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WORLD NEWS: US & CANADA: CBS ships in Big Brother to keep an eye on TV rivals RATINGS WAR NETWORK ACTS TO WIN SLICE OF MILLIONAIRE SHOW ACTION:
Financial Times; Feb 9, 2000
Within the white walls of CBS studios, a prolefeed* factory at the corner of Fairfax and Beverly, Los Angeles, Big Brother was introduced this week to representatives of the Thought Police.
Here, at last, was a credible rival for Emmanuel Goldstein, Enemy of the People also known as Regis Philbin, host of the hit game show, Who Wants to be a Millionaire?"
Driven by the rise of the ABC television network to the top of US prime-time television rankings for the first time in five years - mainly on the success of the imported British quiz show - Les Moonves, CBS president and chief executive, ranged far to come up with a counter.
Mr Moonves believes he has found it in Big Brother, "part social experiment, part real-life soap and part competition", an elaborate Dutch production which requires 10 strangers to live together for 100 days under the eyes and ears of 24 television cameras and 59 microphones. Part Orwellian nightmare and part programmer's dream, edited extracts from their doings and sayings will be broadcast "at least" five nights a week for 100 days throughout the US summer. For web-heads, the relentless observation will continue 24 hours daily via streaming internet video. But beeper-blockers will be applied to the seriously private bits.
Cooped up in a purpose-built house with a small garden surrounded by high fences, participants will be deprived of almost every modern convenience and all contact with the outside world.
They will also be obliged to fulfil challenges to test their strength, ingenuity and sanity.
One task allotted during the programme's maiden run in the Netherlands required the inmates, hamster-like, to ride an exercise bike for the equivalent of 2,000km. Completion wins a small reward, such as extra cash for food or luxuries which are passed in through a larder. Falling down on the job brings budget cuts.
The contestants vote periodically to eject one of their number, but the person actually expelled is chosen by viewers and surfers.
The ultimate reward for the US version has yet to be decided.
But according to John de Mol, the show's originator and chairman of its owner, Endemol Productie, the Dollars 125,000 offered in the
Netherlands is nothing compared to the real prize: celebrity. The first expellee was famous for all of two weeks until the next one was booted back to reality. Bart, the first and so far only winner, is now "more famous than the queen", claimed Mr de Mol.
Mr de Mol himself is also something of a celebrity. He claimed he felt like the "little country boy in the big city for the first time", but he has already licensed the show to RTL2 in Germany, Channel 4 in the UK, a Portuguese network, and now in the US. He is soon to meet Japanese broadcasters.
By all conventional commercial measures, Big Brother has had an extraordinary impact during its brief life. In the last week of its outing on the Veronica network in the Netherlands, 3.8m people called in to nominate the cash prize winner.
Inevitably, Big Brother has drawn its critics. Last week, for example, ponderous questions were raised in the Bundestag, Germany's parliament. This week, CBS was given an inkling of what it can expect from America's abundant supply of self-appointed moral guardians.
Cameras focused, notebooks and pencils busy, representatives of the Thought Police fretted about what might pop up to affront sensitive viewers. Mr de Mol and Mr Moonves pounced on that one.
The Dutch were not half as randy or open-minded as Americans might believe from visiting Amsterdam. Viewers would certainly not see any sex or nudity on CBS. As Mr Moonves averred, he had grief enough when a character in Chicago Hope, a hospital drama, used the term "shit".
Fears of folk running amok were allayed with assurances of meticulous physical and psychiatric testing and care before, during and after the ordeal.
"We don't want to torture anybody," claimed Minister Moonves. Except, of course,those people over at the ABC, NBC, and Fox networks. If CBS pulls it off, those oldthinkers may need to come up with some thing even more compelling than Who Wants to be a Millionaire? And speedwise. * With apologies to George Orwell, inventor of Newspeak, and author of 1984, published in 1949. Prolefeed: "entertainment" and "news" doled out to the masses by The Party governing Oceania. Oldthinker: Those whose ideas formed before the revolution. Speedwise: quickly.
Copyright: The Financial Times Limited 1995-2002
http://globalarchive.ft.com/globalarchive/article.html?id=000209001262&query=prolefeed
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