Big Brother "news"

[Ally]

Here's the psych test contestants are given.

[IRiSHMaFIA]

27 May 2006
BIG BROTHER'S DAWN: I WAS KIDNAPPED
SHOCK CLAIM AS VIEWERS AXE CONTESTANT
www.dailyrecord.co.uk

No 3 Dawn's fury as she warns BB chief that two housemates are suicide risk

By Stewart Maclean

BIG Brother reject Dawn Black yesterday warned she wants TV bosses to be charged with kidnap.

Just hours before Bonnie was evicted, Dawn, 38, claimed Channel 4 chiefs refused to let her quit and kept her in the house for a whole day.

Last night, viewers saw her dramatic exit from the show amid claims she was evicted for breaching the show's rules.

But yesterday, she threatened to call in police to probe her kidnap claims.

The yoga instructor also dubbed the show "dangerously off the rails" and claimed two of the remaining housemates were potentially suicidal.

Dawn said: "They held me there against my will for nearly 24 hours before finally chucking me out. It was like being in jail, except with them mocking me all the time and refusing to listen to me. I'm furious.

"I'm thinking of what to do about it, but one option is to press charges for false imprisonment because that's what they did.

"When you join the show they say you can leave at any time but they literally locked me into that house.

"If anyone else did that they'd be prosecuted for kidnap so I might press charges."

Viewers last night saw producers call her into the Diary Room and order her to leave the house after she told fellow housemates she had received a secret code from her sister.

Dawn admitted her sister Jo had passed her message - but said it was simply to tell her to calm down and leave the show.

She said: "I told my sister before I went on that if she wanted me to leave the show she should call up and tell me someone in the family was ill.

"She had been watching me on the live channel and had seen me begging in the Diary Room to leave the house, and she could see I was getting more and more stressed.

"That's when she rang up and left the message. As soon as I got that, it strengthened my urge to leave."

Fiery Dawn - who would have faced eviction last night if she hadn't left the show -said: "I asked again and again to leave but they wouldn't accept I wanted to go.

"They were obviously worried because Shahbaz had quit and the show was in trouble.

"Then I heard giggling in the background. I agreed to go to bed and said I would try and leave the next day but then they locked the bedroom door in case I tried to escape. It was outrageous."

She went on: "It was just pathetic when they said I was being evicted for cheating. How can you sack someone who's already resigned? That's just stupid.

"This series is just too silly for words now, and the producers are being totally irresponsible playing with people's lives by putting them on the programme when they're not mentally stable.

"Shahbaz has obviously got mental problems. He needs medical and psychological help.

"I worry about Nikki and Lea too. They are both lovely girls but they have problems and they're not stable. And I want Bonnie out as soon as possible because she's cracking up in there completely.

"These people can't function properly in the outside world so it's ridiculous to put them on the show.

"I can see dangerous patterns of behaviour in some of the housemates this year.

"I don't like seeing people being used. I'm strong enough to cope with Big Brother's bullying but some of these people aren't.

"If one of them comes out and kills themselves the producers will have blood on their hands. But as long as they get their ratings they don't care."

Dawn was branded "smelly" by housemate Nikki for refusing to shower.

But she said: "I've seen how being on the show can ruin your career, and that's why I didn't want to shower naked, because I work with children."

Now she has refused to appear on spin-off show Big Brother's Little Brother, despite being warned she would be in breach of contract.

She said: "I'd rather go to jail for breaching it than deal with those people."

A BB spokesman yesterday countered Dawn's earlier claims that she had not been allowed to get her asthma inhalers out of her case.

He added: "Dawn was permitted to take four inhalers into the house in her overnight bag."

They were not available for comment on the kidnap claims.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I know of at least one forum in which Dawn would be classified as a DAW: "Desperate Attention-seeking Whore". A bit harsh, yes, but claims of kidnapping? What did she think she was signing up for? "The Good-Morning-Happy-Day-Dawn-Show"?

Whatever, Dawn.....get over it....it's only television.............

Again, just my 2p..............

Cheers,
Kez

I think they were totally in the wrong to keep Dawn in the house after her requesting to leave. If it was a matter of hours to prepare transport then fine, but not keeping her in a full night after her making it clear she wanted to go.

I don't care what she signed prior to going in. Nobody has the right to hold anyone that way and I hope she gets her day in court.

[IRiSHMaFIA]

Kevin O'Sullivan is a complete bloody prick loser as far as I'm concerned. He couldn't give a rats arse about anyone's sanity in the house including Shahbaz as it's all good telly to him.

I'd like to see him put in that situation. He'd prove to be nothing short of a caged rat, running on a turnwheel like a feckin maniac, losing it before anyone else did. He'd turn out to be the biggest buttwipe BB ever had because he sounds like a cheap sadistic prick that's good at criticizing others but wouldn't be able to take it himself..... just like his cockend hero George Michael.

[faceless]

Kevin O'Sullivan is a complete bloody prick loser as far as I'm concerned. He couldn't give a rats arse about anyone's sanity in the house including Shahbaz as it's all good telly to him.

I'd like to see him put in that situation. He'd prove to be nothing short of a caged rat, running on a turnwheel like a feckin maniac, losing it before anyone else did. He'd turn out to be the biggest buttwipe BB ever had because he sounds like a cheap sadistic prick that's good at criticizing others but wouldn't be able to take it himself..... just like his cockend hero George Michael.

TESTIFY!!

[faceless]

Twins set for the house?

Big Brother is apparently planning to replace Shahbaz and Dawn with a pair of twins after original housemates prematurely left this week; Shahbaz had a breakdown and Dawn got expelled for breaking the show?s rules.

Now Big Brother is planning to insert Marcus and Andrew into the house, in an attempt to mix proceedings up after apparently growing concerned at the mass ?coupling up? of contestants, according to the Daily Mirror.

It is not clear whether the twins will be passed off as one person, in order to confuse housemates ? as has happened in the Australian and American versions of the show ? or whether they will take up both vacant places.

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Ah, the old "confuse em with a set-of-twins" routine...

:google:

[IRiSHMaFIA]

I hope the twins are fit blokes that put the rest of them to shame. I'd like to see what Sezer said come true, with them going in and breaking up the so called 'couples'.

After reading more about Sezer, I'd hate to see Imogen make the mistake of getting too involved because he seems like a pretty dodgy character. As for Grace, she can't seem to make up her mind who she wants between Mikey and George so a couple more in the mix would only add to her dilemma.

Nikki on the other hand hasn't a snowballs chance in hell of getting anyone because she's too much of a whining cry baby and no guy in his right mind would want any part of it.

The most important reason for having a couple lookers would be to give the female viewers something decent to look at x 2

[Ally]

The most important reason for having a couple lookers would be to give the female viewers something decent to look at x 2

I second that sis!!

[faceless]

BIG BROTHER?S BIG MISTAKE

The latest series of the reality TV show has barely begun, but Channel 4 has already been criticised by psychologists for its mental health screening process after Glaswegian Shahbaz threatened suicide. Barry Didcock reports on the battle between ratings and responsibility

AS the presses rolled on last week?s copy of Heat, the self-styled ?official Big Brother magazine?, staff were probably crowing at the headline they had come up with to introduce this year?s housemates. ?Unleash the mentalists? it read. Even by Heat?s high standards, it was a beaut.

Accompanying it was a spread of pictures featuring, among others, Tourette?s syndrome sufferer Pete Bennett, ?wacky Paki poof? Shahbaz Chauhdry from Glasgow, and bunny girl Nikki Grahame. ?The most bonkers lot ever to grace the BB house,? said the magazine?s editorial.

But by the time Heat actually hit the newsstands on Tuesday the headline wasn?t looking so clever. ?Shahbaz on suicide watch?, screamed the same day?s Sun on its front page, relaying the fact that the 37-year-old had threatened to kill himself. Hours later the Mental Health Foundation, which had been deluged with calls and e-mails over the weekend voicing concerns about Shahbaz?s mental state, issued an open letter to Channel 4?s director of programming Kevin Lygo asking him to outline exactly what psychological screening measures were in place to ensure the welfare of the Big Brother contestants. At the time of writing, the Mental Health Foundation had not received a reply, but Channel 4 is promising a prompt response.

By Wednesday, the rest of the red tops had caught up with the turbulent events playing themselves out in the Big Brother house. At 8pm on Tuesday, Shahbaz had left the house after a 90-minute consultation with a nebulous entity known only as ?Big Brother?s producers?. He did not say goodbye to his fellow housemates ? unsurprising as by that point they had handcuffed him, gagged him, locked him out of the house, stolen what few clothes he had and taken to leaving any room he walked into. And so he left, in pieces, which may have been the same state in which he arrived.

He did, however, appear on spin-off show Big Brother?s Little Brother on Wednesday night, after his departure from the Big Brother house had been shown. There he told presenter Dermot O?Leary: ?I am disturbed ? I don?t know if I?ll survive in the outside world.?

Television regulator Ofcom has received 184 complaints about Big Brother so far, 150 of them relating to that Wednesday night episode. It?s a large amount, but by no means the largest ever received. When 2005 Big Brother contestant Kinga simulated sex with a wine bottle, there were 259 complaints. And 517 people contacted Ofcom when, in the same series, Zimbabwean nurse Makosi was evicted, the imputation then being that there was a racist element to the crowd response and that the manner in which presenter Davina McCall conducted the traditional post-eviction interview amounted to racial discrimination. In neither case was Big Brother found to be in breach of Ofcom?s code.

Shahbaz is currently ?holed up in a hotel room? ? the words are those of a Channel 4 insider quoted in The Sun on Thursday ? where he is, once more, on suicide watch under the scrutiny of ?mental health experts? (another nebulous term). ?He is not a well man,? continued the insider.

Meanwhile, Pete Bennet has become the bookies? favourite to win Big Brother 2006, a rich irony given that it was his inclusion which Channel 4 expected to generate the most ? excuse the pun ? heat. Instead it is a different issue which has jumped up to bite Channel 4: a mental health issue, certainly, but not quite the one the station was expecting.

Exactly how much psychological screening goes on before contestants are allowed into the Big Brother house and how rigorous that screening is has been a controversial subject since the show?s inception. But it has never before come quite so sharply or tragically into focus.

Channel 4 won?t reveal the name of the consultant psychologist who advises on all aspects of housemate psychology. They will say, however, that the person is a chartered clinical psychologist with an MSc in psychotherapy and a BA in psychology, and that they are a member of the British Psychological Society.

In a statement, Channel 4 added: ?The welfare of all our housemates is of the utmost importance to us and housemates are intensively screened by professionals to ensure they are psychologically strong enough to cope with their experiences. During their time in the house, housemates are monitored 24 hours a day and psychologists are on hand to talk about any concerns they have.?

One of those who tuned in last week to watch Big Brother was Daniel Sokol, a medical ethicist at Imperial College, London. Sokol didn?t like what he saw and isn?t convinced that Channel 4?s screening and assessment procedures are intense enough.

? It seemed quite plain to me that these people were not psychologically robust ? certainly not Shahbaz. Besides, how do the psychologists define ?psychologically robust?? I wanted the psychologists of the show to clarify the methods of assessment that they use. The whole Shahbaz debacle was, to me, just further evidence that the validity of their assessments is dubious.?

Nikki Grahame is another that Sokol has worries about. Indeed, a friend of Grahame?s has already gone public with her own concerns, describing the 24-year-old as an unstable anorexic who she fears might kill herself. Viewers had a taste of Grahame?s instability last Saturday night when a lack of bottled water sent her into an explosive temper tantrum in the diary room.

Shahbaz has since claimed that he duped the Big Brother producers by not telling them that he had been prescribed antidepressants in the past. ?But,? says Sokol, ?that raises the question of how thorough the [psychological] examination is. Is it just 10 minutes or do they have access to the contestants? medical records? If they did have Shahbaz?s medical records, they would have known he was on anti depressants, that he was treated for psychological frailty.?

Sokol also wonders if the consent of the contestants itself is valid given that Rule 14 of the Big Brother Rule Book states that Big Brother can change any rule it wants. ?Is it ethical to make these contestants, some of whom may be obsessed with fame, do practically anything?? says Sokol. ?Does that constitute valid consent??

THESE questions of assessment, consent and medical history are thorny ones and a potential minefield for makers of reality TV shows. One person who has seen the process close up is Dr Cynthia McVey, a psychology lecturer at Glasgow Caledonian University.

?Nobody who is psychologically unstable or particularly vulnerable should be allowed to take part because they are subjected to quite a lot of stress and humiliation, by Big Brother not giving them their suitcases, or by other housemates,? she says.

McVey has been involved in an advisory capacity on several reality TV programmes, including Castaway, the year-long programme made by Lion TV for the BBC which followed the trials and tribulations of 36 people living on the Hebridean island of Taransay.

For that show and others McVey has developed psychological profiling tests which she believes are tight, accurate and ? most importantly ? hard to beat. If there is psychological frailty, she says she will uncover it.

She recalls an incident during the making of Castaway in which the programme makers wanted to include a person whom the tests had deemed unsuitable. ?What we found was that this person was above average on depression and above average on anxiety.?

The BBC went back to the contestant and asked to speak to their GP. The GP then told the BBC that the contestant was, in McVey?s words, ?psychologically vulnerable? and should on no account be allowed on to the programme. However, such laborious checks are expensive and time-consuming and it is all too easy to cut corners ? or find accommodating psychologists.

Of course even those who survive the Big Brother house have another challenge facing them ? how to deal with life after they leave. A fortnight ago, Makosi was interviewed on TV by Lorraine Kelly. She spent most of the interview in tears and told Kelly: ?Since leaving the house I?ve felt so depressed. In fact, I think about killing myself every day ? It all stems from the treatment I got when I left the house. The audience thought I had just been manipulative.? Kelly later described her as ?a damaged soul?.

Cynthia McVey has her own story to tell. She met ?Nasty Nick? ? Nick Bateman, from the first Big Brother series ? at a Royal Television Society event. ?He did say that he had met other Big Brother contestants who had said that they were distressed afterwards, were depressed and ? this is anecdotal obviously ? were on antidepressants.?

Even Germaine Greer has felt Big Brother?s sting. She participated in Celebrity Big Brother in 2005, but walked out after five days. She later said programme makers used ?superior bullying? tactics and called the house a ?fascist prison?.

?You?re playing with peoples? lives,? says McVey. ?The contestants are only in the house for a few weeks, but the repercussions of that for the rest of their lives in terms of their self-perception and their self-esteem can be immense.?

And yet ? and here is the deepest irony ? we remain transfixed, tuning in every night in our millions to watch the trauma, collision, screeching and injury. Not for nothing do we call it car-crash television, but how will we cope when we have a human write-off to deal with?

www.sundayherald.com

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[Fredgremlin]

I think I mentioned elsewhere about the mental instability of some of the house mates.

I do find it incredible that they have used such people for the show - although, putting my eyes in the shoes of a TV executive, volatile people are more likely to make good TV.

But can't you create a slightly volatile enflamed situation if you use people with strong opinions and beliefs rather than those with much weaker minds.

I believe BB has crossed a dangerous line. And hypocrytically, I still watch it. I'm dealing with that.

Nice find there Faceless.

[faceless]

PORN BEEF
By Cameron Robertson

HERE is Big Brother's Lea when she was 22 stone - unrecognisable from the busty blonde porn actress in the house. Our amazing pictures show the extent of the transformation in which she lost 10 stone and had ?80,000 of cosmetic surgery. Single mum Lea, 35, turned to performing in sex films to pay for it.

She joined BB7 as its oldest house mate after forking out for four boob jobs to make her bust a 30M. An insider said: "It's amazing. You wouldn't think it's the same person."

Lea revealed earlier on the show that she had got rid of mounds of fat with liposuction. Housemates heard her say: "They don't just suck it out. They have to dilute the fat first." She also reportedly had a nose op, collagen and tattooed liner for her lips and cheek and bum implants. But she told housemates she does not consider herself to be a freak, just "abnormal".

Lea is said to suffer from body dysmorphia, a mental disorder causing a warped body image leading to "imagined ugliness". Pals say she started hating her appearance after she gained a lot of weight when she was pregnant with her son a decade ago. She split from her husband in 2000 and claims to have been celibate for a year.

Lea, from Nottingham, was bullied at school for being overweight. Then at one time her dieting went too far and she was a tiny six stone.

In the house Lea played no part in the furious row about glamour modelling between bitchy pals Nikki and Grace. Nikki, who has posed topless, went mad when she claimed Grace had said she "wouldn't lower herself" by doing those kind of photoshoots. She announced: "Grace is trying to belittle me in front of the boys. I'm very upset." Grace told her: "I never said 'lower' because that's degrading to you or anyone who's done it. I apologise, I didn't mean to offend you."

But Grace then told Big Brother in the Diary Room that Nikki, who entered the house in a bunny outfit, was not such an "innocent girl". She said: "You can tell that by her outfits. Would an innocent girl walk around with her a**e cheeks hanging out?"

The pair, who once worked together on the Harrods perfume counter, had been rivals for the attentions of George but he seems to prefer Grace. Nikki later admitted Grace had hit a nerve. She said: "I worry what people are going to think of me because I did stuff like that."

Sezer got in on the bitching when he said Nikki is a "Jodie Marsh in the making". He also told Imogen he had "picked the wrong girl" after her vow not to have sex in the house. Randy Sezer told her: "BB asked why I like you. "I said because she's got boobs and an e. So I picked the wrong girl. In the real world I'm used to getting my own way."

On tonight's live Channel 4 show the gang will meet two new housemates - twins Marcus and Andrew. An insider said: "The way it is looking, Nikki's prayers for a man, or men, could be answered."

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[Ally]

That's quite huge weight loss for Lea. She doesn't look like the same person now and I know she's had a lot of surgery to alter things. To me she looks much older than what she actually is though and I think she has the worst hair extentions I've ever seen. She would actually look less harsh and prettier with a few changes in her eyebrow shape, make up and hair. Still if she's happy with herself now, than that's all that matters really.

[IRiSHMaFIA]

Still if she's happy with herself now, than that's all that matters really.

I agree with you there It's not really anyone's business what she's done to herself or how much she's spent, as long as she's happy with the result.

[faceless]

Still if she's happy with herself now, than that's all that matters really.

I agree with you there It's not really anyone's business what she's done to herself or how much she's spent, as long as she's happy with the result.

Of course it's everyone's business - she's on Big Brother! She sold her soul and all I can see her getting out of it is maybe being the celebrity brought in to open Ann Summers shops!

[IRiSHMaFIA]

Still if she's happy with herself now, than that's all that matters really.

I agree with you there It's not really anyone's business what she's done to herself or how much she's spent, as long as she's happy with the result.

Of course it's everyone's business - she's on Big Brother! She sold her soul and all I can see her getting out of it is maybe being the celebrity brought in to open Ann Summers shops!

erm no. She didn't 'sell her soul' but signed up to be on a reality tv show. She left herself open for the public to know pretty much everything about her, but that doesn't make everyone privy to all facets of her life. If she gets anything positive out of it then good on her. They go through enough public ridicule to be deserving of it I'd think, and at the end of the day who cares what she looks like and what she's done to herself. As long as she's happy with it who cares?

[faceless]

erm no. She didn't 'sell her soul' but signed up to be on a reality tv show.

same thing