Because let’s face it, this year’s been a bit of a mess hasn’t it? This year’s housemates have basically been extras to all the older housemates that have come in. Still I said Joel or Nick would win at the beginning of the series and that’s looking quite good, so.
So if it’s entertainment BB wants then surely it’s time to incentivize it properly:
- All weeks are vote to save.
- Housemates have an individual prize fund starting at £25k (for example), but they earn 20p (say) for each vote they receive across the series. This shouldn’t be too hard, Endemol would get to keep the revenue from all the losers.
- They get fined £500 every time they use the phrase “up for nomination.” A siren will go off when this happens.
- The winner gets to take their bank home with an exciting Pointless tower-esque graphic before the fireworks go off.
- And bring back the shopping list.
So you can bland your way through the series and go home with the minimum, or risk getting nominated and being fun and winning something lifechanging.
Call it Big Brother: Stake Holder, get Emma and Rylan in power suits, 20 million viewers.
CHEQUE PLEASE.
That’s brilliant! Interestingly means that you have to be up for eviction to increase your prize fund! No risk, no reward!
Utter genius, Brig!
It will of course mean a lot more playing up to the cameras and gameplaying, but this is basically the mainstay of scripted reality anyway, and if that’s the direction the show feels it has to go in to remain relevant then you might as well do it in such a way that it still feels like Big Brother.
The show’s got little to lose, you might as well just go for it now.
Love the idea, especially the up for nomination bit, but even just switching to “Vote to Save” would go a hell of a long way. VTE knocks out big characters whereas VTS supports them.
Did BBUK ever have a combination of Vote To Save and Vote To Evvict?
In Germany every housemate had 2 phone numbers with one being VTS (in Germany “Haus”) and one being VTE (in Germany “Raus”). So you were able to vote for every one in every possible way and the graphics were nice. I really liked it and that would raise the prize fund a bit more in Brig’s Brother. An idea I would totally support, it seems really great!
The idea has been tossed around on Big Brother forums, and the general consensus is the producers wouldn’t do it because it would confuse the general public. Would be great though, as currently, “supporting” a Housemate doesn’t really happen, because you can only vote to evict.
They did it in Australia and it didn’t really feel very transparent and I didn’t really understand it.
The object is not to raise the prizemoney per se, it’s to encourage the housemates not to be boring.
As I understand it, the Australian format was that each vote to save cancelled out a vote to evict the same player, and only the remaining votes were used to calculate the percentages. Not that the host was ever able to explain it adequately. (Australia also had a season where there was no prize and players had to earn money by passing tasks, which would work pretty well if the tasks were well designed.)
I don’t think save votes work, actually – in a two-way vote there’s no difference at all, but as BB Australia shows, a three-way vote will typically result in two popular people splitting the vote and the bland hot guy scraping through on votes from teen girls (and/or Wales et al) until Sam Evans wins anyway. The bigger problem is the constant twists that seem intent on keeping certain producer favourites around so they don’t have to develop storylines when they could just spend another six days commenting on how Perez Hilton is dry-humping a window again.
Yes, every positive vote cancels out a vote to evict. The German BB has always been showing graphics with the percentages the (e.g. five) housemates had. For example (save/evict):
23%/77%
25%/75%
36%/64%
56%/44%
60%/40%
But you didn’t know who had which percentages. With the second look at the votes they’d say something like “The three hms with the most votes to save stay”, but they would reveal whose percentages were whose. If the two who were still able to be evicted were close enough, they would even reveal their results. If it was already clear who would be voted out at that point, they would normally not show their exact percentages, because when they have shown it in the past, the evictee was voted out too clearly.
I’m still quiet into that system, maybe I can find you an excerpt from our old live eviction shows, because they were very different from yours generally.
Requiring a degree in maths to understand it will not fly here, and I note this isn’t a system that lasted long in Australia also.
I’d so something close to it- say the prize fund is £150K (with no messing around with it with twists), and the final vote is between 5 HM’s.
-The final 5 get whatever their final vote % is times £1000- they go to say two decimal places. So if the 5th place person got 6.75%, they’d get £6,750.
-The person who got the most votes gets an extra £50,000 as a bonus.
Oh no I don’t like that, you’ll have a winner in the final then… another winner? Who in theory wasn’t there at all?
The problem is that it would favour loud aggressive wind-up merchants and perpetuate the view if you’re not deliberately aggravating the housemates (“bantz”) you are BORING and don’t deserve to be there.
Ever since Gina & Dexter, C5 seem have been much more aggressively focusing each series around 1-2 tentpole stirrers and doing whatever production manipulation they need to keep them around at the expensive of organic house dynamics (Helen’s finale pass, Perez’s secret room, Marc being immune for an entire month for basically no reason).
I do like the idea of “more risk = more reward” though; it’s one thing I liked about The Genius, with the Death Match winner getting the losers garnets.
I don’t think money would really motivate housemates to be more entertaining as a) very few people can “perform” 24/7 b) most of them probably think they are much more fun than they are c) the edit can easily just ignore certain people
Who wants to watch loads of boring people?
What is Big Brother *for* these days?