Yes, I am doing Big Brother. What can possibly go wrong?
TIS the night before Christmas, a time for wrapping, stuffing turkeys, peeling potatoes, hanging stockings and cocooning with family. Today, I’m going to my big brother’s house, and then, on the second day of the new year, I’m doing it again.
Only in 10 days’ time I’m not embedding with beloved family but with a bunch of total strangers, to live with zero privacy for up to a month, sans any contact with the outside world, no phones, no books, no pens, no paper, no newspapers even… with cameras trained on me for 24 hours a day.
I’m going into the actual Big Brother House. For real. I know. Believe me, I know.
I can hear already the chorus of groans, people sighing, ‘Not another one!’ given my father Stanley has only just emerged from the I’m A Celebrity… jungle.
My youngest son dropped his iPhone in horror when I told him on Friday. ‘But you’re my mum,’ he said. My other two were speechless, then rallied. I can already write the story in my own head. ‘Not another shameless, fame-hungry Johnson in another reality TV show!’ Or, my husband’s joke question: ‘Are the Johnsons the new Kardashians?’
Ha, ha (that’s my nervous laughter). Of course not. Hear me out.
I am a firm believer that you only regret the things in life you don’t do, not the things you do do.
I’ve never sat down and watched CBB in the way my children religiously binge-watch it, but when Channel 5 came calling, I didn’t delete the annual email asking me to be on. It was because this one said that the new series was all about female empowerment and 100 years since women got the vote.
IT WAS going to be called Big Sister (it’s ended up being called Celebrity Big Brother: Year Of The Woman), with a ‘classy’ all-female line-up for the launch. Female politicians, performance artists, broadcasters. Serious stuff. Big names were duly dropped, and the emphasis on ‘empowerment’ rather than ‘ritual humiliation’ promised. Not a lot of people know this, but my mother was born a Fawcett, and a distant forebear is Millicent Fawcett, a leading 19th-century suffragist. (Indeed my own daughter Milly is named after her.) So it fitted. Sort of.
Of course, I may be – in fact I am – a cross between the princess and the pea and a barking drill-sergeant when it comes to sleep, exercise, tidiness, food, coffee, cleanliness, well everything really – and I could easily lose every remaining shred of my credibility and my fond aspirations to be taken seriously – but, apart from that, what could possibly go wrong?
So I met with the delightful team, and they made it all sound fun and exciting, which is their job (to get you across the line and locked in the house). And after some back and forth, I signed up.
I have no idea about who I’ll be bunking down with in the communal dorm, or the nature of the tasks, so we’ll have to see about a ‘classy line-up’ and ‘empowering’ on January 2, with the live launch show, and in the days and weeks that follow.
Anyway, last week we did something called a ‘profile shoot’ and interview in a studio which was, I admit, fun, and will be used for the credits, the live evictions, and as punctuation throughout the long hours of transmission.
My oldest son, an aficionado of the show, said: ‘Oh yes, the profile shoot, that’s where they make you seem really silly and annoying.’ Then he went on: ‘You know, Mum, the whole show is designed to mess with your head, and be a social experiment.’
And as he spoke, some buried memories of the show started surfacing in my subconscious. George Galloway in a catsuit licking milk from a saucer. Katie Hopkins in a blue sequined cocktail dress in the same house as the late Keith Chegwin. The housemates being made to dress up as tacos and being squirted with fish guts. Angie Bowie being told that David Bowie had died and the housemates thinking, when Angie relayed the news, that she meant David Gest who was in the house asleep. Liz Jones in the bath saying: ‘Not even my cats like me.’ Heaving duvets. Oh my God, the heaving duvets.
Of course, it was only after I’d signed the contract, and the die was cast, that my son said the show channelled the notorious Stanford prison experiment. This was a planned two-week investigation in 1971 into the psychology of prison life, where, as my son explained, volunteer college students divided into prisoners and camp guards.
IT HAD to be ended after only six days as the guards turned into sadists and the prisoners became stressed out and depressed. Those running the experiment had bugged the cells to monitor what the prisoners said, and made public announcements over the intercom to those inside. There were no windows or clocks so you couldn’t judge the passing of time. Sound familiar?
My son told me this after I had just signed the 44-page, 16,000word contract, with its extensive contraband list. It features ‘timepieces of any description’ and absolutely everything else I depend on for survival, including my mobile phone, and above all, reading matter. Not even a cereal packet. ‘Now you tell me!’ I moaned. The truth is, I am absolutely bricking it. I can’t pretend otherwise. But it’s too late to stop now, and I can only hope for the best and trust that it will all be all right on the night in my glass-half-full way, and I won’t let the Fawcett side of the family down – or anyone else I love. ‘You have no idea what you’re in for,’ said my eldest (at least my kids are with me every step of the way). ‘But don’t worry, Mum. Just pray you get kicked out really early. It’ll be fine.’