Lady in red, what have you said?

Childe Samantha to the BB final came.

A gum-chewing gamine in a red dress, asked by Davina, Sam had her chance in front of C4's millions to say what she had been doing since leaving the Big Brother house, and she said: "lots of modelling and getting men on a p*rn site."

Take a moment to leap to whatever conclusion those words suggest.

Many landed with the thought that Sam was appearing on the site herself, though the truth is very different. Even the "p*rn" part is questionable. Fortunately, everything else she's said about it has been clearer.

Sam wants to create a magazine for women that would would feature "naked men". She'd researched it as a student and thought the "new ladette" culture meant there was a gap in the market. She also describes it as like a lad's mag such as FHM, so perhaps the men wouldn't quite be naked after all. The website is a related idea, perhaps just an easier to produce version.

None of that would be clear to most of C4's viewers, unless she made it clear, so why say something so cryptic to the largest audience she's ever likely to get?

So far (early September), Sam's website is still the barest sketch of an idea, a single page of what appears to be hand-crafted HTML. Whether she will ever develop her idea beyond that remains unclear.

The soundtrack of this site: Holly Beth Vincent

You better tell that girl to shut up
Tell that girl I'm gonna beat her up
You better tell that girl, tell that girl, tell that girrrl.

Holly Beth Vincent's "Tell that girl to shut up" doesn't quite fit Sam's situation, but we're all postmodern quotists now, and any excuse will do for a good song.

Holly Beth Vincent, vocals, guitar, and songwriter for Holly and the Italians is one of the great power pop "might have been"s of the 80s. She could write, play, and sing to match the best, but by the time the Italians' album, The Right to be Italian, was released the right moment had passed, and the timing, plus the band's name, made them seem manufactured to those who didn't pay close attention to the credits.

Her subsequent solo album, confusingly entitled Holly and the Italians, is a work of genre-transcending brilliance, and Holly does virtually everything on it. Mandolins and trumpets join rock instruments in a melancholy wall of sound.

Both records have been re-released on CD. (Buy them now!)

(Martha and the Marbles are supposedly the closest present-day equivalent, but I remain to be convinced.)

Listen

Help Heat: be too thin

The Monday, August 15, 2005 Media Guardian's Media Monkey column has noticed Heat's obsessional too-skinny themette:

Followers of Heat magazine may be feeling a little confused. The Emap title, which began life as an entertainment bible before switching its focus to celebrity shagging, now appears to have morphed into a groovy edition of Weight Watchers. Barely a week goes by without it obsessing about the weight of one celebrity or another .... Perhaps the answer might be that when they put "skinny" on the front cover, sales leapfrog over the 600,000 mark.

So think again, skinny celebs. Do you want to help these people who are exploiting you?

Questions: Why do celebs (and it seems to be women in particular) get so thin? A slender, toned body looks better, and healthier, so why go further? And what does Heat think it's doing here (apart from making money), especially since it's also fond of celeb "new look", "how I lost weight" articles?

They'd tell our girl to shut up

Sam's enemies. They deserve only a minor role in themselves, on this site; but they can sometimes stand for something larger. They are:

• Other housemates: the Bedroom B******, the Dark Deceiver, TLT, Team Smug;
  
• Big Brother in its many branches, including Big Brother's Little Brother guests such as:
  
• Polly Hudson, sarcastic "Pollymeter" Big Brother columnist for the Mirror and writer at large for:
  
• Heat magazine. (It's an anagram of "hate", you know.)

BTW, does Heat still have its Big Brother helpline:

Heat's Big Brother helpline was a huge success this year again with top counsellor Phillip Hodson being inundated with calls. ... Five of the callers were actually crying and were so distressed they couldn't speak clearly. ... Most callers were normal viewers who had just got sucked into Big Brother, watching it on the internet and E4 for large parts of the day, and who now felt at a loss.

Phillip says, "I told them that even though it's only a television programme, it's about real people. The feelings you have are real. You have invested a large amount of time in these people and have interacted and bonded with them. It's completely natural to feel attached to them and therefore experience a sense of loss when they are gone." ...

Source: Heat Magazine, 30 July 2001

Real people weren't being real enough

I was just watching Lost Revealed, and that remark, from John Harlow of The Sunday Times, struck me as something to bear in mind when reflecting on Big Brother. Lost was being compared to Survivor, and a woman was shown saying the characters in Lost had started to seem more real to her than the ones in the reality show. Then: "real people weren't being real enough."

That could be right. Big Brother housemates can be boring, repetitive, or one-dimensional in ways that fictional characters would never be allowed to be, and that real life doesn't seem to be either. Perhaps television filters out so much that only the hightened reality of fiction, and acting, can get through without too much loss.

Or perhaps we're just so used to fiction on tv - to the narrative speed and to the intensity and significance of each scene - that real life in real time seems stretched out and slow.

Somewhere in between we'd find the highlights shows constructed by editing the events of the day before. (Cue huge debate about the aims and effects of editing in Big Brother? Not yet.)

She told that girl to shut up

Sweet Sam, s=xy Sam, sad, tearful Sam: Sam Heuston --- enigmatic, quirky, a bikini-loving beauty with an expressive face. She's been called "the shining light in a dark, dark TV show" and "a geometric, revolving world of shadow and light". She's been thought to be everything "from snidey b****, to s=x-mad maniac, to twitching nutcase, to giggly airhead, to sweet, generous girl, to strong, opinionated young woman." (I thank various posters to internet forums for those kind and unkind words.)

For her first two weeks in Big Brother 6, Samantha Heuston was best known for wearing bikinis in all weather, for oddly-timed, sometimes derisive laughter, for sitting in thought "while expressions passed over her face like cloud shadows on a summer day", for quick (but quickly fading) smiles, and for saying "shut up" and "f off" to her tormenters.

In her eviction interview, she called that her "'shut up' phase", and that was the inspiration for this blog.

I'll use it to post news about Sam, comments on Big Brother, and - why stop there? - my reactions to Britain's celebrity obsession and its distrust of beauty, to media bias and spin, to the hates of Heat, and to anything else that makes me want to enter a "shut up" phase of my own.