you just check his poop

Evening all

london has been a weird place to work today, One of my team is a special constable so we needed to let him go and then worried about him all day.

Augusta

Great post and I agree with the majority of it.One thing that has always puzzled me was why Josie was so grateful to the BB team. I found it really unbelievable that she largely supported them whatever happened to John but also didn't seem to mind how she was treated in UBB. I have often wondered if she was another pre select and that was the reason for the gratitude

Hi guys

Happy Birthday Lena.

Welcome to our new member Coli.

Just to update you my daughter had her op today and it went well. They kept her in overnight and I have to go back in the morning hopefully to pick her up. I am knackered. We got to the hospital at 9.45 this morning and I left at 7.30 tonight. They said she was a day patient yesterday and so I didnt see the point in going backwards and forwards the price of petrol being what it is now and they let me sit with her for most of the day so that was ok.

Hi Loving

So glad thats over and is recovering well. Hospitals are tiring places, bet you sleep well tonight.

Could they be dating for 4 months you think? I get very confused about where a relationship starts in this country.I would think in 4 months,it is either on or off?

At least it is over.Let us hope for a speedy recovery.

LOL I didnt get what the crying over Govan was ,2 weeks? At least John that was understandable.

Absolutely! Watching tonight, I sensed a real tension on the news channels between having in all conscience to be pleased that most areas seem quieter at the moment, and a desperate search for more news 'stories' (quote) and drama - this is what keeps the channels in business, after all.

And I agree it is similar to the merging of reality TV into soap opera

And on that note I shall bid you all goodnight - early start tomorrow - 5.30am

You may have noticed I am a night owl, not an early bird, so it will be a real struggle!

:yawn: So, night night everyone, sleep tight, Lindy x :sleep:

This is what I think. Im not sure if you dated someone for 4 months then youd either be together or just friends. But from what I have heard ect, I have a feeling they are together x

Good morning all.

Glad to hear everyone is safe and sound. Please take care everyone. For the first time in about 3 years we have heard police cars' sirens going up and down the road.

Some interesting posts last night. Josie crying when Govan left - perhaps it was because he was her ally. I have maintained that if Govan had stayed in the house, I don't think anything would have developed between John and Josie and I also think that Josie and Govan would probably have both been evicted before John.

If I don't speak to you before you go away have a fantastic holiday and lots of snaps please!!!