RR: I thought Michael and Estelle hooked up after he saw some outside footage of himself when he realised that he was looking bad, and it leads to my next question that I have noticed in the last two seasons that the contestants appear to be much more aware or sophisticated about how they are going to be perceived by the public and about how they need to drive plot lines. Do you find that?
Chris: Yes it is true. They are much more sophisticated, we started off in 2001 and we are in 2014 with a three year break. A lot of them are students of Big Brother and they are also not stupid and they have watched enough Big Brother to know what’s entertaining and what goes in the show and what people like to see, they absolutely do have an awareness of what ends up on the screen. The beauty of the Big Brother format is you might think you have a game plan and think you know everything and think are going to deliver this and deliver that but you just can’t sustain it for that period of time. If I go in deciding I am going to be nice guy Chris and that’s going to be my persona and I am going to fall in love with someone, that is fine but you would be lucky to last a week. Once you get inside that house it really is the cliche pressure cooker. It starts to put pressure on people and often liken it to an office. Someone is new at work and the first day they arrive at work everyone is smiling and sweet, but by week four people have started to make their opinions, people have started to drop their guard, people have started to get irritated at people. You can go in with a game plan but it is impossible to keep that up for a great length of time. Yes you can have a plan and yes people are more aware of story lines, and plot lines we might want, but once again I go back to this predictability thing that is not what will end up being interesting to us, the producers or to the viewers. We look for stuff that is genuinely unscripted drama.
RR: Do you look at what people are saying on social media like Facebook and Twitter or blogs and move the story line or editing a bit to reflect what they are saying or who they are liking or disliking?
Chris: My colleague Alex Mavroidakis is the Executive Producer, I am most of the time inside the Big Brother world inside the edit suite and so are my colleagues who make the show on a daily basis, and we make 90 minute to one hour shows day after day after day. We don’t have time to get into what people are saying in the outside world. Alex on the other hand will keep an eye across that because obviously the perception of the outside world, we can’t work in a vacuum here we should listen to what people are picking up on and what they love but that is a secondary thing. Our world is the world of that house and the politics, the loves and dramas of the house and what the outside world thinks of that is interesting but it is not what drives it.
RR: I know Bravo has plot lines can be swayed by what people are saying on social media for some of their shows but they have a much longer lead in time.
Chris: Obviously if the entire internet is talking about Tully and Drew and it is going off… for a start they will be talking about it because it is already in the show and we pretty much know it is a story, but there are some things that are not as big as that and you find out that are intriguing everybody and you would make a note to extra eye out for it but usually we are leading what the story is and we are setting the agenda.
RR: I did have a bit of an epiphany last year when I realised that particularly older women with kids just can’t even drive a plot line. They can’t crack on to someone and they also have this pressure they place on themselves about being a role model for their children so they are not going to douse themselves in tequila and get naked and dance. What advice would you give to an older person on how to create a plot line on the show?
Chris: We have had older people in there and mothers in there and they do tend to get swallowed up by the young peoples world. It is a bit like being an older person at a party, you think you can get down with the crowd but you do end up in the kitchen but you do end up in the kitchen with the old persons. It is young not too young 31 to 32 but once you start getting to mother’s with kids like Sharon last year. I remember one scene where she was saying “I’m crying, I don’t care what is happening here, but I don’t want my kids to get upset seeing me cry on TV.” That is a good example of how they are not really foot loose and fancy free if they have to worry about that their husbands are watching who they are having a glass of champagne with, or children seeing them get upset.
RR: Or viewers saying OMG she is flirting with another guy. Viewers putting morality on the mother.
Chris: We in the world love to observe and we also love to judge even though we say we don’t judge, we do. If a housewife was sitting up late and was having a glass of wine with one of the young hotties. She would be conscious we would be thinking “Is there something happening here?”. That is the sort of intrigue this sort of show is brilliant for. Our minds are always ticking when we are watching it. If the producers put a scene in of the mother having a glass of wine a 2.ooam they are are going to think “what is happening here”, maybe something is happening or maybe nothing.
RR: Speaking of alcohol, you guys seem to be rationing it since it came to Network NINE. There are strict rations on how much alcohol goes into the house each night?
Chris: I liken it to a dinner party. It is fine to have a little bit of alcohol so they loosen up a bit. Once you get the guy who has had 15 glasses of beer at the dinner party and he is slurring his words and he is saying stuff unintelligibly they are not interesting anymore. With alcohol we are always wary of if you go too far with it it goes from being something that is interesting to people that are not making any sense. A drunken housemate is not interesting. The other thing is the health and safety side of things.
RR: Live feeds, I presume they are not coming back this year.
Chris: That’s correct.
RR: You read the criticism that occurred in the USA of Big Brother where the editing wasn’t showing a girl, Aryyan making the racist, homophobic comments and it the social media out cry that went mainstream that made the show do a montage of what she had been saying and she was soon eliminated from the house. That is where me and the readers of this blog think has there been times where you have manipulated a character to look better or worse then they actually are?
Chris: Let’s say an unconstructed housemate was sitting down there and they started staying things about Aboriginals, you can’t broadcast that because it is raw racism. You get criticised for being racist and tasteless and probably justifiably so. We have to censor the worst of people. Sometimes it is too bad for TV, we simply can’t show it nor would we be thanked for showing it. So in that sense we do. It is not warts and all it is as close to warts and all that we can get it in good taste.
RR: Big Brother is screening later for a few weeks due to The Block are we going to get a bit more raunch or raunchy conversations.
Chris: The problem we have this is that these show get replayed at different times. Whereas we are going later we still have to be mindful that if it is repeated on GO at 5.00pm we have to be aware of children watching. We can have good adult conversations and we can have people in bikinis and people falling in love and cuddling in bed. The topics can still be adult and enthralling, but the PG rating has to stay for that reason. (cont'd)
Chris: Yes it is true. They are much more sophisticated, we started off in 2001 and we are in 2014 with a three year break. A lot of them are students of Big Brother and they are also not stupid and they have watched enough Big Brother to know what’s entertaining and what goes in the show and what people like to see, they absolutely do have an awareness of what ends up on the screen. The beauty of the Big Brother format is you might think you have a game plan and think you know everything and think are going to deliver this and deliver that but you just can’t sustain it for that period of time. If I go in deciding I am going to be nice guy Chris and that’s going to be my persona and I am going to fall in love with someone, that is fine but you would be lucky to last a week. Once you get inside that house it really is the cliche pressure cooker. It starts to put pressure on people and often liken it to an office. Someone is new at work and the first day they arrive at work everyone is smiling and sweet, but by week four people have started to make their opinions, people have started to drop their guard, people have started to get irritated at people. You can go in with a game plan but it is impossible to keep that up for a great length of time. Yes you can have a plan and yes people are more aware of story lines, and plot lines we might want, but once again I go back to this predictability thing that is not what will end up being interesting to us, the producers or to the viewers. We look for stuff that is genuinely unscripted drama.
RR: Do you look at what people are saying on social media like Facebook and Twitter or blogs and move the story line or editing a bit to reflect what they are saying or who they are liking or disliking?
Chris: My colleague Alex Mavroidakis is the Executive Producer, I am most of the time inside the Big Brother world inside the edit suite and so are my colleagues who make the show on a daily basis, and we make 90 minute to one hour shows day after day after day. We don’t have time to get into what people are saying in the outside world. Alex on the other hand will keep an eye across that because obviously the perception of the outside world, we can’t work in a vacuum here we should listen to what people are picking up on and what they love but that is a secondary thing. Our world is the world of that house and the politics, the loves and dramas of the house and what the outside world thinks of that is interesting but it is not what drives it.
RR: I know Bravo has plot lines can be swayed by what people are saying on social media for some of their shows but they have a much longer lead in time.
Chris: Obviously if the entire internet is talking about Tully and Drew and it is going off… for a start they will be talking about it because it is already in the show and we pretty much know it is a story, but there are some things that are not as big as that and you find out that are intriguing everybody and you would make a note to extra eye out for it but usually we are leading what the story is and we are setting the agenda.
RR: I did have a bit of an epiphany last year when I realised that particularly older women with kids just can’t even drive a plot line. They can’t crack on to someone and they also have this pressure they place on themselves about being a role model for their children so they are not going to douse themselves in tequila and get naked and dance. What advice would you give to an older person on how to create a plot line on the show?
Chris: We have had older people in there and mothers in there and they do tend to get swallowed up by the young peoples world. It is a bit like being an older person at a party, you think you can get down with the crowd but you do end up in the kitchen but you do end up in the kitchen with the old persons. It is young not too young 31 to 32 but once you start getting to mother’s with kids like Sharon last year. I remember one scene where she was saying “I’m crying, I don’t care what is happening here, but I don’t want my kids to get upset seeing me cry on TV.” That is a good example of how they are not really foot loose and fancy free if they have to worry about that their husbands are watching who they are having a glass of champagne with, or children seeing them get upset.
RR: Or viewers saying OMG she is flirting with another guy. Viewers putting morality on the mother.
Chris: We in the world love to observe and we also love to judge even though we say we don’t judge, we do. If a housewife was sitting up late and was having a glass of wine with one of the young hotties. She would be conscious we would be thinking “Is there something happening here?”. That is the sort of intrigue this sort of show is brilliant for. Our minds are always ticking when we are watching it. If the producers put a scene in of the mother having a glass of wine a 2.ooam they are are going to think “what is happening here”, maybe something is happening or maybe nothing.
RR: Speaking of alcohol, you guys seem to be rationing it since it came to Network NINE. There are strict rations on how much alcohol goes into the house each night?
Chris: I liken it to a dinner party. It is fine to have a little bit of alcohol so they loosen up a bit. Once you get the guy who has had 15 glasses of beer at the dinner party and he is slurring his words and he is saying stuff unintelligibly they are not interesting anymore. With alcohol we are always wary of if you go too far with it it goes from being something that is interesting to people that are not making any sense. A drunken housemate is not interesting. The other thing is the health and safety side of things.
RR: Live feeds, I presume they are not coming back this year.
Chris: That’s correct.
RR: You read the criticism that occurred in the USA of Big Brother where the editing wasn’t showing a girl, Aryyan making the racist, homophobic comments and it the social media out cry that went mainstream that made the show do a montage of what she had been saying and she was soon eliminated from the house. That is where me and the readers of this blog think has there been times where you have manipulated a character to look better or worse then they actually are?
Chris: Let’s say an unconstructed housemate was sitting down there and they started staying things about Aboriginals, you can’t broadcast that because it is raw racism. You get criticised for being racist and tasteless and probably justifiably so. We have to censor the worst of people. Sometimes it is too bad for TV, we simply can’t show it nor would we be thanked for showing it. So in that sense we do. It is not warts and all it is as close to warts and all that we can get it in good taste.
RR: Big Brother is screening later for a few weeks due to The Block are we going to get a bit more raunch or raunchy conversations.
Chris: The problem we have this is that these show get replayed at different times. Whereas we are going later we still have to be mindful that if it is repeated on GO at 5.00pm we have to be aware of children watching. We can have good adult conversations and we can have people in bikinis and people falling in love and cuddling in bed. The topics can still be adult and enthralling, but the PG rating has to stay for that reason. (cont'd)
Karishma Sarkari@KarishmaSarkari
