Herinneren jullie je Bart van Big Brother nog?

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Bart, now 31, has spent most of the past eight years trying to recover his privacy and equilibrium, and has suffered five breakdowns in the process. He has grown to detest the vacuous celebrity culture, the adulation of talentless exhibitionists, that Big Brother pioneered. “This is the new opium, the new religion,” he says in an interview before the ninth season of the witless show ends on Channel 4 tonight. “I am not a fan of the programmes, or of people becoming famous for being stupid.” And of his role in the birth of a show that, in his view, led to a dumbing down of television around the world he says: “If it's true that I helped to create that mindless monster, I'm not too proud of it...Big Brother took away the need to make inspiring programmes and replaced them with mindless chatter. It's time to put it in a museum for weird artefacts of television history.” If he knew then what he knows now, Bart declares, “I would never have signed up”.
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For Bart, however, Big Brother's success proved a mixed blessing. He was unprepared for celebrity. Three days after emerging from the house, he had his first breakdown. He spent the next two years in what he calls “oblivion”. He attracted shrieking crowds wherever he went. He was pulled from his car by hysterical women, dragged from stages when he opened clubs or discos. He took on an agent, a manager and a bodyguard. He made an “insane amount of money” from commercials and other promotions.

Bart was embarrassed by a fame he felt was undeserved, and recoiled from the millions who idolised him for no good reason. “I resented being famous just for being famous...I was a false saint,” he says. “I felt the whole country had gone mad. I found the whole country had dumbed down...I had contempt for a society for which fame is an end in itself.” He became reclusive. He had more breakdowns. He sought refuge in drinking, womanising and the soft drugs that he called “my rescue from insanity”.

He has no idea how much money he made, but burnt his way through almost all of it. His relationship with Sabine lasted a month - “we got mobbed by reporters everywhere we went” - but there were no shortage of other women. “Girls would say ‘Can I go with you tonight?'.” He reckons he slept with more than 130. Finally, he came to his senses. He began dabbling in journalism. A friend took him to Baghdad to interview Tariq Aziz, Saddam Hussein's Deputy Prime Minister. He signed up as a reporter in Utrecht, made TV programmes for teens and edited a magazine for singles.
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“In the end I got back to what I was before - just a lot wiser and with some shattered illusions about the way the world works,” he says. “In my terms that's success...I have more fun and I work less than most people. I don't belong to any corporation any more. I have enough money for the stuff I need to do and I have a really, really relaxed life.” He seldom bothers watching Big Brother nowadays. The first series was so innocent, he says. It was an experiment involving people playing themselves. There were no fights, no exhibitionism, no demeaning or degrading tasks. His sex with Sabine, Bart argues, was discreet and entirely natural - not staged.

Today the contestants court celebrity, the producers encourage conflict and the more tantrums, transsexuals and sufferers of Tourette's syndrome the better. Almost nothing is taboo - fights, masturbation, drunkenness, nudity. If the participants do not know who Shakespeare is, believe Cambridge is in London, or think chickpeas come from chickens, no matter.

They should “get a f***ing life, read a book, do some community service,” says Bart. “TV provides us with more and more stupidity. It's dumbing people down...the irony is I hate the way of life I helped to create.”
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The typical viewer is a 15-24 female with no religion and little interest in politics, who uses Bebo over Facebook and enjoys Heat magazine - though of course its audience is wider than this. Those who say BB is on the wane don't belong to this group. They were never meant to.

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Op zondag 12 oktober 2008 12:35 schreef TNA het volgende:
Zieke samenleving of niet, ik heb me prima vermaakt met Big Brother I Effe lekker knuffeleh!

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Op zondag 12 oktober 2008 12:52 schreef ThE_ED het volgende:

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Nee