Nasty Nick’s Nightmare Notches Up Record Ratings For Big Brother
Every cloud has a silver lining, and this was certainly true of the cloud under which “Nasty Nick” departed from Big Brother on Thursday. The silver lining for Channel 4 was the highest viewing figures since Four Weddings and a Funeral was screened in 1995, with the extended 10.50pm show enjoying an average audience of 5.5 million, or 46% audience share. All those bleary eyes around the office water cooler, where we all apparently discuss events in “the house”, could be accounted for by the fact that viewing peaked at 11.57pm, with 6.2 million viewers, representing a 72.5% audience share.
One of the programme’s distinctive features is the viewer interactivity afforded by its website. An estimated 10 million hits were recorded during Thursday, a figure which is believed by Intel to be the most traffic ever seen on a website.
The programme has created a gratifying level of media interest and audience figures for Channel 4 since its launch last month (see Big Brother Is Watching Audience Figures Go Up). Broadcasting the programme to coincide with the silly season has guaranteed extensive media coverage, despite the period witnessing far from silly events such as the Sarah Payne murder and paedophile ‘outings’, the Concorde crash and the sinking of a Russian submarine.
Any programme which offers 24-hour Peeping Tom opportunities was guaranteed to get the Sun (the official Big Brother paper, apparently) et al going. However, it has been noted that even the broadsheets have stepped into the populist breach to protest (daily) at our voyeurism. Big Brother is the end of civilisation as we know it according to these critics. This attitude perhaps reached its peak in the Observer, which on Sunday offered an analysis of Nasty Nick’s relationship with the other male contestants according to Hegelian philosophy and then said, “There’s no doubt the show brings out the car crash voyeur in us all.”
Car crash voyeurism it may be, but here no-one is getting seriously hurt. Nasty Nick may claim that his life is “hell” with no chance of a post-BB girlfriend or job, but the Sun paid him £70,000 to say that on their front cover and it seems unlikely he will disappear without gaining a few lucrative deals, as at the very least he is hot-tipped to become the best pantomime box-office draw since Christopher Biggins (as the baddie, of course). With rocketing ratings for Channel 4, the prospect of fame, fortune and even the prize money for the contestants, the only ones losing sleep over Big Brother are those of us hooked on the 24-hour webcams…
Channel 4: 020 7396 4444