WATCHING BIG BROTHER

On Sunday I saw some people having a meal (scrambled eggs, I think) and then one man poured himself a glass of water and drank it. Later, someone else took a broom and swept the floor of the kitchen while some others sat in the garden.

No, this wasn’t a typical Sunday at the Rooney homestead; this was a day in the life of Big Brother Africa 2 (BBA2).

BBA2 is the new ‘reality television’ show broadcast by satellite company, DSTV.

For those of you who have real lives of your own and haven’t been paying attention, BBA2 put 12 ‘housemates’ together in a house, locked them away from the world, and has had cameras following them for 24 hours a day.

Sunday was day 42 of their exploits. The series is scheduled to run for a total of 98 days.

From time to time, viewers are asked to nominate one of the housemates for eviction from the house. This goes on until viewers have voted everybody except one person off and that person is then declared the winner. The winner gets to go away with 100,000 US dollars (700,000 Swazi emalengeni).

This is only the second time that Big Brother Africa has been broadcast, but the programme format is not new. It started in the Netherlands in the1990s and local versions of the programme have been broadcast around the world since. It is now one of the most successful programme formats in the history of television.

Back in the 1990s, the programme makers made all kinds of claims for Big Brother. They said it was a social experiment to see how people would react to living so closely to one another without a break and for such a long period. Sociologists and psychologists rushed to praise the programme for its intellectual insights.

Nobody seriously says that kind of thing now. It didn’t take too long before the truth came out. The reality of this ‘reality television’ programme was money. That’s why it’s taken so long for Big Brother to get as far as Africa: there’s not much money to be made on this continent.

Here’s how it works. The BBA2 programme makers wanted 12 contestants from across Africa. Instead of auditioning people across the continent and taking the best people they could find they decided to look only in Africa’s richer nations. They didn’t bother to come to Swaziland.

BBA2 found its 12 contestants – with no more than one person from any single country so they could spread the interest in the programme around the continent. Countries represented include South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda and Botswana.

BBA2 is targeted at a very particular audience of young people. To be attractive to sponsors and advertisers the audience need to be in well paying jobs and have money to spend on the goods and services advertisers want to sell.

Advertisers who use television have trouble reaching younger adults, so BBA2 was aimed specifically at these kinds of people. BBA2 wants the audience to relate to the participants so they chose men and women to take part who come from a very narrow social demographic.

The 12 housemates range in ages from 21 to 30-years old, but most of them are aged 23 to 28. They don’t have run of the mill jobs in the real world. Two describe themselves as ‘authors’, one is a model and actress, another is a fashion designer and yet another is a ‘radio personality’. This range of occupations is hardly typical of the average African.

The cell phone company MTN sponsors the programme and must be rubbing its hands all the way to the bank because the other way they make money is by getting the television audience to send SMS text messages.

If you want to vote to evict a housemate you send an SMS message. If you SMS from Swaziland it’ll cost you 50 US cents (about E3.50). The other moneymaking scheme is to get viewers to SMS messages that get published on screen. Again, an SMS from Swaziland will cost you 50 US cents.

To get the messages flowing and to incite interest, BBA2 has manufactured conflict within the house. By clicking OK on screen you are taking to a ‘news’ centre where you can catch up on what’s been going on in the house for the past 40-odd days. Here you learn that the housemates have fallen out with each other and there are now two opposing camps who are fighting with one another.

Also, a couple (one male and one female) are said to be getting a bit hot and have been kissing and nuzzling one another.

On the afternoon I watched, these two pieces of ‘news’ excited most of the text messages. There was a constant stream of messages (at E3.50 a time) and as far as I noticed none of them were repeated.

So the companies behind BBA2 are making a lot of money out of this programme, but as viewers what are we getting? On Sunday, I switched off after an hour or so and went to read a book. When I switched back on an hour or so later, there was a man and a woman in the kitchen boiling a pan of water. Maybe it was time for tea.

When I lived in Papua New Guinea I watched a TV programme called Haus and Home where they showed viewers how to decorate a wall in your house by painting it. We then spent some time watching the paint dry.

Why did I suddenly remember that? ….