Highway to moron hell

June 8, 2005
Big Brother's Gretel Killeen.

Big Brother's Gretel Killeen.

(various times)

If the Channel 10 programming department ran your local bus service, it might look something like this.

The bus you catch at 8.15 each morning might arrive or it might not. Sometimes it would arrive late; sometimes it would be shifted to another route without notice and a different service substituted. Sometimes the 7.15 would still be sitting at the bus stop when you got there and not move until it's good and ready, causing the other buses on the timetable to bank up behind it.

Sometimes a three-legged camel would arrive instead of a bus. Or a kiddy's bicycle with streamers coming out the hand grips. Often the bus would turn up, but be one of those European tour, 24-hour party buses that ferry drunken idiotic twentysomethings across the continent as they hang their bums out the windows, vomit on each other and bond from the waist down. For such passengers, vomiting on each other is a form of foreplay.

You might stumble on to one of these buses and endure a nightmare journey to places you had never imagined existed; places of incalculable moronosity. If that's not a word, it should be.

On the front of the 24-hour party bus would be the words BIG BROTHER, indicating not a destination but a medical condition in which the eyes remain open and the sexual organs still respond to stimulation, but all other brain activity has ceased.

In the past five weeks the Big Brother bus has barged on to the Channel Ten schedule and displaced countless hours of perfectly presentable television. Not television that would be circled in Einstein's Green Guide, sure, but acceptable television.

I count 17 hours and 40 minutes of Big Brother screening this week, including Big Brother Uncut, which boasts "the naughtiest, skimpiest, downright dirtiest bits that we can't show any earlier". Last week a bloke had his penis out of his pants as he massaged a fellow housemate's shoulders. It's classy stuff.

That 17-plus hours compares to eleven-and-a-half of news and current affairs each week on Ten. Talk about priorities. Ten keeps blaring that it owns the youth audience and then it feeds them this pap. That's what they want to watch? And what if they want to eat only pizza, drink Coke, shoot up heroin and pull kittens' claws with a pair of pliers?

Fresh young minds with so much potential, mown down by a bus driven by fools. Seriously, Ten, think again.


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