Next year's Celebrity BB - axed

This news just breaking on the Press Association...

1 SHOWBIZ Brother Axe CHANNEL 4 AXES 2008 CELEBRITY BB Channel 4 is axing next year’s series of Celebrity Big Brother, it announced today. The move, which comes after the race row that engulfed the previous series, is part of a programme of “creative renewal”, according to the broadcaster. The highly successful series, which attracts huge ratings, is expected to return in 2009. The decision also comes after this year’s series of the standard non-celebrity Big Brother has failed to make as big a splash as usual, even though it has still attracted healthy ratings. The broadcaster said the decision is unrelated and is part of a policy to clear almost all returning series from the heart of its peak time schedule in the first half of 2008 in pursuit of new and adventurous programming.

Radical certainly but sad for me. Obviously all BB's critics will be crowing, but how absurd to axe a popular show, even if it is - as they claim - for just a year, which commands high ratings and affection. But do you agree? Or has Celebrity BB had its day?

Comments

[damian barr]

i smell lawyers. But Tim, just think of all the time it frees up in our TV viewing schedules. We can now watch repeats of this year's live feed!

Dx

[The Stoat]

If 'creative renewal' involves giving Charley Uchea her own TV show (see Daphne's post of yesterday) I'll be claiming a refund on my TV licence and punting the box into the wheelie bin, never to darken my living room again.

I can't wait until next May for BB. And although the 'real' BB is definitely my favourite, the celeb version has its charms. Watching Germaine Greer doing the washing up while wearing a mob cap and Mrs Tiggywinkle nightie was one of the high points of the decade, as far as I was concerned.

[Dawn Right Nasty]

Never fear - Lauren's here!

Babes, don't worry, we don't need Big Brother no more. For just £5.99 a month we can sign up to Lauren Harries TV and have fly-on-the-wall access to unbridled madness whenever we feel the call.

Last one on Paypal's a LOSER ...

http://www.laurenharries.tv/index2.html

[The Stoat]

Sorry to sound like a High Court judge, but...(adjusts wig, peers over half-moon spectacles)..who IS Lauren Harries?

While I'm on, I'd like to make it clear that Germaine Greer, and not I, was wearing the mob cap and Tiggywinkle nightie. Just in case anyone gets the wrong idea.

[Jacynth]

I am sad about this news. At its best CBB is tv gold. There have been some serious lapses of taste over the years though which have overshadowed the finer, more entertaining moments. I just don't think the present production team can be trusted to do it justice and find the right mix of people. They have shown too many errors of judgement and I can't help thinking this has something to do with the decision.

[Jacynth]

Oh no - worse still. I have just realised that if there is no CBB, we will have nothing to blog about. I will miss this blog more than I miss the series...

[hansgruber]

Stoat,

The love of my life. I give you Lauren Harries-

Before:
http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/40767000/jpg/_40767996_james203other.jpg

And after:
http://a161.ac-images.myspacecdn.com/01107/06/12/1107142160_s.jpg

Yes, that’s the same person, and ain’t she perty!

[The Stoat]

My God...thanks Hans. A picture paints a thousand words, they say. Two is even better.

Imagine if you were Defence Counsel and had to sum up Ms Harries in a few words. 'A transsexual former child prodigy in the field of antique furnture, m'lud' wouldn't go down too well with Mr Justice Cocklecarrot.

(I've just checked out the Wikipedia entry, as you can tell. Love the fact that the entire Harries family style themselves Doctors of Metaphysics. Just like that! Took me four years of hard slog to scrape up a BA in said subject).

[Chris Anderson]

I think Lauren Harries should of been on celeb big brother. I am a member of laurenharries.tv and it is great! It's her and her crazy, but funny family!

[Joolz]

I much prefer CBB - it's on at the gloomy beginning of the year and is much shorter.

I still think about Dirk and his miso soup........those chats he had with Jermaine........Q from Stairs trying to rebrand himself as Johnathan. Happy days.

I hope you can come up with an excuse for a Times blog for the more erm alternative types. Can't really see myself reading or joining in with the Alpha Nappy bunch or any of the blogs which require use of the serious side of the brain.

[Liv]

CBB should stay. Love it or hate it, seeing has-been celebrities make twats of themselves cheers up gloomy January, and makes us all feel better about our social inadequacies. And it's absence means sad tumbleweed times for this blog.

[Gabrielle de P]

No, NO - what else is going to cheer me next January (apart from my birthday)? I had already compiled part of my Wish List of Z-listers ... OK, I will share: Paris Hilton, of course, then let's throw in the pot the fragile Sophie Anderton, Jodie Marsh (again), Jasmine Lennard, Lady Whatshername - (the horsey faced blonde on BBBM last night), Neil and Christine Hamilton, Calum Best and Paul Dannan (I can't tell the difference between them), Jeremy Paxman, Anne Widdiecombe and of course the Divine Lauren Harries (don't say I never think of you, HansG). And Ken Livingstone.

[Jessica]

I was devastated to hear this news, too. When will we all meet again? Some kind of an alternative blog might be fun. With posts like "What was the meaning of the end of Cape Fear? Was he in Arizona?" and all those other things that happen that you never quite know what to think about until you are joined by your blogging chums who will clear it up for you and/or talk about something else equally fun and /or bitchy.

Although there is the possibility of me and Daphne getting onto the subject of nits and then nothing will be able to stop us because it won't be officially "off-topic" and then everyone else (or at least those unafflicted by the tiny beasties) will get bored or unkind remarks will be made about our possible banishment to Alpha Mummy.

I wouldn't want that to happen but I will miss you guys.

[The Stoat]

I was thinking about a 'virtual' BB: put together a list of 'famous dead people' housemates - St Augustine, Richard the Third, Salvador Dali, Messalina, Florence Nightingale and what have you; try to guess what alliances and fallings-out might develop, take it in turns to devise tasks and plot lines to confuse them etc.

Or a literary BB: Yossarian getting jiggy under the duvet with Mrs Dalloway, while Tartuffe tries to edge in and make it a threesome, and Billy Bunter eats the last slice of bread.

Someone would have act as a coordinator, of course. Someone with time on his hands, and a sick, deviant mentality.

But where would we find such a man...?

[Daphne]

Jessica, think I have finally denitted her.

Think she's got worms now.

[Daphne]

I agree with Jessica's alternative blog idea, we can all talk, (and talk), about any old rubbish really.

I don't want to go to the Alpha Mummy blog. They scare me.

[Jessica]

I LOVE that idea, Stoat, although I think we would all need a reading list beforehand if we were going to do the literary one. We can't have Heathcliff offering to do the washing-up, or Voldemort giving Madame Bovary a hug and a pep talk after she fails the shopping task.

Blimey, I could go on for hours.

Alpha Mummy scare me too. They have rather too heavily defined parameters of right and wrong. I might say something wrong. Better not to speak at all.