Stupid TV squared: Big Brother goes "to space"

[Kellanved]

Endemol, the company behind 'Big Brother', is pulling out all the stops for its new Channel 4 production. In it, contestants vie to fly to space. The snag? They will be grounded at a military base, victims of probably the biggest hoax ever attempted on TV. Ciar Byrne reports, and reviews the 'highlights' of reality television

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Despite the hype, Space Cadets will not be taking on Ant and Dec in the ratings. Instead, Channel 4 will start screening the show in early December; the celebrities clear out of their jungle hideaway on 3 December.

For 10 days, the channel will televise the contestants as they undergo intensive training in Russia, before being flown 100km (62 miles)above the Earth into near space. Here they will spend five days orbiting the Earth and conducting experiments. Or so they think.

In reality, the nine - joined by three actors whom they believe to be fellow contestants - will be at a disused military base somewhere in the UK and will never leave the ground. The whole process will be filmed live in an unprecedented television event presented by Johnny Vaughan.

The unwitting participants, who were selected for their suggestibility, are currently being kept in a secret location and denied all access to television or newspapers, which would instantly give the game away.

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And if they don't, at the end of the show there will be a surprise sweetener of £5,000 for every day they have spent in orbit. How the show ends depends on what happens. In the ideal circumstance that the illusion is sustained and three contestants believe they have genuinely spent the past five days in orbit, the producers are considering sending them out of the craft one by one on a "space walk". When the door opens, instead of finding themselves 100km above the Earth's surface, mum and dad will be there to greet them.
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/lifestyle/film_tv/story.jsp?story=669727

[Monkey see Monkey Do]

1. Last night I watched Maggie Thatcher's daughter have a wee

on "I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here". Us Brits sometimes turn our noses up at US shows, but we're more than capable of churning out home-grown tat.

(Also, yesterday's "News of the World" (Sunday version of Murdoch's "The Sun" paper) had a double page spread with a contestant from this years Big Brother posing topless. In the most incredibly bad-taste possible, it was accompanied by a story about how she had a breakdown and was suicidal and self-harmed. The following quote was splashed in big, bold print: "These are the sexiest pictures I've ever done - the best tonic ever for depression." God help us all.)