Thirty years ago today,
Star Wars was released. To celebrate, I headed over to The George Lucas Stage at Elstree Studios, to take part in the pilot recording of
Big Brother's Big Mouth.
My housemate, Kathleen, works as a runner on the show, so I got roped in at short notice to be in the audience. I turned up at Elstree Studios about quarter of an hour early, and so had to wait outside with other audience volunteers for a while. We eventually got shown into the BB 'Friends and Family' room, stocked to the gills with cheap lager and cheaper wine. We were shown a tape of last year's launch show, as that's what we'd be talking about in the show, because, obviously, this year's launch show hasn't happened yet.
Now, every single audience member was a fucking twat. It was as if they thought they were at an audition to be in the actual
Big Brother. You know how if you get more than one drama school graduate in the same room, they create a stupidly competitive atmosphere, with everyone trying to get noticed and trying to be the biggest character in the room? It was that, but with twenty of the fuckers. So I just sat drinking beer, inwardly sneering at all the attention-seeking cunts.
Then they wanted us to record vox-pops-type things, saying who we were, where we'd come from, and how excited we were about
Big Brother. Because of all the vacuous morons leaping at the chance, I was in the last batch. I witnessed a pair of Essex girls shrieking and wooping desperately at the camera, and felt nauseous at their stupid performance. As the penultimate vox-popper went up (with me as the last one), the director said, "oh, we still need someone to do the 'Chris Moyles Is A Cunt' thing". I immediately piped up, with "I'll do the 'Chris Moyles Is A Cunt' thing!". It turns out, Chris Moyles, who's presenting the first three shows of the series, had suggested a joke whereby the final vox-pop person would complain about coming all the way to the studio just to see Chris Moyles. So, when I was in front of camera, I said "Hi, I'm Ian, I've come all the way from Birmingham [a lie], I've had to take the day off work [a lie], and I've come all the way to the Big Brother house, just to sit in a studio with that Chris Moyles. He's *such* a fat motherfucker". During the show, they cut at 'mother', and it was rather funny. And all the more funny, because I actually *do* hate Chris Moyles!
During the show itself, surprisingly enough, all the loud, opinionated people from the green room transformed into shy, reserved people with nothing to say whatsoever. So, I excelled, as I'd planned to all along. I got Moyles's attention with a gag about Shahbaz waving like the Queen Mother. He came over to me and said, "ladies and gentlemen, special guest tonight, it's Brad Pitt!". Now, what I *should* have said in reply was "ah yes, you were one of the twelve monkeys", but this didn't occur to me until two hours later. What I *actually* did was just laugh and look sheepish. But in the second half of the show, during a discussion on the possibility of sex in the house, I made a joke about how you never see it going in anyway, which seemed to go down well with the sheep-like audience and crew.
So after the show, having made a good impression, I stuck around waiting for Kathleen to finish so I could get a lift home. As it happened, we ended up in the pub having several pints with several members of the production team. Hurrah! A rather enjoyable afternoon out, there.
In other news, my phone is fucked. It works every now and then, but at random intervals, which usually seem to occur when I'm in the middle of sending a text, the screen just goes white, and stays like that for about five minutes. I should be getting it sorted in the next couple of days, but in the meantime, sorry if I'm uncontactable at certain points. Like you care.
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