A World of Wrestling?

It can't be coincidence that a week before the summer Big Brother OFCOM puts the show in the headlines with its public criticism of it. It is also widely reported that in the Australian BB house a contestant will not be informed about the death of her father. The Daily Mail says that there will be public grovelling at the start of the new series and the The Daily Star claims that certified sex addict will enter the house. Who issues such as certificate?

Unrestrained sex. Unknowable death. This story has already been written. Transgression and punishment have already been trailed.

But this time it will be more explicit than before that we are to jeer and boo not only the contestants but the programme itself, its makers and its broadcasters. You don’t even have to watch to join in.

Big Brother has exceeded itself and the show has become the show.

Here’s Barthes:

‘The virtue of all-in wrestling is that it is the spectacle of excess. Here we find a grandiloquence which must have been that of ancient theatres. And in fact wrestling is an open-air spectacle, for what makes the circus or the arena what they are is not the sky (a romantic value suited rather to fashionable occasions), it is the drenching and vertical quality of the flood of light. Even hidden in the most squalid Parisian halls, wrestling partakes of the nature of the great solar spectacles, Greek drama and bullfights: in both, a light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve’.

Time, then, for twelve weeks of society-wide wrestling. I hope there is free bread. The circus is back in town.

BigBrother's Big Theory