great thread - thankyou for finding it and not duplicating - there are so many interesting threads on here and they just get lost - never to be seen again - in oodles of dupes and one liners

No problem - I only stumbled on it when sorting threads by number of replies, and I found that this was the most replied to outside of silly poetry threads and a couple giving out live updates on the Irish night. Well done Crimpo!

Had the three nom as expected then it would have been accepted - just as it was in BB3 and BB2.

That's a theory on Ray's nom of Nush. Of course there is another theory. He and Scott were acting in tandem - but Nush had pulled Scott towards her and left Ray isolated. He also - we know - has never liked being told who to nominate. Lisa did it - she got nominated, Nush did it - and could have thus easily got Ray expelled from the House. He certainly had ample cause to nom her.

He also knew damn well that his vote swung it this week - hence the backlash against Steph and hence his own mortification after he did it.

Anyway its all our fault - why oh why did we vote out Sissy...

As time passes I'm swinging more and more to the view that Ray will win this one. I'm also ever more inclined to feel that he deserves it...

Thanks Bruno and Chrissie - glad you made it here! The kudos should go to Ben for keeping us going through a long last three weeks. I hope the thread has been interesting - even if only for just how many times I can be proved totally wrong within seconds of posting!

Thread moral - if you're going to the bookies then listen to Ben not me!

Thanks very much, Crimpo.

It's been a bit of a trial to keep interested in BB4 to be honest. A winding, bumpy road to say the least.

As for the bookies, I fear that Nush is going to walk tonight.

Ben has spoken - I'm off down the bookies with the life savings. Sadly at these odds I'll win about about £1.50...

I do hope I'm wrong, but sadly I doubt it very much. Sorry to be a pessimist.

We all have to call it as we see it - and sometimes we get a pleasant surprise. I'll be interested to see the voting figures as I've always reckoned this one was about a 10% margin. I'm not sure it'll tell us much about next week's vote - but I'll defer a final prediction (translation = dooming of one HM's chances) until tomorrow...

I've just been reading this 13 page thread again and I note that 11 pages of it are devoted to the first four weeks of BB4 and then inspiration was largely lost. Rather telling, I think.

God, you're right, ben, you really haven't got a life !!

Perhaps after the first four weeks the House really wasn't split. Ah well! Meanwhile, perhaps we'll all gather again next year or there's always Pop Idol - or perhaps not...

I maintain that the first four weeks of BB4 was fascinating stuff, like watching a flower slowly beginning to blossom. I believe that it would've continued along the same vein with tensions coming to an head in a subtle, authentic way if the producers hadn't implemented that double eviction/crude money-making scheme. Basically it abruptly brought all the intriguing developments in the house to a shuddering halt, knocking the lifeforce out of the series.

That's very poetic, Ben (about the flower blossoming), but who can say what might have been. Presumably Fed would have been evicted that night and Jon survived another week. Then we might never have had the great Jon/fFed double act . Cameron might then have been evicted the following week, leaving Jon to spend longer in the house. However, if he had done so it's just possible that the Tickle cult might have gone off the boil. It was Jon's eviction that made him, really.

All I'm saying is that while I agree the double eviction was a senseless scheme, we can't possibly know that the series would have turned out any better if events had been different.

Absolutely, but whatever might have happened would have happened *naturally* without recourse to shoddy gimmicks. I agree that Jon may very well have burned himself out and although I believed that Jon deserved to win for being the most striking character in the house and for being the catalyst for so many events, I never seriously entertained the idea as a genuine possibility.

The trouble is, watching BB in real time on E4 is not the same as watching highlights, as we all know. Either with or without silly gimmicks the CH4 editors can still affect the outcome by biased editing, as they did last year and this year. So things are only happening "naturally" within a totally false framework.

Too true.. unfortunately.

Its certainly viewed through a filter - some view C4 through a filter of the editor, others view E4 through a filter (noone actually watches 24 hours a day for four months), yet more view through a filter of reports on forums such as this.

I fully agree with Ben that the double eviction was unnecessary and unfortunate. I personally think that Jon would have defeated Fed but his popularity had already peaked by then and I think he would have gone the next week. The sad thing is that we will just never know now...