Promos Ramping Up

At last the TV promos have gone up a notch and now introduce the new hosts Kyle and Jackie O, and what seems to be the theme of the promos for 08, "I Don't Think So". The ad is set to the Kelis track of the same name.

The full 30 second ad airing on Channel 10 now also includes the phrases:

• New Hosts. Same Show? I Don't Think So!
• New Attitude
• Dynamic Housemates
• An X-tra Cheeky Show "Big Mouth"
• Seen It All Before? I Don't Think So!

We'll come back to some of those phrases after Week 1 and see if they were right!

FNL Tickets on Sale to Public This Year

BB has come to his senses and will sell tickets to be in the live audience for FNL this year.

Previously the audience for this show and Monday's Nominations shows have been limited to about 100 invited guests. From what I've heard they were friends and family of Dreamworld employees and BB cast and crew, and all tickets were allocated at the beginning of the series.

This year fans will be able to buy tickets from the Dreamworld website. This has previously only been done for the final FNL of the year, and tickets went for $15 in 2006, and I think about $20-25 in 2007. Hopefully tickets will remain in the affordable category this year, and plenty are made available.

I will defintiely be making this part of the agenda for whatever weekend I manage to get up there this year for an Eviction show.

Calendar Added

Today I have added a calendar that will appear at the top of my blog and let you know what's going on in the world of Big Brother.
The calendar currently has 3 event groups:

• Blue events are TV episodes: Daily Show, Big Mouth, FNL, Evictions, and all specials, including promotional appearances by hosts and HMs.
• Red events are things that are happening inside the BB House.
• Green events are things going on outside the house.

I hope this keeps you up to date with what is happening and you don't miss a beat.

Promos to Begin Tonight?

It is speculated that tonight will be the launch of the BB08 TV ads. With probably 3, or possibly 4 weeks until the series launch, it is really about time.

How much will they give away this year? Will we start with teasers and work our way up? Will they announce the start date? Will they show glimpses of housemates and the house?

I remember back in early 2001 I went to Dreamworld for the first time. It was early in the year and the park was filled with banners with the BB eye and the words "BIG BROTHER IS COMING". At that time I had absolutely no idea what Big Brother was, or could be. But this was my first exposure to the BB teaser ads.

Since then we have seen pre-season promos:

• Announcing BB rumours (03),
• "What's the secret?" (04),
• Gretel interrogating BB "Assume Nothing. Expect Anything" (05)
• Birds, bees, rainbows, and world firsts (06)
• "What Big Brother Promises He Delivers" (07)

This year, the angle will likely be the changes to the series. I'd love to see ads featuring ALL the show's hosts. A Kyle and Jackie ad, a Mike, Bree & Ryan ad, a Tony & Rebecca ad, and a Paul & Tim ad. Make them all different to appeal to different groups, with a common look or thread.

Hopefully they will do away with the Channel 10 look and feel of 2-colour words-on-background flashing kind of promos. They need to come across as more mature than that.

How unfortunate that I will have to watch TBL tonight just for the ads!

Series Shaping Up

Based on the latest info out of Channel 10's own mouth, it looks like the series will be made up of:

• Sunday Night Eviction/Nominations show in one hosted by Kyle and Jackie O.
• Sunday-Friday Daily Show at 7pm.
• A possibly-weeknightly talk show "Big Mouth" with Tony Squires, Rebecca Wilson, Tim Brunero, and Paul Dyer, containing "Uncut-style" (MA) material.
• Friday Night Live with Mike, Bree and Ryan.

Seems a bit light on content given that last year we had 2 hours of live streaming every night plus separate Eviction and Noms shows. The return of an adult-oriented series sounds great though, and will hopefully introduce a whole new audience to the show.

More ex-HMs on the show will be great too, because who can better tell us what the new lot must be thinking. Tim and Paul will add very different views as well.

But where is Mike Goldman through all of this? Hosting FNL, and probably doing voiceovers on the Daily Show. But that's a bit of workload off him this year. Maybe he will become a regular panelist on BM, though that doesn't really cater to his excellent hosting ability.

Let's just hope Ten delivers the promised HD-exclusive content and puts at least a nightly block of uncensored live streaming on Channel 1.

How It Should Be: Launch Show

The BB Launch Show has come under fire for the last few years for not being live. Last year fans streamed audio and text messages from the audience of the show the night before being broadcast, causing producers to stop taping the show. Will this change this year? Does it really matter?

Sure, the live atmosphere makes it more interesting because you know you are meeting the housemates as everyone else does. However you lose the ability to then show clips of the first night in the house after the housemate introductions.

Plus we are fairly certain now the launch will be broadcast, whether live or not, on the Monday night after the SYTYCDA finale the previous night. How will this affect the ratings after so many Sunday night launch shows?

But here's an idea for the producers to use. Why not pre-record the show during the day on Monday? Show the live stream of the taping on the official website so fans who have paid for premium content can watch it live, and this will even prompt more fans to pay for the live feed. They're not exposing themselves to information being leaked in the press overnight because the show will be aired only hours later. The cut down version of the show from earlier in the day is shown on TV from 7:00pm. AND, between the housemates entering the house and the time of the broadcast, BB has asked the HMs to get into some "getting to know you" activities: a BBQ, some drinks, etc. So from say 8:30pm an edited down and censored version of this stuff is played to the TV audience as "Day 1's Daily Show".

Anyway, what should the Launch Show contain? Well, we need to go back to the hosts taking us through the House for the first time. Not the steadicam man running around. It's OK to pre-record this like Gretel and Tim Ferguson did in BB03, but with 2 hosts now, plus Mike Goldman available, why not do it "live". And there's no need to run around so we barely get to see anything. Maybe show us the house room by room throughout the show.

Also, I'm a fan of the awkward house entry where HMs meet each other one by one as they go into a holding room. But we have seen this for the last few years. BB07 tried a different approach with the all girls, then all guys, and watching each other's entrances. But maybe for something different we could have all the HMs meet each other and enter the house at the same time, like back in BB02. This also saves on meeting a HM, then watching the previous HM enter the holding room, then repeat over and over.

I like the HM introduction method they use, with the pre-recorded clip, followed by an interview with the host(s).

Finally, where should they stage this? A stage built outside the house has been done before but exposes them to the elements and it will surely rain if they do this. If they are rebuilding the stage in the amphitheatre from scratch and want to show it off as part of their fresh new look, then why not just stick to using the amphitheatre! It has a lot more audience capacity and facilities.

How It Should Be: The Website

I'll start the What Should Be series with "The Website". Maybe it sounds like a strange place to start, but with a series like BB, the website is almost more important than the TV episodes. The series runs 24 hours a day, and the website provides a real-time portal to the latest information, so it has to be usable.

A lot of people have seen the leaked pictures of the website in development. What we see there is a fairly chunky website-- everything looks kind of big. Having built a lot of financial/banking-style websites myself, I am more used to a site that crams a lot into a small space. As screen resolution gets better, this is not as important though. The site definitely looks clean. The site for the last few years has been dark and drab, with terrible colour choices of greys mixed with a rainbow of menu options-- purple, red, yellow, orange. The new blue and white site is very refreshing.

We can also see, even from the development site, that one of their primary focuses is to find space for huge advertisements before they find a space for content. I understand that advertising revenue is important to the producers. Our BB series are structured around product placements. But the stand-in ads on the development site take up way too much screen space. A third of the page width is taken up by KFC ads. Hopefully these eyesores will be kept to a minimum so they don't take away from the site's usability.

The other thing that needs to be considered is a tie between the look and feel of the site, and the look and feel of the series. BB03 probably did this best with the little "sprite" characters, as they were used around the website and in the titles and logos of the series. BB05-07 tried to match the look of the show by making elements of the site resemble the "boxes" used in the logo and titles, but it didn't pay off. This year's site needs to use elements of what we see on TV to tie the two together.

As for content, I am hoping to see better housemate profiles. I don't want to know what their astrological profile says. I want to know more about the person's outside (and inside) life. The profile never has information like occupation, what their family life is like (are their parents together, separated, do they have siblings, how old, what are ther names, step-siblings?, do they have a husband/wife/partner/kids of their own?-- all important things to know as we watch the series). The diary entries were good and frequent last year, and hopefully this year's site keeps that up. The amount of free content doesn't bother me so much because I will pay for premium content no matter what. Hopefully for casual users' sake, and the general interest in the series by new viewers, plenty of free content is provided, just to keep interest up. I'll cover premium content in a later post.