Wow, Gretel, that was... I'm not sure how to describe it. "Pointless," is a word I'm envisioning the BB kiddies calling it (probably right now, on a forum somewhere near us all). But it wasn't pointless at all, truth be told. It was rather clever, in its intention. Doesn't mean it worked. But great idea. You came across as so... Human™.

That's what that was, wasn't it? It was you, being terribly, terribly Human™? You weren't there to give us any clues about what is about to (star)burst onto our screens, next Sunday. You were setting up the new consumer mentality whereby we forget your bullying of contestants who called your show on propaganda, forget that your supposed feminism is somewhat undermined by being queen of the white-trash, who tells us that misogyny is acceptable because it's a norm, and that boys who slap girls with their dicks are "fantastic housemates"? Before, you'd appointed yourself a throne - aggressively protecting the Machine™ you represent. You were the General of the cruel bootcamp. Now, you're... what's that word Rove was given to use? Oh, yes - "fairy godmother". Lest we forget you were anything else.

It is very important that the public find somebody on that show to align themselves with. If the public are going to turn on the Machine™, then the Machine™ knows very well that this is less likely to happen if the public can identify with part of that Machine™, foolishly thinking it has found a friend who is on their side. Now hear ye this, children of BB07: Gretel is on your side. The conceptual separation has been in place all week, and instead of the golden gatekeeper of Big Brother's secrets, she now plays dumb at every turn. When the OCD scandal broke, she declared she had no idea, because Big Brother - if we are to believe her - tells her nothing. Gretel did assure us in original press that she is personally involved in the process of selection (that was one technique to assure us we would receive a better bunch of lambs), but all this has changed. She's just an everyday woman, a Mother, who battles the terrible twists and turns of the show, just as we do. Except, worse - poor Gretel had to do it while her son was doing his HSC, and her daughter was sick. God bless her. How could you not trust a Mother with a studying son and a sick daughter, who soldiers on while she just tries to hold her job down and please her nasty boss, like everyone else?

It was all pre-scripted copy, of course - most of it hers, I'd hazard a guess to say - and initially, I found it all rather impressive (albeit, in a slightly dubious sort of way). This was a much smarter portrayal for what, we may presume (hope), is a much smarter show, and we can safely decipher that this will indeed present a very different tone to last year's OC meets Surivivor (remembering that this is still a manistream show driven by advertising deals, and we should in no way anticipate an anthropology documentary). She even tried to impress intellectual critics, by reminding us she understands post-modernism (why she ever so casually mentioned witing her son's essays on culturally analytic theory - the very theory Big Brother has often been analysed in relation to). Gretel used the P word! Good God, even I was almost seduced by it. 

 

Admittedly, it all took a rather bizarre turn. The terribly Human™- slash - Mother™ - slash - Worker™ monologues were great - but from there it spiraled, at frightening speed, into something even my machine gun typing had trouble keeping up with. I felt as if I was back in psychotherapy, and I had a client lying on the couch in the throws of free-association. The sympathetic characterisation inevitably led to a moment where Gretel, drained by the ordeal of her children and her demanding job, could no longer remember that keys start cars. This got the giggle it was intended to (let's not ask too much of a Rove audience), but before we knew it, Gretel had two dead spirit guides, called Bob and Wendy, who had "just come to say hello." Don't ask me how we arrived, there - I don't know. One minute she was calling the NRMA; the next minute, she had spirits dropping in to say hello. Your guess is as good as mine.

What I soon realised was happening here was largely a case of too much in too little time, with a performance scripted around mini narratives - each designed with a specific image of her that we were supposed to walk away with, Miss Killeen suddenly a three-dimensional, terribly Human™, persona. It certainly didn't warrant being called an "interview"; Rove asked one question, and from there, off she went, at a thousand mile an hour. But the transition between these anecdotes had been badly fleshed out, or at very least, Gretel became a tad derailed and lost her nerve. In this case, you are likely to stick with what you've rehearsed in your mind, but you're going to end up thumbling over how we get from one point to another. Have you ever been to a job interview where you ended up not being quite on the ball? You've got those little pre-rehearsed monologues, aspects you know you have got to put forward - but somewhere along the way, you start to come unstuck, and you're left pushing out the points as pre-rehearsed in the mind, but with no natural ability to provide any sense of flow between them. You'll also tend to speed up in speech. Gretel seemed to increasingly put her foot on the acceleration pedal, the longer her strange tour de force went on. Let's break the remaining points down, and just ignore how one led to the next.

1. Amusing anecdote about a stranger on the street who apparently offered her a deal, charging her $700 for him to attend events with her, because she's single and suffers such a hard life of attending function after function (oh, the poor little celebrity - what difficult lives they lead). Gretel isn't some mightier-than-thou star, heavens no. She's got losers in the street charging her for their company.

2. Gretel goes to the outback and realises that donkeys are loud. Now, this was supposed to be an endearing comedy piece, where Gretel amuses us by telling us about... well... how loud donkeys are. Did you realise that donkeys make loud noises? Aren't you glad you know? But it fails, and we glimpse a bizarre clue as to how unstuck this is all becoming, when the impersonation this bizarre tale is heading towards falls flat when Gretel chickens out, and won't finish off her punchline. Even Rove egged her on for that loud donkey impersonation - and granted, she knew she was expected to. She ushered towards it, but cowered, at one point even sheepishly covering her face with her hands and declaring she would only do it without her face being visible. But she didn't. She turned to the audience and asked anyone who would be kind enough, to help her out. Surprisingly enough, nobody in the crowd had a loud donkey impersonation off the top of their head. I could be cynical, and say that she was simply portraying a very Human™ quality of shyness, but I actually don't think this was the case. Shit, Gretel, better just move it right along to the next story...

3. Gretel travels to Italy and New York (this is what everyday Mothers do, of course), and while in one of these countries (I'm presuming it's Italy, but this was the point where she really started to lose me), she meets a cab driver who can't speak English. The point of this? Well, it all leads to another amusing punchline based around an impersonation - this time, of the linguistically challenged cab driver. She does actually do this one - but so fevered has her story become, drowning us along with herself, it's all over before I can absorb it (I was somewhere in the dust left behind from the last one), and I can't even tell you what the punchline was. Something about his feet?? Fucked if I know. I'd let go of the handrail, to be honest.

And that was that. Let's all breathe, and return to planet Earth, shall we? Where was Bob and Wendy when she needed them?

And what about the reason the country presumed she was going on the show? You know... that TV show she hosts, that starts next Sunday? Are we going to get anything?

No. And we never were, of course. Apparently, the housemates haven't been taken into lock-down, yet, and don't even know they're going on the show (and this is why we were told nothing... you know, as opposed to this appearance actually being about creating a dynamic between Killeen and the audience that would begin to facilitate the show's redemption with those who have turned away from it). Apparently, due to the housemates still roaming the streets in their final moments of obscurity, this means if they give anything away, it could spoil the proceedings. Which not only leads one to wonder why Kris Noble was saying anything at all at a press conference, but to presume there is an obsessive cleaner, somewhere out there, presuming they're about to find themselves in the Big Brother compound.

At this point, I presumed the trainwreck had finally come to a rest. Except, Rove had one more stint - a test run of this year's BB evicted housemate motif, "20 questions for $20". So shattered was the timing of this segment (thanks to Gretel squeezing far too many anecdotes into her five minutes), we were introduced to this new game without a single explanation as to how it worked, and hence, no hope to even begin to understand it. Perhaps, we may then excuse Gretel for simply not comprehending what it was she was supposed to do (blatantly ignoring that, naturally, she would have been told, beforehand), but spontaneity (or perhaps, just an inability to stay on track) would seem to explain why, half way through, the question, "Who was your first kiss?" sent her off on another tangent - something about a guy called Richard, and a garden hose. Even Rove - considering the one thing that was at least clear about this exercise was that it was a ticking clock scenario - seemed bemused, and unable to get his head around... well... whatever it was Gretel Killeen was doing. Being Human™, I suppose. But somewhere along the way of being terribly, terribly Human™, it had gone terribly, terribly wrong.

The irony was, I felt sorry for her. I do feel sorry for her, still. Which is terribly frustrating, because that was one of the goals of this contrived piece of television! Except, of course, I felt sorry for her, for entirely different reasons than I was supposed to. I don't feel sorry for her because men offer to charge her for their company, or because she finds the show so traumatic she can't remember to put keys in the ignition of her car (not that this particular anecdote had a semblance of truth to it - but reality, for authors, is a flexible matter). I felt sorry for her, because I think what we were witnessing is a woman who very much would like to be herself, if she could only be free to do so - perhaps, if she knew who that even is, anymore. For all her Humanity™, she easily delivered her blatant PR expectations, without fluttering an eyelid. When Rove asked her, "If you weren't on the show, would you watch it?" her predictable PR answer, "Yes! Of course!" seemed, ironically, far more natural than any of her Humanity™. So I'm not getting carried away, here; Gretel Killeen - as far as who she "is" for the purpose of this bizarre show we are all about to engage (as a rather well-paid cog in the Machine™) is no less a designed illusion than any other aspect of the show. And we were witnessing an illusion, here, tonight. But it was fatally undermined, I'd suggest, by the reality beneath it. I wondered if that reality was suffocating, somewhere in there, left only to express itself as an affectation of truth that was at least more indicative than the persona we are use to. I'm sure part of her, dealing with the responsibility of being the face of that show in its most turbulent year (and dealing with her children) was indeed "traumatised", in private little moments; but if only she could express that without it being delivered in a ridiculous characterisation of herself that was, all shadows of her truth aside, still designed to appease the new direction of the Machine™. I wonder if the memory of Richard carried her away because she was badly delivering another hard-sell, or if some part of Gretel Killeen couldn't resist the memory of someone very different to the woman who now sat there, beneath those burning studio lights. I felt sorry for her, because underneath the contrived, there is no doubt an intelligent woman who actually sincerely battles the part of her that was just a single mother who tried to get a career for herself, and in the process, sold her soul. She ended up in a world so ridiculous, so utterly unreal, that even a portrayal of her reality has become just that - a portrayal. Is she a postmodern triumph, or an existential nightmare? Beware the Self who sells the Self to be the Self™ that others want us to be.

There's no business like showbusiness. Isn't that right, Miss Killeen?

 

coming soon: eyeonbigbrother