TVN to launch 'Big Brother'
Private TV broadcaster TVN announced last week that on Dec. 10, it would hold the first stage of casting for "Big Brother," one of the most talked-about television programs in recent years. Ten strangers selected during the casting will live together for 100 days under 24-hour camera surveillance. At stake is a zl. 500,000 grand prize.
TVN will introduce the show with a Nov. 26 broadcast of "Big Brother pierwsze spotkanie (first meeting)."
"We will describe the rules of the show and show parts of the American, Portuguese and Dutch versions," said Andrzej Soltysik, press spokesman for TVN. "We will also include information about the casting call."
In July, TVN purchased the rights to "Big Brother" from Endemol, the TV production company that created the first "Big Brother" in the Netherlands. The company's Polish branch, Endemol-Neovision, is owned by TVN's parent company, ITI Holding, which gave TVN an advantage in obtaining rights to the show. Endemol-Neovision will produce the local "Big Brother."
Despite criticism regarding the inherently voyeuristic nature of reality shows, "Big Brother" has been a success wherever it was launched in terms of viewership.
A series of 100 "Big Brother" episodes was first broadcast in the Netherlands by the Dutch TV network Veronica. Four million of Holland's 15 million inhabitants watched the final episode on Dec. 30, 1999. At the same time, Internet tie-ins have attracted 500 million hits worldwide, according to Mike Morley, the director of Endemol-Neovision.
The show's concept involves taking a group of strangers five women and five men and sequestering them in a house without TV or the Internet, and monitoring them day and night with surveillance cameras. At regular intervals, viewers vote a contestant out of the house, and the person who remains to the end takes the grand prize.
TVN will launch the Polish version of "Big Brother" in the first quarter of 2001.
According to Morley, stations that run "Big Brother" have seen their overall market share increase by up to 10% over the course of the year. " 'Big Brother' tends to do better on the channels that are not the leaders," he said. "If you look at the U.K., (the show) ran on Channel 4, which is an exact parallel to TVN here. Bigger, main stations tend to become quite conservative in their programming, they tend to go for predictable mixes of programs, whereas stations like Channel 4 or TVN are more innovative."
But what Morley described as innovative, others simply consider bad taste.
"It's a paradox of our times. On one hand, you have this obsession with privacy and special laws that protect it, and you can be prosecuted for publishing your debtor's name. And on the other hand, people love to display themselves and others love to watch," said Ryszard Legutko, a philosopher at Jagiellonian University.
According to Catholic Bishop Jan Chrapek, shows like "Big Brother" pander to the basest human tastes. "The question is whether the media should promote bad taste or help shape tastes," he said. "The fact that so many people have watched this show proves that such a human weakness (voyeurism) exists, but that doesn't excuse the program."
Endemol-Neovision's Morley doesn't see anything damaging in "Big Brother," either to its participants or its viewers. "The biggest fact that makes me say so is that people can stop at any moment and leave the house," he said. "At the same time I hope that the show affects viewers' tastes and moral standards in a good way. I think (the show) will make every intelligent person in Poland question the standards of their own behavior (against) those in the house."
According to Legutko, however, "Big Brother" transgresses the boundary of what should and shouldn't be done. The "commercialization of thinking has reached such a level that not only are contestants not ashamed to be in the program, but the producers are not ashamed to run it," he said.
But Morley said it's possible to reflect reality without being too invasive and or obscene. "Somebody going to the toilet probably isn't of any interest to our viewers, but somebody talking about going to the toilet and actually using the toilet cubicle to communicate another message suddenly has a different dimension," he said.
TVN's Soltysik said that cameras will shoot everything, including sexual situations and biological functions. "But we haven't decided if we will run them during the show," he said, adding that such scenes were excised in Spain and Portugal but remained in the German version of the program. "The station's experience is that Polish viewers don't need to be bombarded with sex scenes," Soltysik said. "But we are counting on romance, tears, fighting and disputes."
The first stage of casting will involve a call for written applications. "We would like to go through all the letters that we receive and then send back up to 5,000 questionnaires," Soltysik said. The application stage will be closed by the end of December and final selection will begin in January.
