Sadly CBB Must Come to an End.

Despite a unprecedented for UK TV extension to the season Celebrity Big Brother (CBB) will sadly come to an end on Wednesday (29/1/14). I guess this means that this will probably be one of my last posts on the subject.

On Friday (24/1/14) Linda Nolan was evicted from the show. This was rapidly dwarfed by events later in the evening when a reunited Casey Batchelor and Lee Ryan finally achieved sexual satisfaction whilst in bed together. Exactly what is meant by sexual satisfaction goes a long way to explaining this particular relationship. By her own admission Casey has never achieved orgasm through sex with a partner. Therefore it is likely that she looks on sex more as a way to express love, affection and companionship rather then out and out lust. As a result the events in the CBB house seem to have been conspiring to force Casey back into a relationship with Lee.

Firstly there have been the overt efforts by Jim Davidson to encourage the two to get together. Partly this has been driven by a desire to improve the atmosphere in the house by washing away the memory of Jasmine Waltz who Lee cheated on Casey with. Also Jim comes from the generation where the idea of an unmarried women doesn't really compute and Jim has certainly been doing his bit to reduce the number of unmarried women in the world having been married four times.

Secondly there has been the largely unplanned effects of Jim's massive and long-running argument with Linda. As I've mentioned this argument centred around Linda's now dead husband Brian Hudson's conviction for theft from Jim's mentor Frank Carson. Re-awakening Linda's grief at the death of her husband this argument created an extremely poisonous atmosphere in the house leaving all the housemates craving the shelter of love, affection and companionship. Therefore all the anger and bitterness in house which Lee's cheating on Casey with Jasmine contributed to actually ended up making Lee seem more and more attractive to Casey which in turn made it easier for her to overlook the fact that he's really not an attractive man.

Although sex guarantees ratings Big Brother seemed unsure as to whether it wanted to take responsibility for making a couple out of Casey and Lee. So in Saturday's (25/1/14) grandfather clock task they included a nasty surprise to drive Casey and Lee apart. Basically this task involved a secret door disguised as a grandfather clock being placed in the living room of the house. Every time the 'grandfather clock' chimed the housemates had to freeze and remain perfectly still while a visitor from the outside entered the house and wandered around the house. I think first came Lee's band mates from Blue who started singing one of their songs just daring Lee to join in with them and fail the task. I think up next was Ollie Locke's mother and sister who brought the family dog in with them. The dog proceeded to lick Ollie's face while he tried to remain perfectly still and fought back tears as his mother and sister told him how much they loved and missed him.

The real kicker came though when Lee and Casey were enjoying a post-coital cuddle on the sofas when all of a sudden the clock struck and in walked Jasmine. Jasmine then put in an utterly fake performance about how much she was in love with Lee and how angry she was at Casey for stealing her man. This obviously caused an explosion of emotion in the house with Casey in floods of tears worrying that her parents would be ashamed of her (odd for a topless model) while Lee spent the next day and a half doing that strange thing he does whereby he seems to think he can change history by repeating over and over again to anyone who will listen what he thinks history should be. As someone on Twitter commented it is as if by going without TV for three weeks Lee Ryan has somehow forgotten that TiVo exists. Casey's tears and Lee's desperate attempts to self-rationalise his behaviour went on until Lee was finally and thankfully evicted from the house through the grandfather clock in a surprise (to the housemates) eviction on Sunday (26/1/14)

Although this made for an hour of TV on Sunday that was so dramatic and captivating that it succeed in pushing the Grammys off the top of worldwide Twitter trends I can't help feeling that Jasmine's return to confront Lee and Casey was a little unnecessary. The main problem was that it all happened so quickly that the majority of viewers only found out about it around 15 minutes before the voting closed meaning that there was little time for it to have any impact on the result. If Jasmine hadn't re-entered the house and Sunday's eviction actually took on Monday I think that there was a fair chance that Casey rather then Lee would have been evicted. While Lee is clearly an idiot I can't help but feel that after watching her lose all respect for herself by taking Lee back the viewers in turn would have quickly lost all respect for Casey meaning that no-one voted to save her. Secondly the confrontation was so dramatic that coming so close to the end of the show it has completely killed off activity in the house with everyone too on edge to do anything.

With the housemates really just sitting around quietly waiting to see who has won it seems like a good moment for me to talk about who I would like to see win. Having faced the public vote every week and having survived every week the out and out favourite is of course Jim Davidson although I think a lot of his support might disappear now that it is a vote to win rather then a vote to keep him in the house for as long as possible. That said I wouldn't be too upset to see Jim win because a lot of this stuff about him being a racist, a homophobe and a misogynist seems to me the result of a witch hunt by the liberal elite rather then having any basis in fact. While Jim has been in CBB the self-proclaimed guardians of Britain's liberal elite - Channel 4 - have been far too busy laughing at the poor people in the show "Benefits Streets" while cashing cheques from the taxpayer.

My actual favourite though is Sam Faiers who has really pleasantly surprised me by coming across as rather intelligent and actually quite normal. As I've mentioned before Sam comes from a 'structured reality' show called "The Only Way Is Essex (TOWIE)." This is a show that is so trashy it aspires to be "Keeping Up With the Kardashians." It also follows a similar format of pretending to be a fly-on-the-wall documentary but is actually entirely fake with the people in it pretending to act as outrageously as possible in order to guarantee themselves the most time on screen. TOWIE is particularly offensive because the people in it seem to pride themselves in their own stupidity. For example former TOWIE cast member Amy Childs has built an entire career on her breasts and her inability to understand even the most basic things while fellow cast member Joey Essex recently took great pride in revealing that he was too stupid to tell the time.

Therefore I was really impressed by the way Sam came into the house and more or less spent the entire first week asleep which is pretty much everyone in Britain's reaction to the first week in January. Sam went on to show real intelligence and emotional depth through the way she quietly supported Linda during her feud with Jim and acted a general linchpin/peacemaker within the group. So I think Sam most deserves to win CBB and there is a hope that victory might go a long way in helping to rescue her from TOWIE.


18:05 on 28/1/14 (UK date).