Big Brother it is not, insist the makers of No 54, but it has to be admitted that Ireland's new web-based soap, is a very close relation: Student Brother.
Unlike Big Brother, Dublin-based No 54 is not a competition, nor is it synopsised for national television, but both web-based dramas share three essential ingredients: 24-hour surveillance, an attention-hungry cast and an audience dying for a glimpse of other people's lives.
Launched nearly two weeks ago, No 54 (unlike you-know-what) is exclusively web-based and focuses on the antics of five Irish students who have given up their privacy for the fame and fun that comes with living rent-free in a luxurious Dublin city-centre pad.
The blurb for the website is attention-grabbing: "Five students. One designer pad. 24-hour surveillance. Anything can happen." My personal experience of watching No 54 over a 56k modem at midnight one night last week was exactly that, except I found that though there was plenty of action in the living room, I couldn't make head nor tail of it.
For the most part it was a bit like looking into a goldfish bowl and a fairly murky one at that. There was approximately a 10-second delay for the picture to reload on RealPlayer and the audio had that patchy and garbled underwater quality - very similar, actually, to having one's head in a goldfish bowl.
No 54 is poles apart from Big Brother in that the residents can leave the house - college schedules mean that they have to leave sometime and if they skip lectures, their parents or lecturers can check in to see if they are still in bed!
Masterminded by the student portal website Oxygen.ie, No 54 aims to be an entertainment channel, entertaining like with like. The student mix of Liam Doyle, Siobhan O'Dowd, Ross O'Mullane, Frieda Gormely and Ewan Kelly star in a soap that friends and fiends alike will more than likely log into. As the stereotype goes, when students aren't in bed or partying, they are in college on the Internet watching others do the same.
One of the stipulations with No 54 is that there is at least one person in the house at any time - so viewers will have someone to watch. If viewers get bored with the 18to 23-year-old Trinity and DCU students, at least they know that there is more to the soap than the anchors. The creators of the project have a safety net in place: even if life inside the goldfish bowl gets dull and bland, friends, bands and DJ sets will make regular appearances to entertain the world from the No 54 sitting-room.
So far, viewers are not given the option of which of the 20 cameras they would like to use to spy on the occupants of No 54. In fact only four cameras are currently in place, with additional cameras being put in place over the next two months. Big Brother it is definitely not, but in the future visitors to the site may be able to vote on where the next camera will be installed, which could make for more interesting viewing altogether.
www.oxygen.ie/no54
