If RT╔ bosses are serious about competing in the reality-TV stakes, I have a suggestion for them. First, they should scrap Treasure Island (this could be done by accidentally screening the final programme in the series out of turn, but hey, I'm not trying to teach Montrose management to suck eggs) and concentrate on the Big Brother format instead. And here's the clever bit: they should turn BB into a European competition.
The way I see it, Big Brother is the new Eurovision Song Contest. It's camp and Ireland is proving very good at it, to mention just two of the scarier similarities. But more generally, it shares all the traditional values of the Eurovision: from the awful triteness on the one hand, to the sheer mind-numbing banality that makes you despair about popular culture on the other.
Also, and this is crucial, both competitions culminate in a voting process which exercises an appalling fascination even on viewers who've managed to ignore the programme until then. Indeed, only for the fact that the British don't consider Ireland foreign, the Channel 4 people would surely have spotted the international potential of BB - which they imported from the continent, after all - already. So we need to act fast, before they cop on.
In my plan, the series would start with 15 people in the house, one from each of the EU member states. There is a potential difficulty in that all the competitors could be speaking different languages. But given the standard of conversation in the Channel 4 series, this would not be a major problem. We could also string it out a bit by having extra housemates - from the applicant countries, obviously - ready to join after the first evictions; although maybe each of the original members would have a veto over enlargement.
Once the basic arrangement is in place, the dynamics of human interaction would take over. There would be the usual sex angles, for example, but as with everything else in the house, these would have an international flavour. Would France and Germany "do it" before the series ends? Would Greece and Italy advance the cause of European union live on camera? Would the Benelux countries scandalise viewers with a three-in-a-jacuzzi love romp? There would be tensions in the kitchen, of course - probably a Franco-Italian struggle for supremacy. And control of the household budget would be a big issue too. You can imagine the English tabloids in a frenzy over the prospect of the British housemate surrendering fiscal control to a German-dominated central bank.
And this is the whole point. We would sell the programme all across Europe. And then, by extending voting rights to the participating states, we'd make a killing on premium-rate phone-calls (I hope the RT╔ bosses don't mind me using the term "we" here: let's not forget whose idea this is, after all). If we played our cards right, we could revive the fortunes of Eircom in the process; but only after getting a stake in the company, naturally.
The weekly votes would transfix the Continent. Obviously, the housemates themselves would make the initial nominations. Then the phone-lines would be opened to the public. And every Friday night, the presenter would call on Paris, Athens, Stockholm, etc, to announce their national votes in colourful local accents. We could work on a way to get the phrase "douze points" into this somewhere.
Realistically, the personal idiosyncrasies of the participants would influence many of the evictions. After the first week, the housemates might decide unanimously that they simply couldn't listen to another of Wolfgang's Bavarian drinking songs; or that, loveable as Heidi from Austria was, her constant yodelling was inhibiting the chickens from laying.
But hopefully, from a ratings point of view, we would gradually tap into the centuries-old grudges in which Europe is so rich, so that evictions would become diplomatic incidents. There are risks in this, of course. Personally, I would be reluctant to include the Balkan countries, at least in the first series.
Properly done, the show would be at the cutting edge of mindless entertainment. But if necessary (we have to think of the next licence fee increase), it could be sold on an educational angle. If we were running by the autumn, the show would dovetail perfectly with the Government's forum on Europe. And merely by mimicking the Channel 4 series, in which the contestants receive bossy and sometimes irrational directives from a distant Big Brother, it could provoke debate about the way the European Commission operates.
In order to get the co-operation of other European countries, we'd probably have to spread the competition around, allowing each year's winners to host the following year. But this is not a problem, because it's obvious that Ireland would win it with monotonous regularity. Anyway, RT╔ bosses, that's my idea. I'm at the end of a phone, if anyone's interested.
fmcnally@irish-times.ie
