I read your argument the first time and answered it; you have just repeated it in such loaded language that it is impossible to debale with. To repeat: Luke had no issue with Scott; he did not see Becky or Ashleigh as being of low status in the house, no one did, because they were not; he did not loathe Luke S, who had no 'ilk'; he admitted that he had an issue with him (which was perfectly understandable to people like Sheivonne who commented on how Luke S constantly interrupted him and talked over him) but tried on more than one occasion to talk it through with him; your language about him 'constantly whining and snivelling' makes it perfectly clear that you are not interested in debate, only in abusing him.

Let's leave it at that, eh? Let's not pretend that there are any actual contributions in your post to the debate, such as it is.

I feel the same about those who have a delusional and irrational love for him. Not that they should reassess him now - because everything looks different after the event when none of it matters and even I find myself thinking "he wasn't that bad" until I'm reminded about some incidents on here - but at the time.



Whenever Luke's mask slips it's always the other person's fault... Like when Sara was "going ON and ON at him" in the task before he snapped at her... and when Becky supposedly came "STORMING over looking for a fight" after she found out Luke called her fake behind her back (instead of keeping quiet and letting people badmouth her, like she should have done, because being cowardly and just bitching about it to your friends instead is seen as a good trait on here ) About the ashleigh thing, we are all in agreement that the sabotage of the task was nasty, but Adam keeping the cigarettes for himself and away from people who had nothing to do with it, was petty and selfish. You finding Luke's comment funny and appropriate is not a justification, not everyone finds condescending and degrading male chauvinism with the intention of provoking someone who is obviously already angry, funny.

BIB: I don't see why when I describe Luke it is seen as name-calling and when MissBeastie describes an incident it is dismissed as 'loaded language' and yet you are allowed to come out with this which sounds like the kind of overly emotive and misleading exaggeration you would find in one of those terrible TV magazines.

I think it's up to the moderators to decide whether or not my posts contribute to the debate, not you.

You stated that it is 'unacceptable if someone tries to improve their standing in the house by turning on the 'outcasts' or low status housemates as they see them. And no one, surely, could suggest that Luke ever did that'. Well, I have accused LukeA of doing exactly that and given examples. I didn't see Ashleigh or Becky as having status in the house. No-one was intimidated by them, no-one took their views seriously and neither of them had anything remotely interesting or intelligent to say. They were both easy targets for LukeA to put down with his superior language skills and patronising tone. He hated LukeS and said so, and the 'ilk' to which I refer is that of the competitive, controlling, dominant Alpha male type, (Connor, for example...)

The fact that I don't like the persona he adopted in the BB show is my choice, and I will use adjectives to describe his behaviour as I saw it, just as you do. The fact that you think of them as 'abusive' is ridiculous. He did snivel (to cry and sniffle) and he did whine (moan, whimper, cry) in the DR regularly about how disliked he felt he was, despite the fact that I never saw anyone being mean to LukeA - nor denying him the 'acceptance' he claimed he was struggling to achieve when he entered the house.

I'm not saying that a confrontation should have taken place between LukeA and LukeS or LukeA and Scott, Connor or whatever (although LukeA nominated LukeS more or less every week as far as I remember and said that he hated him) but had their been any overt conflict, I'm suggesting that LukeA would not have been so superior and condescending towards those characters as he was with the women he tried to squash because he saw those HM's as being of high status.

In both of the examples that you have mentioned it was just as much the other persons fault as it was Lukes and I don't remember him excusing himself of any blame. Sara was going on and on at him and he understandably got irritated by her and snapped. I don't understand why you interpret this as his 'mask slipping' as if he was revealing some sort of nasty character trait

I agree, that Luke should have told Becky about how he felt about her behavior directly, instead of telling Ashleigh and that it was understandable that Becky would want to question Luke about what his problem was with her. When Becky confronted Luke he was honest with her and gave her a detailed account of what she had done to upset him. Although it was wrong of him to tell Ashleigh first, I think he showed positive characteristics in the way he handled the confrontation with Becky.

Also being cowardly and bitching about things with your friends is deemed a very negative trait on here,

I don't think he was condescending or ever tried to 'squash' them. In the conversation he had with Becky regarding his 'fake' comments he gave a detailed account of what she had done in very plain language .The reason she got tongue tied and flustered was because she realised that she'd been sussed out and couldn't deny what he was accusing her of.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahb6fZbmVD8

The row is here. When Becky asks LukeA why he thinks she's fake, LukeA claims she's changed towards him and started to be 'weird'. He reminds her that when he asked everyone to be quiet in the bedroom, she giggled and then whispered in the bathroom and has now begun to be 'horrible' to him. (I remember the moment LukeA asked the HM's to be quiet and it was in the most inappropriate and patronising teacher-like of tones).... Becky says she's never said anything mean about LukeA in the diary room and is clearly upset and hurt. She becomes flustered and starts to offer that perhaps it's because she's involved in acting on the outside world that he's defining her as an 'actress', adding that if she was a doctor.... but get's tongue-tied and lost. LukeA adopts his sincerest half-frowny look of confusion and asks 'Where are we going with this?'. Poor Becky hasn't got a clue what she's saying any more. but because she's prone to tears and babbling nonsense and because he had his main man Adam sitting right beside him (and Scott, who hates confrontation) LukeA is able to demolish Becky, by speaking to her in his cold, rational, 'I don't give a fk what you think' manner. Different story when he had his little chat with LukeS when he realised things weren't good between them: 'I've always really liked you.... I thought you hated me... you're a really cool guy with an amazing body' etc...

Different status different LukeA.

You have not addressed the point that Becky obviously had a very high status in the house. All the housemates repeatedly referred to the fact that they knew she was popular because she had been chosen by the public.

Luke was absolutely 100% polite and pleasant in the bedroom asking them to be quiet. The contrast between what he actually did (which we all saw) and how it was described afterwards by those who didn't like him was beyond absurd.

I think Becky came over extremely poorly in BB, and I suspect that she understands that now, and regrets throwing away the friendship of people who would have been honest and kind to her in an attempt to curry favour with those she misjudged to be more beneficial.

I think it was Luke telling off Becky and Caroline when they were being noisy in the bedroom that changed Becky's attitude towards him, and then Luke so obviously throwing the spaghetti task, thus putting her into the firing line, turned her against him completely.

i don't think the bedroom had a thing to do with it. He spoke briefly and politely to them and they behaved like arses. You surely don't think she started crawling to Conor, whom she had previously detested, just because Luke once asked her to keep the noise down when she was shouting next to a sleeping Ashleigh? And the turf war task was too late to explain it. By then, she was hanging onto Conor and Luke S as if they were lifebelts and she was in deep water.

It was noticeable that after Luke A's 'clear the air' talk with Luke S, he stopped nominating him, and never said anything really hostile about him again; as far as he was concerned, it really DID clear the air. When Adam said (which he did a couple of times) that the division was his problem, he readily agreed. But his conversation with Becky and Caroline didn't do the trick because he could see and hear them still bitching and laughing, so he felt that it had meant nothing. (Though it is probably for the best that he knew nothing of Caroline's conversation in the blue task room bedroom).

Yes I've watched that clip many times before and that is the confrontation I was referring to. Your interpretation of it is clearly completely different to mine. I stand by everything I said in my last post. In my opinion the reason Becky got tongue tied and flustered and started babbling nonsense was because she'd been sussed out. Instead of admitting that she had turned against him and the other outsiders in favor of Conor and the popular people within the house who had treated her badly, she completely denied it and pretended that she had said nothing but nice things about him. Luke was just standing up for himself.

When Luke was in the bedroom and asked her and Caroline to be quiet as others were sleeping, I thought he was polite and I didn't think it was 'inappropriate' nor 'patronising'.

The Luke S situation was different because they were having a conversation, which was instigated by Luke A, Becky approached him in a confrontational manner and asked him why he didn't like her. I don't think he treated anyone differently regardless of their 'status'.I wonder if Becky would have so readily confronted Luke S or Conor if she had discovered that they had called her fake or made a comment about her BMI. The time when she heard Conor saying that she had an ugly personality and she just laughed it off suggests not. Perhaps it was Becky who wanted to 'squash' Luke because she considered him have a low status in the house.

I think Scott was just an example of someone not so easily squashed. And your saying he "was quiet and shy, clung to the side of either Caroline or Becky throughout" was, imo, rather misleading, making him sound much more squashable than he was.


You keep shifting to status in the house. The post history shows it ought to be status as Luke A saw them, as I explained before. Becky and Ashleigh did seem to have low status in his eyes, imo, and I don't think you've shown otherwise. Luke saying Becky was popular -- or that HMs believed she was (it's not clear which you meant and I don't remember exactly what he said) -- is about her status outside the house and in any case would not necessarily mean he saw her as high-status. Nor would Ashleigh being "at the centre of the more dominant group" mean he must have seen her as high-status.

(I don't think the group structure was actually that simple, btw.)


Yes, but the thread's history shows one of them ought to be the topic, while your posts kept addressing the other.


Strange then that your posts kept shifting to the 2nd.

And I don't accept your characterisation of what happened in the time between Luke A finding out he'd been nominated and Lauren's eviction. It was not just (or imo even primarily) "being upset at face to face nominations" or "trying to sort things out with those who have nominated you" or even wanting "to look good to the public". Plays for sympathy aren't the same as wanting to look good; nor is sabotaging Lauren.

One of the things that turned me against Luke A -- which doesn't mean I dislike him when all's considered -- is his saying in the DR (after being nominated vs Lauren) "I've worked so hard to get where I am in my life". What's that have to do with being nominated in a game show? It was like he thought he'd never have to face the vote, because of how hard he'd worked.


Was the comment not made because of something Becky said or did nearby and not long before?


Scene 1: Finally someone (Luke A!) shows they won't stand for Becky's nonsense. Cheers in the forum.

Scene 2: Luke A backtracks like mad and goes into woe mode.

It's hard to avoid the suspicion that the first was real and the second was big time damage limitation because he was worried that Scene 1 would work against him with housemates or viewers.

How's that work? Not everyone gets tongue tied and flustered because they've been 'sussed', so there must be something more to it than that.

Even if we assume that being 'sussed' played some part, the rest could be consistent with what MissBeastie's said.

It doesn't seem to me to mean anything. No one ever tried to squash scott; he kept his head down the whole time. It was actually quite odd in his eviction interviews hearing him saying how much he disliked Caroline and Becky's bitching, because I can't remember him EVER saying so in the house. I just can't see the point in trying to argue that Luke would not have 'squashed ' someone he had no desire or reason to squash.

I can't even see what 'status as Luke A saw them' would mean other than 'status in the house'. He liked Becky and spent a lot of time with her, then believed that she had joined a group that did nothing but bitch about him. I am sure he LIKED her less after that, but 'status' is an odd word to use for one person's view of another. I don't think anyone had an inkling of how unpopular Becky had become until she was actually evicted. THAT gave her status; in addition she seemed confident and articulate, which was not difficult in that house.
He probably thought Ashleigh was thick as pigshit - who wouldn't? - but she had a high status in the house, as being Luke S's girl. I used to watch open mouthed during the first half at the deference shown to her by the other women - all the high-status tricks of falling quiet when she spoke, allowing her to dictate the topics, asking her questions and not expecting any in return etc. In any case, we seem to be building an absurd level of theory onto a single sentence in a confrontation entirely initiated by Ashleigh. Luke A and Ashleigh barely spoke as far as I can see, which I'm sure suited both of them equally. Ashleigh herself clearly said (quite late on) that Luke A was "too nice to nominate". She didn't find him interesting or fun or her kind of person, but it is plain ludicrous to suggest, as someone did above, that she felt bullied by him.

I absolutely reject the suggestion that he sabotaged Lauren, but there is probably nothing new that anyone can say on that.


I think an important factor in these examples is that he really didn't expect it to be broadcast. He was horrified when Adam was given the diary room questions that were then made public because - and I can't remember his exact words, but they were to this effect - he thought of the diary room as a private place where you could vent your feelings safely. I am not sure why BB decided to broadcast so many of his diary room conversations - no other housemate had anything like this level of having their private conversations shown. For some reason they decided that part of the persona they wanted to show us was 'person who often gets upset in the diary room'. We know, from passing remarks, that there were times when other housemates had spent long periods in the diary room, but apparently this was not part of their 'story' and the conversations were not shown.

In this case, I am sure Luke was absolutely sincere when he said he expected to be evicted early because he was older than the others and not entertaining. But on this occasion he was just very upset; he believed he was going and was having trouble facing that Friday. He hated the thought of coming out to boos; some housemates don't give a damn and some give a very big damn; I don't think there is a 'right' or 'wrong'.

She had said that she really respected him; he judged that alongside the fact that he could SEE her making fun of him and Adam through the window. Hence the "she respects me like..." comment. Anyway, she wasn't there when he said it, and it wasn't really aimed at anyone. I am not sure why people act as if he said it to her - she was obviously both horrified and thrilled when her sister told her what he had been caught on camera saying.

MissBeastie has addressed the issue of whether Becky had high status in the house and also the more relevant issue of what status Luke A gave her. That the HMs "knew she was popular" (something they couldn't actually know, btw) does not mean she had high status.

"Status" hasn't really been defined, but I'd say Becky had low status in Luke A's eyes. He looked down on her, didn't have much respect for her, didn't defer to her. However, when he let that show, he'd later worry that she'd nominate him, or turn other HMs against him somehow (as happened to Lauren), or perhaps that viewers would side with her -- it's not clear exactly what worried him -- and he'd backtrack like mad.

(If we have to put it in status terms, he worried that she had high status in some way with some other people.)


Not everyone would have 'snapped' like that, and it definitely revealed something about Luke A's character when he did. I suppose you might try to argue that it wasn't nasty, but didn't he in effect threaten her? It was a part of his character that was at least an unpleasant.


The "outsiders" and "soldiers" spent a lot of time being bitchy with their friends, with quite a few people failing to see it as a very negative trait.

I am only addressing one point and it's your point:

'unacceptable if someone tries to improve their standing in the house by turning on the 'outcasts' or low status housemates as they see them. And no one, surely, could suggest that Luke ever did that'

I don't know how LukeA saw Becky or Ashleigh in the status stakes, but there are clues in the way he spoke to them both (ie. the condescending way he asked Becky to be quiet in the bedroom and the patronising way he shouted after Ashleigh 'what you gonna do? get LukeS?') compared to the tone he used when talking to high status LukeS, for example, when they were in conflict, or, if one were to imagine it had been high status Connor who was making a noise in the bedroom, would he have spoken to him in that Head Boy voice?

I would strongly suspect he saw himself as having a higher status than Becky and Ashleigh a lower status than LukeS and C, and was capable of 'turning on' the lower status HM's. Now whether this was to improve his standing in the house is arguable, but given that he is supposedly a man who values peace and goodwill, as he showed us all during his 'lets talk about this' session with LukeS when they were in conflict, why would he not have treated Becky and Ashleigh in the same manner?

'Because they were attacking him' you'll say.

Ok, as you wish.

He treated Becky in exactly the same way as Luke S, ie tried to have a friendly one-to-one conversation with her about their differences. But whereas he obviously felt he had turned a corner with Luke S, he obviously didn't with Becky. He never had much of an issue with Ashleigh - I think they barely spoke - apart from the single spat about the chocolate order and the resulting cigarette shortage. Consequently he didn't 'treat' her like anything, though he was rather a charming chef when she had to cook the dinner, which must have tried his patience.

You've reminded me, Wonky, thankyou, that yes, LukeA was at his absolute best when he was teaching someone to do something (Ashleigh cooking) or when giving support during some kind of adversity (I'm thinking of him in the diary room with someone who was absolutely freaking out about putting her hands into boxes of horror... who was it? was it Caroline?).

Anyway... yes... those were two moments when I really liked him, although thinking about it now, on both occasions he was in the position of having higher (for the sake of a better word) status, ie. he was being the coach, or the rock for someone to lean on.

The guy (for me anyway) had status issues, in that if he felt ok about his status, he was nice, but in that BB house, where he clearly felt insecure and inadequate, he seemed to go down the road of criticising and bitching about the very people he wanted the approval of, rather than rising to the challenge of being out of his comfort zone and having a fun time.

I am aware that none of this is about your Group A or B theory, but I'm afraid I'm finding it too hard to grasp

Completely disagree. His tone, body-language, attitude, vocabulary (swearing) was completely different when talking to Becky about their issues compared to the way he spoke to LukeS.

Before he had the 'where are you going with this?' conversation he had had a perfectly friendly, ordinary one sitting on the patio bit at a table.

* Scott didn't keep his head down the whole time. * For all we knew, he said plenty about their bitching at times we weren't shown. * Think if it as contrast with less intelligent and articulate housemates. Do you think Luke A would have treated Scott in the way he did Becky, Ashleigh and Sara if he and Scott had clashed?


They are obviously different, for otherwise every HM would have to agree with every other HM about every HM's status -- something that obviously needn't be true.


I agree it's an odd word to use, and I think it's mostly been a distraction, but you introduced "status" into the discussion, and you said "It only becomes unacceptable if someone tries to improve their standing in the house by turning on the 'outcasts' or low status housemates as they see them".


Well, it might give her status, but did it actually do so? I don't think so. Becky wasn't treated as the alpha female. She wasn't central in the way you said Ashleigh was. HMs didn't generally defer to her or treat her with extra respect. You haven't pointed to anything that indicated she actually had high status, just to something that might, conceivably, give her high status.


Those things (if true -- I don't remember well enough and haven't checked) would indicate that Ashleigh had high status with those HMs. But did Luke A show Ashliegh deference, fall quiet when she spoke, allow her to dictate topics, etc -- or in some other way show she had high status as Luke A saw her?


I don't think the post said she felt bullied, just that some of Luke A's behaviour made him "a bit of a bully".


Since you haven't really dealt with what's already been said, I feel no need to say more.


I don't see how he could genuinely believe that. He's watched BB. He must know that things in the DR are often broadcast. And BB could have made that even clearer.

I'm not sure what you mean by "Adam was given the diary room questions that were then made public", but Adam being given something that happened in the DR is a very different from it being broadcast to viewers. It is rare for HMs to learn, while they're still HMs, of something that happened in the DR -- though even that's not unknown.

But the idea that Luke A thought DR sessions were private and would not be shown to viewers is simply not credible.

Not only that. As someone who'd watched BB, he'd know there was a fairly good chance that enough would be shown that it could influence viewers. Even without that, what he said and did in the DR reveals something about him and his thinking.


That's an interesting bit of mind-reading. Clearly, he didn't like something about being up. But was it that or something more like fearing his chance of winning might be over.


I don't recall the details, and I don't know of a clip, but it seems to me that everything you've said is consistent with the following events happening in sequence and close together in time: Becky tells Luke A she respects him; Becky starts walking away; Luke A makes his BMI comment. Which would make it not very different from what MissBeastie said: a sarcastic comment as she was walking away, even if she wasn't "there" when he said it.

Now, if you said Becky was long gone by the time Luke A said it, that minutes or longer had passed, that would be different.

But you are now inventing a different Scott altogether, one who clashed with Luke in some imaginary way. If he had stormed out of the house in a temper about something and barked at Luke....then what? There are too many unknown factors.


I should think they often thought Becky was a bit of a pain, or perhaps that is just because I found her a major pain and can't imagine not doing. But there was something rather careful about the way Conor and Luke S treated her, which combined with the repeated reflection that she must be popular with the public made me think they didn't want to be seen as crossing her. It is a limited kind of status, and obviously not as solid as the status of being liked or admired, but I think it did protect her quite a bit.


We hardly saw them in the same conversation. I was merely pointing out that she was not, in any normally accepted sense, a 'low status' housemate. If nothing else, the fact that she was in a partnership with the person Luke A found most intimidating would have given her reflected status. He certainly wouldn't have felt as if she was a safe target for abuse, if he had been the kind of person to name call people, which of course he wasn't.

Yes, but only a tiny minority of diary room conversations are broadcast, particularly when you take out the nominations and the group conversations. Any individual diary room conversation would have a very low chance of being shown on the highlight show, which is all we have now. There really was no reason for Luke to suppose that so many of his, and only his, solitary diary room conversations would be given highlight time; I don't know why they were. The BB twitter feed constantly referred to really interesting sounding conversations between the outsiders, and we know that Luke and Adam did a lot of mutual pranking, dares etc, not one second of which was ever shown; for some reason they preferred to show him alone in the diary room rather than with his friends.


Well in the absence of any other evidence, it is not unreasonable to look at what someone actually said. And what did Luke (repeatedly) say about being evicted? That he didn't mind being evicted, that he expected to go early, but that he dreaded being booed. Now that was silly. The crowd is small and their views are often weird. They often boo perfectly harmless, likeable people - Maisy, say - for no other reason than that they enjoy a good boo. It was irrational for Luke to have such a dread of 200 people getting off on five minute's booing. But that was how he felt - he hated the PROCESS of being evicted. I would as well, being equally irrational and silly about it. It can't be nice, unless you are a very confident person.



We don't know what Becky was doing because she was off-camera. LUKE was walking away, rather rapidly and in some irritation. That is all we saw: Adam was sitting in the smoking area, Luke strode up in a mood, moaned briefly about Becky, then, when Adam said nothing, gave the topic up.

Wonkeydoney: re Most people not enjoying watching Shabaz.

He was never put to a public vote, so none of us know how the majority were really feeling about him.

However, i do know that years ago on this forum, many who loved BB7 were saying that the early weeks of that series were about as good as BB gets, and while he was there Shabaz dominated proceedings, and was atracting front page news in the tabloids, so obviously many were gripped by him one way or another.

Furthermore, BB7 was a strange series in terms of the popularity of it's hm's.
Pete was really the only hm most loved.
Nikki became a 'BB superstar' very early on, but she only just survived a head to head against Sam.
I think that underlines my opinion that we simply have no idea what the majority really thought about Shabaz.

Hmmmmm. Fair point. The Nikki/ Sam vote was very odd indeed because she was always treated as a HUGE star (I remember Heat magazine, which was a big deal in those days, saying that she was the only housemate they cared about, quite early on) and Sam was a tiny minnow. I guess the vote was pro and anti-Nikki and Sam was kind of ballast. So Shahbaz might have performed at least as well if he had been up against her. He was bloody irritating though, and if he had stayed would surely have become more so. He was as attention seeking as Charley, with added creepiness. I can't believe he would have been a stayer. But you are right, we will never know.

Even a public vote wouldn't tell us how people felt, beyond how how much people wanted him out compared to others who were up.


Shahbaz left on Day 7, so the early weeks were mostly without him, and nothing you said shows people were gripped by him. That he "dominated proceedings" doesn't mean viewers were gripped.

But also, by the time people were looking back at bb7 (indeed, even during the show) the worse of Shahbaz's behaviour had largely been forgotten. Such things are not a reliable guide to how people thought at the time.


I'd agree that we don't know what the public really thought about Shahbaz. But we also don't know what the public really thought about Pete. However, in both cases we have some idea. (More re Pete, but still some re Shahbaz.)

In this forum at the time, it didn't seem that many enjoyed watching him. Some of his behaviour was not well received, to say the least. But then there was a big turn against the HM perceived as bullying him. It still didn't seem that many enjoyed watching him, and there were so many complaints about HM behaviour that "enjoying" is a rather poor fit.

But ... despite all the complaints over the years about HM behaviour, bullying, and so on, there was never a collapse in viewing figures while it happened. Arguably, many were turned off in the longer term by what happened in the Jade/Shilpa CBB, but there still wasn't a mass exodus while it was happening. Many were up in arms about Conor's behaviour in BB13, but few turned their back on the show.

It might be interesting to have a discussion about such things some time. Why do people continue to watch behaviour they find objectionable, in effect treating it as entertainment? And doesn't that make them in a way complicit? It can make a BB series, and some HMs more interesting. Would we really rather such things didn't happen or were always quickly stopped? Why does the same forum that usually and repeatedly complains about "Ofcom complainers" ruining BB, and of BB being "sanitised", sometimes turn to Ofcom instead?