Fair enough, I didn't know that.

I often think BB housemates are selected for immaturity, and more so in BB7 than any other. Luckily, they don't all stay immature forever. Grace seemed to settle down and grow up when Mikey stuck with her and she found an adult path in life. Nikki presumably grew up when she got involved in anorexia education, and had to focus on other people and not herself.

After Pete, Aisleyne was my favourite bb7 contestant.

She had the most emotional intelligence that year. She was really intuitive and sensitive. She had her off days but overall she was welcoming and polite to the outsiders of the house.

Whatever happened to Spiral/Glen?

Not a lot. He had a hitlet in Ireland. http://www.dailyedge.ie/forgotten-ir...99025-Jul2013/

He was quite cute bu seemed a little prone to aggressive outbursts when things didn't go his way. It was a shame about the eviction in pairs as I'd liked him to have stayed over Michael.

That is not true. She didn't say "lower" or "demean", and she even said that she would do lad's mags such GQ or Maxim. She did say she wouldn't do Nuts, but she didn't seem to see anything especially wrong with it, or even with posing topless; it was just the she, personally, wouldn't like to do it. Obviously, she changed her mind about doing Nuts. But that seems a very minor thing to me.

Unfortunately, this thread seems to be going the way many threads used to, when Aisleyne was criticised: bring in Grace and criticise her, as if that changed anything about Ash.

More to in bb7 than in any other?

Do you even have any examples, other than (supposedly) Nikki and Grace? Grace btw showed a good number of signs of maturity in bb7, though obviously not about everything. Even Nikki did at times. I really don't see how you can get the bb7 HMs as a whole to be the most immature, let alone the most selected for it.

She almost certainly looked down her nose at those magazines and whether she used the word "demean" or not she made it quite clear, in no uncertain terms that she looked down on it, and would NEVER pose topless.

I remember she was interviewed after her nuts shoot (in, I think, Heat) and they brought up her moral stances in the house and she laughed it of with "Yeah I'm a right hypocrite".
Literally from the horses mouth


I think it did change things to a degree.
Grace's bad behaviour and Aisleyne being one of the few who spoke out against it while others (Nikki, Lea etc stood by) did change a lot of perception about Ash in terms of speaking out against someone who had commited a childish/ immature act. Before this she had never really had a major confrontation with anyone. So to dismiss Grace's effect is to speak in ignorance about the event.

What made me laugh about it was how quick Mikey and Lisa were to dismiss it as being "over and done with". You can bet your ass if Suzie had thrown water over Grace and stormed off calling people a "moose" they'd have been bitching about it for days afterwards. Knowing Lisa there might have been a few swear words thrown in.

How did she supposedly make it clear that she looked down on it?

And she didn't post topless. Claims that she posed topless have always been either simply false or else based on a tendentious and over-literal interpretation of "topless" to include shots in which it's hands doing the covering rather than any visible "top" -- the sort of pics that were called "implied topless" when Aisleyne did them and people were saying Ash hadn't posed topless. (That was before Ash actually was appearing topless in magazines.)


I'd like to see some proof of that. I don't even think I've seen it claimed before. Not that it makes any real difference. Even if Grace said she was a hypocrite, that wouldn't mean she was. She changed her mind about posing for Nuts after learning more about it. That's not hypocrisy.

Are you planning to keep making "horse" comments, btw?


How does anything Grace said about lad's mags change anything about Aisleyne?

You've switched to something completely different.


But there you're pointing to Aisleyne's behaviour. That's not switching to some unrelated way to slate Grace. Nor is it slating Grace as a distraction from something questionable that Ash did or as a way to try to make make "not as bad as Grace" pass as "Aisleyne did nothing wrong".


So?

This was supposed to be a thread about Nikki and Aisleyne.

That wasn't her former self, though. The "ghetto princess" persona was at least in large part something she made up for BB auditions, as she explained in her book:



Thanks for the explanation re Susie. For "reverted to the girl in the audition tape", see above. In any case, I don't think Aisleyne's behaviour divides neatly into those few days vs everything else. The more usual view from those who liked Aisleyne has been that her fake eviction and crowd hostility that night brought about a transformation. One post even said 'her barriers had been broken' and 'I believe what we are seeing now is the "real" Ash, the one she has suppressed for many years. Thats not to say she was fake before, but she had a front that protected her though her life.'

The change in Aisleyne post-HND was the main thing that fuelled the accusations that she was fake and deployed multiple fake personae, which was eventually countered by the idea that Aisleyne was 'complex'.

I'm more inclined to the view -- which some of her supporters also had -- that there was nothing in post-HND Aisleyne that hadn't been seen at one point or another earlier; but I also think that her not so nice behaviour wasn't confined to 'one bad week' or to the few days you mention.


Did the highlights not even show such things as Ash demonstrating to the HMs in the HND how Nikki was supposedly aware of the cameras and used them?

When, btw, was that apology and making up? I'm trying to see how it fits into the story.


I think there's a big question mark over all of Aisleyne's niceness towards Nikki after Ash returned from the HND.


It wasn't only after the "water throwing spectacle" that Ash started to have any beef with Grace. Indeed, that wasn't even the first water incident where Ash had a problem. (Did the highlights show the time Grace splashed water in the pool, and Ash's reaction?) It's just the first time Ash said anything to Grace rather than behind her back.

I was going to try to explain some other things, but giving the way this thread is developing, I think it would be a waste of time.

I think that makes a lot more sense about the period after Nikki returned than it does about the early part of bb7.


How was Richard positively unpleasant to Aisleyne? (I just can't remember any examples at the moment.)

In any case, he already had a problem with Ash well before then. I think it was because of her friendship with Imogen. (Richard nominated Ash and Imogen in week 6.)


I think bluntbob and others have explained that pretty well, and very differently from what you suggest; but I don't have time to try to find the relevant posts right now.


It would be nice if that about the "celeb beano or other" could be pinned down. The claims that Ash and Grace still don't get along all seem to be based on vague memories that can't be pinned to anything definite. However, I remember, and posted about back in 2007, that Ash said on her radio show that Grace had apologised to her (presumably at the BB reunion) about things she'd said during BB; and Ash accepted the apology.

It was noticeable that Pete, Aisleyne and Nikki had had extremely disrupted teenage years; both Nikki and Pete spent substantial periods in hospital and not much time at school; and Aisleyne was in the care of the local authority for a while. I think it left a mark on all three of them.

Lea seemed very volatile and immature for her age (she said later she was withdrawing from drugs and feeling terrible). Shahbaz was like an annoying 12 year old, the way he lurked round people being annoying on purpose. Glyn (presumably clever enough in an academic sense, since he was just about to go to university) seemed babyish even for a teenager.

The general immaturity of BB housemates struck me afresh last week when I was watching Bear Grylls's The Island. Because there were people NOT selected for immaturity: they have their tears and spats occasionally, but the vast majority of the time, under a lot of pressure, they are calm, mutually supportive, resilient and stoical. Which is surely what a BB series would be like if the people were selected to be 'ordinary members of the public', as is so often suggested.

Which brings me to a story I have posted before, and which never fails to madden me because I cannot find the source of it. I found it in a copy of The Standard (London paper) in the British newspaper library (when I was looking for something else, or I would have made better notes.) It was a column by someone with a long history of mental health issues, who had been specifically head-hunted for BB7. They decided not to do it. But I was struck at the time that they specifically looked for people with a history of mental health issues, presumably in the hope of generating fireworks. And with Shahbaz, I think they only just got away with it.



I don't really go for that, as a general principle. If someone is polite and pleasant to someone that they have to live with, that is adult behaviour; we don't have to peer into their very soul to see if they really do love them. It seemed to me at the time that Aisleyne was making strenuous efforts to make peace with Nikki when she came out of the HND, and that Nikki really made her work at it. Of course by then Nikki's head was being messed with by Jayne, who never tired of telling her how much more popular she was.

I think that's a good point, as a general comment about BB HMs. And, though this is seldom mentioned, Ash did show child-like behaviour at times. Still, most people seemed to see her as mature, rather than immature; and even with her and your other examples, I still don't see how HMs were selected more for immaturity in bb7 than in any other series.

As a possible counter-example to your Bear Grylls's The Island, though, consider Hijack BB. Those HMs didn't seem to be selected for immaturity, but nonetheless didn't seem all that different from HMs in other BBs; and the Island ones might even have been selected for unusual maturity.


Interesting. I'll let you know if I ever come across it.


But it isn't a general principle -- or at least not that one. It's what happened specifically in bb7 that puts up the "?". And by making it only a "?", I am giving her some benefit of the doubt.

There was more to Aisleyne's behaviour than being polite and pleasant, and polite and pleasant parts often seemed excessive, artificial, and forced.

Ash didn't know it but Lea and Nikki had it in for her once they realised that pete fancied Ash .

I remember during the majorettes task Lea and Nikki standing in the kitchen bemoaning the fact that pete was always hanging round with Ash these days , Nikki said (between shovelling cereal into her gob) "what's she got that we haven't got ?"
it was hilarious .

Apart from Victor, I thought the hijack HM's were quite mature, considering that they were all under 20. I can't remember now whether they had alcohol?

It was more mutual than that though. My recollection is that there was a lot of one-sided grooming behaviour, with Aisleyne doing Nikki's hair. And I can remember at least one occasion when Nikki was snuggled on Aisleyne's lap.

I got the impression that Aisleyne might have been interested in a little romance with Jonathan. It would have been interesting to see if the magazines had gone for it, as they did Pikki.

Stop talking about Grace then

I started the thred, it evolved, that's life jim, but not as we know it.

You may actually be correct about "implied Nudity" The cover I remember seeing she had her hands over her chest. I didn't read the magazine herself , and have no wish to look at pictures of her so whether she covered herself up , or had the full sheperd's bush on display I'll never know (quite happily). So the benefit of the doubt is yours. Wear a sash


I made ONE (and it was superb)


You keep asking me to prove things that are only a click away on you tube. Ditto the Suzie/Aisleyene conversation. I'm writing based on scenes I've viewed in my rewatch over the past few months. There are over 90 episodes.
From what I recall, if it narrows it down, Aisleyene and Nikki's making up was before Ash's eviction to HND and re-enfoced again after Ash returned from HND, However Nikki's bile towards Ash was in full frottle when Nikki returned after her inital eviction.

I've now done what I should have done the other day and checked the nomination history. Nikki was nominated by 4 housmates in week 3: Pete, Glyn, Aisleyne, and Lea. I don't think that fits the idea that Nikki was seen as a popular favourite from the off. (It didn't seem they were nominating her tactically because they thought she was popular.) Nikki had 10 nominations in total, Aisleyne 12. I don't think that fits the idea that they were at opposite ends of a spectrum, with everyone in the house believing Nikki was wildly popular and Aisleyne not at all.

I don't know why Richard had such a problem with Imogen. But I think she and Shahbaz are the only examples, and even in those cases, his attitude didn't seem to be about "using people to get ahead". Though he did have an eye on trying to win, I think he was generally pretty easy-going and tolerant.

Richard did nominate Aisleyne 3 times, and didn't ever nominate Nikki; but his first nomination for Aisleyne wasn't until week 6, when he nominated her and Imogen. He also nominated both of them in week 12. The only other time was Aisleyne + Spiral in week 9. So that doesn't fit the 'spectrum' idea either; instead, it looks like his problem with Ash was largely her friendship with Imogen. Indeed, he sometimes said Ash had become a "plastic".

Re "In the case of Aisleyne, Nikki was a bit of a nightmare: someone with a huge body of fans who was quite capable of being a bitch." -- how does that work in the "first half dynamic"? How would Ash know Nikki had "a huge body of fans"? Maybe after Nikki returned, maybe if the HND HMs brought in some outside knowledge, but how any earlier? Later, Nikki was voted out. Doesn't that suggest a lack of popularity? Nikki was voted out and Aisleyne wasn't? Doesn't that suggest Ash was more popular? (That leaves weeks 7 and 8 -- see below.)

I think the main reason HMs were wary of "crossing" Nikki is the way she reacted. It made life in the house a lot easier if you didn't set her off. And so HMs tried both to avoid setting her off and to mollify her if she had been. Perhaps this was especially so in the early weeks, before she got used to living with those people in that house. At first, she didn't even want to drink the tap water. (I'm assuming that didn't last and BB wasn't secretly giving her a special supply.)

(There were other hard-to-live-with HMs in bb7, of course, and they weren't treated with the same tolerance; but they were also different in behaviour and personality. There's also the sometimes popular idea that Nikki was more tolerated because she was physically small, female, and more child-like.)

By "weeks 7 and 8" above, I mean the period from Ash being fake-evicted, hearing the crowd, and going into the HND to the point where Nikki was evicted. The usual view of that has been that the crowd made Ash think she was unpopular and that Ash then, in the HND, reflected on her behaviour. So it's possible that in this period, Ash at least thought Nikki was more popular than she was. In any case, the way Ash was towards Nikki when Ash returned from the HND is usually attributed to Ash changing her approach as a result of reflection in the HND -- either in a good and praiseworthy way, or in one sly and Machiavellian.

I think your idea of HMs being "selected for immaturity" is a very interesting one, and here are a couple of thoughts that might be relevant when comparing BB HMs with people in other shows:

One is that the BB house is designed to be subtly irritating.

The other is the cognitive bias that's called Fundamental attribution error.


How is "a lot of one-sided grooming behaviour" "more mutual"?

I think that if someone is describe as being "polite and pleasant to someone that they have to live with", that suggests the ordinary sorts of polite, pleasant behaviour we might encounter, say, among people at work or who are, perhaps, going to be together on a long bus or plane journey. It suggest something a lot more like the way Ash and Nikki were earlier, at times when they weren't clashing -- something relatively distant and 'cool'. I'm not saying "polite and pleasant" can't be stretched to include such things as grooming, but it wouldn't normally being such things to mind.

In any case, there was a big change from how Ash and Nikki were before to Ash holding Nikki, stroking her hair, and saying they were like sisters. And why Nikki in particular? Ash and Imogen were friends, but we didn't see them like that.

True, except that believing that someone is very popular does not really seem to stop people nominating them. In BB2, for example, the housemates came to believe that Paul was immovably popular, as he survived eviction after eviction, but they still kept nominating him.

I don't think the housemates could hear cheers and boos in BB7, but when they did the golden ticket draw in the garden, they believed that Aisleyne was being booed (though actually it was when the cameras went onto grace; but they had no way of knowing that, and as Aisleyne was the one at the front doing the actions, they believed it was her.) So at that point, they believed that she was not liked. And of course as soon as Jayne came into the house she could not say enough about how popular Nikki was compared with aisleyne.

The fact is that they were utterly gobsmacked when Nikki was evicted, to the point where they simply refused to believe it. And, as with Brian Dowling, it seemed that Pete was always seen as the winner.


When Aisleyne made her poor speech in support of Pete, Richard was properly unpleasant to her, though one could reasonably argue that it was absolutely nothing to do with him. That was one of the incidents that made me think he was happy to be seen to be picking on someone he had decided was a kind of PR nightmare, and to be Nikki's New Best Friend, as the supposed runner up.


Yes, fair enough. For all that it was full of volatile people, it wasn't a nasty house like BB6.




I think this has got far more acute over the years. The last BB I saw - BB14 - was pretty unscrupulous when it came to putting unpleasant pressure on a housemate in order to elicit a reaction. It's almost certainly what people expect these days. You won't get a drama a day by putting in people like Anna Nolan or Dean O'Laughlin and letting them sit round playing the guitar.


In the sense that Nikki obviously elicited it and Aisleyne gave it. It's not as if Aisleyne held Nikki down while she did her hair. Maybe mutual is not quite the right word. 'Mutually agreeable' perhaps.

No true, though I think Aisleyne/ Imogen became friends gradually over a number of weeks.

They were even planning to go on holiday once they left the BB house, so it was a surprise they fell out.

Inside the BB house, Imogen handled the extremes of Nikki better than anyone. I really enjoyed watching them together.

Nikki and Imogen did seem to get along well, but I can't recall any time when Imogen had to handle one of Nikki's extremes. Can you remind me of any?

I wonder why Imogen wasn't more of a 'bridge' between Aisleyne and Nikki during bb7. (I don't mean that as criticism of Imogen; I'm just wondering why it didn't seem to happen.)

You use such forms of argument a lot. You find some case(s) where something doesn't work and treat that as showing it never works. But it might usually -- or even almost always -- work, despite those examples.

In any case, Paul does not look like a very similar example. The reason they "came to believe that Paul was immovably popular" is that he "survived eviction after eviction". But what you said about Nikki is that she was seen as a popular favourite from the off.


I'm not sure what your argument is there. Is it (1) they must have already thought Aisleyne was unpopular, or they wouldn't have thought she was being booed, or (2) the boos made them think she was unpopular? If it's (1), you've already given a different explanation: "Aisleyne was the one at the front doing the actions". If it's (2), then the belief that Ash was unpopular would have been short-lived, since the chants gave them a rather big clue that the unpopular one was someone else.


Nikki was evicted when everyone but Jayne was up, so what they found hard to believe was that Nikki was the least popular; and they'd recently been reminded that evictions aren't necessarily real. So I don't think it shows the HMs believed Nikki was wildly popular -- or that she was perceived as a popular favourite from the off. It was week 8 and also after Jayne had given them the impression that Nikki was popular.


That re the speech may say something about how Richard viewed Aisleyen and Pete, but I don't see how it says anything about how he viewed Nikki. Also remember that by the time Nikki returned, Richard had nominated Aisleyne 3 times and had said she'd become a "plastic": so he already had a problem with her, for reasons that didn't seem to have anything to do with Nikki.


It's not clear -- let alone obvious -- that Nikki elicited it.


Do you think becoming friends gradually explains why Aisleyne didn't hold Imogen, stroke her hair, etc, like she did Nikki? Ash also wasn't like that with Jennie, or indeed anyone except Nikki. Even with Nikki, it was only for a relatively brief period.

Hi, Veri.

Here's a few for you. All live feed scenes BTW

One morning ( i'm not sure but i think it was the week she was evicted) Nikki was in a genuinely foul mood ranting and raving about the air con. Her mood was bringing the atmosphere in the.house down to the point where Richard said he'd had enough of her now.
Nikki, went into the DR in almost total meltdown saying she wanted to ho home.
After she left the DR Nikki went into the garden and saw Imogen sunbathing. Everyone deemed to be keeping their distance from Nikki but Imogen started to talk to her so Nikki layed down beside Imogen and they started to chat quietly. Unfortunately, we didn't hear what they were chatting about but it went on for quite some time.
After a while, Nikki stood up and went back to the DR and said she was happy again and wanted to stay.

The night Imogen was evicted.
Imogen was being helped by Lea to get her outfit ready and make up on. They had started without the help of Nikki. When Nikki saw that, she started to moan and moan. Imogen told Nikki very firmly she didn't have time for this and for Nikki to shut up and start helping.

Others treated Nikki like a child, but not Imogen!

Imogen wasn't really a friend of Aisleyne until Grace and then Nikki left. Imogen was quite scathing about her initially but I think as the the amount of females of a similar age dwindled and there were so few to get on with they became friends. I think Imogen actually genuinely liked Aisleyne in the end but the friendships she chose initially like Grace and Sezer prevented her being open to a friendship with Aisleyne until they'd left.


To be fair that is treating her like a child and it worked. The others just let her get on with it which is actually more like treating her like an adult.

Gosh what a difference to now - the whole show back then -- full of spark

BB7 was one of my favourites