Behind the scenes at Big Brother eviction night

It’s a toss up as to which is the worst job in Big Brother: the poor camera-operators sitting in the dark and silence behind the Big Brother walls or the production assistants forced to log every excruciating detail of every conversation into a computer bank.

Either way I know I would much rather be Alex Mavroidakis (pictured), Executive Producer and ultimate puppet-master of the Nine reality series.

Visiting the Big Brother compound at Dreamworld is a surreal experience. The eviction stage backs onto production offices and the control room for the show, a few hundred metres up a hill from the BB house, which is fenced off and guarded. From the outside the house looks like a drab warehouse, but as I am escorted into the “camera runs” which are shrouded in black, I’m warned to whisper in hushed tones and never to peer close to the glass when I pull back the thick black drapes. It’s like something akin to a Ghost Train, although I can’t help but recall the UK zombie series Dead Set and I’m tempted to run amok.

I peek into a bedroom where housemates are grooming themselves endlessly in readiness for a big night. I’m told they haven’t been advised of an eviction but they have been counting the days, they know it’s coming. The half-way house Diary Room has an old tube telly in front of a chair. The front yard looks large and inviting. We pass unfortunate camera-operators sitting silent and alone in the dark watching housemates do nothing in particular -not an ideal way to spend a day of Queensland sunshine. Beautiful one day, black and isolating the next.  George Orwell would be proud.

The Control Room is like a small version of NASA, with a wall of screens and about 20 personnel. This place is literally manned 24/7. Big Brother appears to be in his early 30s and sits in a small office, but there are a handful of Deputy Big Brothers all of whom are authorised to speak and make decisions. There’s an audio censor monitoring the sound with only a 30 second buffer. I can’t help but notice amongst the tiny TV screens there are even cameras pointed at the toilet -it never airs but it’s under their watch all the same, to ensure there is no cheating.

There’s so much vision captured across the series from so many cameras that not all of it is kept. I’m not sure there’s enough hard drives on the Gold Coast to store it all. But all audio is kept for referencing.

I’m captivated by a couple of autopilot production assistants whose job it is to log every minute detail into a computer system for story producers to be able to extract plot points and story arcs, and for editors to quickly find vision amongst the plethora of output. As they type banal housemate movement into a computer I feel like monkeys at typewriters had it better than this (“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”). I truly hope they didn’t graduate from a media course for this.

“That’s the worst job in television,” admits Alex Mavroidakis.

Big Brother is a juggernaut. With a staff of 300 it requires all manner of personnel, but the upside is its training opportunities.

“The executive producer of The X Factor started here, the executive producer of MasterChef, and  the executive producer of My Kitchen Rules. Big Brother is a breeding ground for television and it’s terrific for Queensland,” he says.

‘It’s a good place for learning and we have a lot of entry level position here because there’s a lot of logging that needs to be done. It’s a relentless machine that never stops because unlike any other show that has a month for post (production) or a thousand EPs to make a thousand different decisions, once those housemates go in the house it never stops. It can’t stop. There isn’t time to screen and re-screen. There isn’t time to make executive decisions at boardroom level. It just keeps going and it never stops. But that’s why I love it so much.”

Mavroidakis, who is also the voice of Surly, has been with the show since 2002 (only Mike Goldman surpasses him as a BB original). He is a self-confessed BB addict and workaholic.

“I live in Currumbin which is an hour away but when BB is on I just can’t so Southern Star put me up in a place 10 minutes away and I never go any further than 10 minutes away from Dreamworld. Basically when the housemates sleep I sleep, and when they’re awake I’m awake.

“I am a fan. I’m a Big Brother purist. To me it’s the original and the best because it’s as raw and honest as reality TV can get. We genuinely do not ask them to say things twice when they fluff a line. We don’t ask them to stand three metres to the left if we can’t get a good shot. We don’t ask them to change their clothes if they look like shit in the morning.”

In the auditorium a crowd of 800 is kept entertained by Mike Goldman, whose banter includes plenty of questions on the show, a few prize giveaways, some ‘twerking’ and asking how many in the crowd voted (a show of hands seemed to be about 50 people at best). Reflective of the new audience, there were plenty of kids with ardent parents. Some anklebiters even had phones.

Sonia Kruger looked ravishing as a lady in red whose main role consisted of linking between footage and later interviewing the evictee, which turned out to be mum Sharon. Kruger’s eyesight must be nearly as good as her teeth, the autocue was located at the other end of the eviction ramp. In between hosting, she watched the footage on the big screen, possibly for the first time like the rest of us.

It has to be said the eviction show took far too long, with Sharon not evicted until 9:17pm leaving only two segments to talk to her on stage. Sharon seemed very together for an evicted housemate, with none of the shock-and-awe at the fan frenzy. I guess she knew what to expect, but it kind of dilutes the natural reaction.

Mavroidakis defended the lengthy show when I asked why so many episodes this year have been stretched to 90 minutes, presumably at the network’s request.

“There’s no question that the show would move faster if it was less than 90 minutes but the fact of the matter is that Nine want lots of Big Brother. It’s a robust format and the value it has to Nine, and that it had to TEN, was that it spits out content 24 hours a day,” he says.

“But I’m a purist I would love as much BB on television as possible. Nine love primetime that’s their major interest and that’s why they want 90 minutes from 7 til 8:30. And that’s fine by me. Nine took a major punt on the show and kudos to them for doing it. It paid off last year and I hope it’s going to pay off again this year and I hope we’re here again next year.

“I love the show and I love the fact there’s more BB in primetime.”

I also ask why BB has a preponderance of silly costumes and antics, seemingly over “ordinary” housemate storylines. Is this part of Nine’s plan to broaden the show to a family audience?

“We’ve tried to pull back on the silliness and the juvenile aspect this year. We did have to do a lot of it but as you’ve already identified when you have 90 minutes you have to produce the house.  You can’t just sit back and go ‘This cast is brilliant’ -and this cast is brilliant- but you can’t just sit back and hope for the best. When you have 8 segments to fill in a 24 hour period, the housemates if they have nothing to do will wake up, clean their teeth, swim in the pool, lounge around the pool all day and then they will go to bed. Then we don’t have a show,” he says.

“The best stuff about BB is always the natural conversations. It is never the tasks or missions. It’s never the nominations or evictions. The things people remember are Sarah-Marie, Fitzy, Marty & Jess, Chrissie, Reggie, Ben from last year. It’s the natural stuff that’s the gold.

“Of course if it happens we’ll show it. We’ll happily chuck out a task if we have an argument, a love story, raw human drama that we all love. We will chuck out the fun and games for that. But we cant just sit back (and hope)…”

This year’s ‘Twist’ of the divided house has been effective and sought to inject conflict. But as a viewer, I’m hoping I won’t have to watch that half-way house all season.

“That’s good because you won’t,” Mavroidakis insists.

‘I’m trying to ban the word ‘Twist’ from the office because I think we’ve heard too much of it.  I want to just get on with the series and fall into BB now. But of course that Twist has been done around the world. BB is a global format. But what has never been done is that you have complete access to each other. You can touch, feel and pass food. Human nature says when you divide two people you will get two tribes with rivalry. So that divide has absolutely worked for us to get into the characters.

“But are we going to leave it there for 12 weeks? Absolutely not. A lot of people are already wanting to see a united house and we’re not deaf.”

Also amongst other changes, Big Brother Showdown only has 2 more episodes, then makes way for NRL  finals and Mavroidakis teases that “for the next couple of Thursdays at least we will swap a nominee and open nominations.”

Other criticisms have been that evicted housemates never get enough screen time, with suggestions producers play favourites. Conspiracy theories abound, but it’s evidence of the passion for the format.

“I’ve been here for 9 years and I’ve heard about vote-rigging, producers playing favourites, people getting favourable edits and all how we portray them,” he defends.

“But the housemates go to bed at 1am, by 4:00 in the morning we have to have our first segments roughed out. By 11:00 in the morning we’re screening to the network. We don’t have time to sit there and say ‘Today we’ll make David look bad.’

“Here are the best bits of the day. Let’s make them make sense in the story arc. Bang.

“I’ve read this week that ‘We’ve hardly seen Sharon.’ But there are 17 housemates all screaming for attention and if Sharon isn’t talking what are we supposed to do?

“Our most hated housemate, and our most loved housemate, won the series last year. With Vote to Save, which is the best invention in the history of BB, our bigger characters that force a reaction will stay longer. If it was Vote to Evict we would have Tim in the press room now and Ben would have been the first evictee last year.”

This year Mavroidakis has even engaged in interviews with the Behind Big Brother website, which has such history on the series it is sometimes the show’s very own nemesis.

“It’s a nemesis because they love the show. I don’t disagree with a lot of the things they say. They’re fans of the show and they’re our lifeblood. I’ve always said to (Nine) that I believe we have 600,000 fans who will watch BB sitting on a spike in the middle of the Antarctic. They will watch the show come hell or high water. BB has some really hard-core fans unlike any other show because these people are real. But then we’ve got to pick up the rest.”

I ask about the Drew and Jade marriage “twist” (I maintain it was a task not a twist) and specifically about whether its conclusion saw the couple unfairly thrown under the bus by Mavroidakis. He concedes the point, with a disclaimer.

“Probably. But if we had said ‘Drew and Jade have passed the task’ then half the audience would have gone ‘Hang on a minute. You didn’t give the other housemates an opportunity to come to the Diary room! They didn’t know there was a task going?’

“I was as shocked as everyone when ten people put their hand up because we watch them 24/7. I absolutely knew Tahan would put her hand up and I suspected Xavier would. As soon as they stood up to go to the Diary room 10 other people followed them and I thought ‘Bloody hell.’

“You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t in this business and what I’ve learned is that I get 1000 tweets a day telling me I’m the best producer in the world and 1000 telling me I’m the second coming of Satan.

“There’s no other show I can think of that gives a network that much value and that much content. And decent content too. If the show was crap I’d be upset but the show has been terrific this year.”

 Big Brother airs weeknights on Nine.