Seven Days with Silly Goons

A large hole has been left in Channel 4’s broadcast schedule since the demise of Big Brother.  To replace this, or rather to keep the Big brother audience Channel 4 have opted for the fairly obvious replacement of another interactive, reality based show.  This new show, “Seven Days”, is in most ways the complete opposite of the ideas which made up Big Brother.  Where BB was held completely in a purpose built house, Seven Days is filmed entirely in the “real world”; Instead of Big Brother style evictions, the cast of 7D are in it for the long haul, potentially forever, as Channel 4 ominously put it.  The show’s characters are still handpicked but instead of casting entirely on causing conflict as they were in BB, 7D’s cast seem to have been selected for their almost painstaking normality and therein lies one of the main problems.

            The premise of the show is that a number of people are filmed over the course of seven days and on the seventh the show is edited and broadcast.  The interactive element comes from viewers sharing their feelings via Channel 4’s “chat-nav” website (hopefully they also chat-navved the person who created this term right out the door by means of a toe up their arse), through twitter, facebook and all other associated cool social media outlets.  This means that the people on the show can see how much everyone hates them as the show airs, and cameras will be there to catch their reactions for the next episode.

            Channel 4 are obviously working on the assumption that underneath the general public’s celebrity obsessed veneer, people are just straight up nosy and love nothing more than voyeurism.  Big Brother showed that we don’t care whether someone is a celebrity or not, only that we can heap scorn upon and deride complete strangers from the comfort of our own sofa.  With this knowledge, Channel 4 have decided to give us a window into the dull lives of middle class Londoners living and working in Notting Hill, hoping that we find this entertaining because it gives us someone to fixate our all consuming hate on anonymously.

            People will always want what they can’t or don’t have under the illusion that the grass is greener.  It’s our nature and what drives us forward.  Thanks to Seven Days though, those who earn less than £20,000 and/or don’t live in London can see how much duller their lives are compared to our own.  This show is hate-gossip for the 21st century slob who can’t even be bothered to meet real people to moan about.  Or if you prefer not to be as cynical as me, it gives world weary gossipers who have grown tired of using their noses to poke in the affairs of their workmates and neighbours a brand new opportunity to be nosy about “real” people with whom they would have had no chance of meeting before.  Fantastic!

            Thanks to Seven Days, not only do we get to see spoilt middle class girls moan about having to work as models, hopefully we can also see these same girls break down – almost live – thanks to the interactivity and immediacy of the social media element of the show.  The self absorbed 26 year old whose only concern in life is that mummy is leaving her in charge of an interior design business will most likely be seen in the next episode having a temper tantrum and snorting cocaine in mummy’s bathroom, tears streaming down her expensive cheeks if the bile on twitter under the hastag #sevendays is anything to go by.  Go on, stop reading this and read how much twitter almost unanimously hates this show and its cast already.  Seven Days is going to be a roaring success.

(If you got the Jamiroquai reference in the title, award yourself 10 points)