Save the Twins, Save the House

(Why am I wasting this title before they come up for eviction? Sod it. I'll just use it for every twin post and pretend it's a series...)

Read this article in The Sunday Times. It's rubbish. I mean, it even references this Daily Mail story as a source, and its not like its a good Daily Mail story, its just the usual rubbish, as if writing about how shocked you are at everything actually makes what you are writing about shocking. But I don't want to go too much into The Sunday Times story's idiocy and dismantle it, I just wanted to pick up on this point:

But, as the cast of the latest BB demonstrated in horrific detail, it is not just the audience that has been invented, it is the protagonists. People like this did not exist before BB with its penumbra of celebrity culture was born.

The (literally) bottomless, shrieking, preverbal twins Sam and Amanda only look, sound and act like that because they have been taught to do so. They have been told that this is what you should do – it is what you must do – if you are young and pretty. In another time, another place, another culture, they would have been different people with different aspirations. The rest of the cast ranges from the pathetic to the brutal, all are inventions.

Firstly, “(literally) bottomless”?????? Bryan Appleyard likes the big booty? In an otherwise OUTRAGED article this information seems ... superfluous.

But my primary point is that of all the contestants to chose to illustrate his point why on earth chose the twins? The twins initial reaction to being in the house and their subsequent behaviour seem completely different to the usual Big Brother contestant reaction. There's was a reaction borne out of joy, excitement, naivety. The usual reaction is more akin to Charley's and Shabnam's and it's a detached excitement. An excitement borne from cynicism: “yes, this is Big Brother and of course I'm excited but it's what happens afterwards that I really want. Bring it on!” It's a constantly deferred excitement. The proper Big Brother reaction is to sit round and tell everyone how real you are being without ever actually being. The proper Big Brother reaction is to sit round and talk about how you are sick of superficial conversation but never have any other conversation. The natural state of Big Brother is this mix of cynicism and deferment. The twins (and again I should say “from what I've seen”, I've not been able to catch as much live feed as I might have liked) seem to be the opposite, and in this sense they may well be “preverbal”, or at least, if we are arguing for the normality of deferment, they are “now”. And this can only be a good thing.

The problem with this is at which point does this stop being the way they “are” and become the way they “act”? And isn't this the eternal question that Appleyard should be concentrating on, rather than slagging off teen girls because their arses aren't to his taste?