Does anyone here think the novely of reality TV will come to an end and we may in the future be switching off BB!

I personally think if the contestants are similar to last year and nothing about the house if different then I could very well get bored.

I will also be honest and say that BB is the only reality TV that I really watch and at times I find it boring, the only reason I watch it late at night (I suffer with insomnia ) is because after a certain time there is nothing on TV to watch any way. Especially if you have NTL, most of channels switch off so your are usually left with news programmes which keeps rechurning the same things or the music channels.

I wont watch programmes like the club rep thing! I find the idea of watching everyone getting drunk and showing us what they have got or haven't really tedius.

Never!!

It's primal man. Coronation Street has been going for 40 years ...and those people are not even real.

Your 'club reps' and your 'pop stars the rivals' may come and go but when the format's this perfect there's always going to be an audience.

BB will never get boring because no 10 (or 12) people are the same.

Even if you filled the house full of blatant wannabees, the outcome will be very addictive to watch becuase no-one can predict how they will react and interact with each other and the pressure of being locked up 24-7.

The one thing that spoilt BB3 for me, was the press - but thats a whole different thread.......

And besides, I dont have digital, so I only get to see the 1/2 hour interesting round-up of the day.

BB probably does have a sell-by date, and Celebrity BB2 came very close to finding it. I thought it was extremely poor TV. I appreciate that it must be very difficult finding semi-famous people to appear on the show, particularly with more remunerative ITV celeb shows competing for contestants, but if the selection of normal contestants ever dropped to be the equivalent to the CBBs this year, I don't think I could face watching multiple weeks of them.

Celebs are boring by nature anyway. If they were in for the full 9 weeks and we got to see them crack up in week 5, then that might be a bit more interesting.

(IACGMOOH - who were half of those people anyway???)

Am I the only person in the country who enjoyed CBB2 ?

Oh, well

I think BB has a few years left in it yet. I think eventually it will have to move on from being a showcase for 23 year old drunken show-off wannabees, although I'd probably carry on watching so I could come on here and take the p*ss out of them

I'd like to see them trying different themes, some of which have been mentionned on here

eg an over-40s BB
a BB for intelligent people (it'll never happen !! )
an all-gay BB
an international BB

OK, every now and then there will be one that you don't fancy so you give it a miss that year.

It will always hold some interest for me even in its most homogenous form (23-yr old wannabes). But I'd love to see more of a diverse mix in terms of age and intelligence/cultural background.

I think for a number of us, the novelty can't wear off because there is just this fascination with the endless possibilities of interaction between a group in this situation. There's a chaos theory element to it, in that you could start with almost identical initial conditions and every time it will be so different by the end of 9 weeks.

And yes, it's primal, I so agree with that.

And I enjoyed quite a lot of CBB2 too swingaleg

All though a lot of people here are saying they are and will continue to be fans of BB.

But does this apply to the other reality TV programmes?? I am the only one who finds shows about Holiday Reps etc a complete turn off!

No, Drifting, you are not alone

I can't watch any of the holiday reps in a villa in ibiza, covered or uncovered

I can't watch any of the "pop" ones

I managed only the first episode of Fame Academy, same for Murder Game

The only other one I've watched is I'm A Celeb, and I never really got into that.

BB rules the roost !!

It's still in it's early stages... And there is some genuinely excellent reality TV... Faking It for example.

Big Brother will always work I think... Putting 10 or 12 people in a house for 9 weeks and seeing how they develop, no matter what people want to say about it, is actually an interesting concept. Certainly it's more interesting than those that come out with the "lowest common denominator" argument.

Fame Academy is still a decent idea imo, regardless of the bad press. It's just finding good people/musicians.

Even if the current shows run out of steam, there will be new shows combining things that worked from these shows, and coming up with something original.

I'm personally waiting for politicians to be put in a house for a few weeks whenever the elections come up.

No, I really enjoyed CBB2 as well, I thought it was a lot better than CBB1 which for some reason I just couldn't get into (I'll probably get slated now!! )

I think that Big Brother has a few more years left yet - like someone's already said the housemates they get each year are completly different characters and you never know how they are going to react both to each other and being locked in a house full of TV camera's.

Look at Sunita last year I thought she'd have done really well but she just couldn't hack it. Yet Jade who I've got to admit I couldn't stand at first, as the show went on my view of her really changed!

The Faking It and Wife Swap were pretty good, but each one is self-contained and only takes up an hour of your life

it's not a major commitment like BB

Probably could have got into FA, but I don't have the channel that the live stuff was shown on. Just watching the Opportunity Knocks style weekly show was never going to interest me. Same with Reborn.

I thought CBB2 was ok too. The house is just too big for 6 people tho. And 6 people isnt enough.

I also think they should have more BB housemates, maybe 16, so theres more chance of friction (or even communal bonding(I dont mean an orgy). I suspect it always needs a baddie or 2 though.

I think it can get boring when it gets down to 6. Last year was good because there was Jonny forcing everyone into rotten drunken games, a bit of friction, but when it gets to lower numbers theres a good chance it could get really boring. The night before winners night last year was fun though.

I would like 16 contestants with the final week being 6.

I think BB could get boring but I hope not. Its still better than soaps, quizzes, entertainment shows, dramas etc. BB is real life with a chance to reward or punish behaviour patterns via evictions. Tim thought he must be a nice guy the week before he was voted out. There cant be anyone in the UK now who thinks that to act like Nick is attractive to women. The best chance we will get to scrutinize human behaviour I would think (people were probably scared of Tim before BB last year. Now they have seen him in all his glory). BB is good because it might influence peoples behaviour in life (i.e. not to act like Nick or Tim) plus we now know what Nick and Tim are like now 100% rather than just the image they try to convey.

Maybe in a few years when the world of 'celebrity' is saturated with non entities like Jade Goody, Kate Lawler and Alex Sibley, the novelty will wear off for the press and a large share of BB's current audience. Personally, I think this will be when the show really comes into it's own.

Once all the media attention is taken away the contestants will stop seeing it as a launchpad for a career in showbusiness and hopefully (and if it's still financially viable), BB will return to it's Orwellian roots and become the anthropological experiment that it should be.

Reality TV is a misnomer!

What we are talking about is unscripted TV with amateur (cheap) participants (except the celebrity versions - for chariddy)

There have been some real turkeys. I tend not to be interested in the 18-30 sex, drink and whatever, which seem to me to be an excuse for soft porn and bad behaviour. Neither am I normally a follower of soap operas.

The more a reality show resembles a soap opera, the more successful it tends to be. Hence the particular success of BB which goes on for such a period of time that viewers can engage with the characters.

The first reality TV show that I can remember was presented in the form of a Documentary in the 70s about a dysfunctional family in Reading called 'The Wilkinsons'. Anyone remember it? They could give the Osbournes a run for their money.... and they were amateurs!

Do we include programs like Airline, the Cruise and Castaway?
They seem far more reality based.

So when does a Documentary become a 'Reality' Show? Does it depend on a competitive element with a 'prize' at the end of the day?

"Even if you filled the house full of blatant wannabees"
hehe

what i don't fully understand about the reality shows is the fact that the viewers intentionally vote out the 'trouble makers' and those that are comparatively entertaining. then the rules take out factors such as ganging up on others, which i think would make for a more interesting show.

the pre-vetting of contestants to remove the mental (/interesting) ones is surely a mistake

i'm not a huge fan of the reality shows, but i accept they're here to stay in one form or another (there's certainly a market for it, despite the 'novelty' having wore off already for certain variants of the reality show). after a day or two people will have their favourites again and the press will swarm over every inch of the contestants lives (and predict who 'will do it').

out of curiosity, how much do they charge for the web broadcasts of BB? and are they uncensored unlike the e4 feed?

Yes, I remember the Wilkinsons, although I think the programme was called "The Family". The guy that made it, Roger Graf (?) made another series about the Police and several others. At that time the genre was widely known just as "Fly-On-The-Wall" TV

The Airline/Airport type series are usually referred to as Docu-Soaps to reflect the creation of story lines & characters, using real people as the raw material.

I'm beginning to think that the test of a reality show should be wether we have extensive live coverage on the sub-channels. That way we can at least have a chance to judge what might be real, and what is production team story-lining

Knew you would put me right swing.... 'The family' it was!

Yup, Fly-On-The-Wall it was (maybe a clue to the two flies on the Big Brother wall!)

As for Docu-Soaps..... well this my point. I know I'm just an old cynic, but the viewing public seems to be loosing the ability to distinguish between reality and fiction on TV. It is all delivered through the same box. Even the Big Brother hms seem to be 'acting' the parts of reality TV contestants. Ermmm, am I confusing myself?...

As for 'real' soap operas... a good proportion of viewers have always confused the characters with the actors who play the parts! It's not such a stretch for the confusion to work in reverse.

"The Family" was brilliant, compulsive car crash telly. I doubt you'd ever get people to be so open on TV these days, everyone's too media savvy.

The Big Brother aspect of Fame Academy was far superior to BB because they chose people who had a few braincells and were able to hold decent conversations rather than spend all their time on 18-30 party games. But maybe the participants of BB are self-selecting, would anyone with half a brain apply?