To be fair, it's only a minor buzz that currently exists, and my own clash came in what is really only (until the show starts, at least) a handful, within a small pond of die-hard followers - important to remember, when considering this online audition promotion, and the publicity it has managed to generate. Ultimately, some of the most viewed videos in the top 100 have racked up only 6000 or so votes. That's not many, in the greater scheme of things. In the end, I found myself in a discussion about the discussion (how postmodern!). But are we that bored that the BB die-hard clan (and, more to the point, those who are responsible for the alternative BB bedroom media), who basically never leave the show, are left to discuss the technicalities of the format for the discussion, itself? Are we reduced to the ever-present egocentricity of the wonderfully vile world of Big Brother, and those it offers significance to, attaching itself to basically anything that gives an outlet to that egocentricity? Apparently. I mean, who the hell does Aaron Darc think he is?! And what is he trying to do? Get seen? Because there's an awful lot of people, in the land of Big Bother, trying to be seen. That's what makes it so brutal.

Somewhere, in all this, are a few thousand hopefuls who'd like very much to be seen, as they scramble for our attention on the 2008 official online audition website. They're sticking out their breasts, their pulling their most adorable smiles (the one Mummy has told them is so adorable, all their lives - it must be, then), they're being wacky, and funny, and yes, some of them are just being plain desperate. To seriously consider them is to devote way too much time than is healthy for anyone to surrender to such endeavours, but for the past two weeks, I've surfed my way through an awful lot of wasted screen-time, to come away feeling like I have a valid impression of just who is trying to get themselves in that spotlight that has burnt so many, left dozens more empty, and benefited all but a few. Let's face it; if there was any reason to watch, it was for this most telling portrait of the wanna-BB's of this eight year series. I'm not sure what it told, exactly, that we didn't already know - not much. And sadly, what was worse was the realisation that we could be in for another fairly drab crew. Dreams of what Big Brother "could be" aside, the show is a product of what is behind it (no reconstruction - through superficial marketing, or otherwise - can really change that, completely). Yada, yada, yada - I believe you know the rest of this particular point of mine.

So, let's get the obvious out of the way. Yes, there are literally hundreds of Pretty People™, as phone sex companies save their pennies for advertising slots. The cute, early to mid twenties boys became a tiresome blur. There's a kind of tragedy to the young women vying for the equivalent spots; but the boys, oh so tellingly, possess that male, youthful, Aussie arrogance that compliments the tanned skin, cute grin and biceps, ever so painfully. Oh, and don't forget the cheesy dialogue. Joel , 23, begins his video by... well... cutting to the chase, his supposed scripted gold coming in his announcement that, "last time I checked" - Joel lifts up the top of his designer jeans, then smiles - "Yep, I'm male." Joel's is one of the most popular videos on the site. That is all ye need to know.

The thing is, by this morning, the promotion (as I write) has only til midnight left to run - at which point, the site will no doubt turn into a pumpkin, and all the little hopefuls will anxiously wait for a ticket to the real ball. But this means that, by today, the top 100 is going to be where those who will receive that ticket, on the strength of this promotion, will be. Only 50 of those 100 will make it to the next round, and that's all they're garanteed, as such. But even so, there are a handful of faces - real people, after all - in that top 100 list who, in a couple of months, will no doubt try to win our love and side-step our hatred. I'd suggest that one of the flaws in this system, if you understand the Big Brother mindset and demographic, is that most people would have stuck to this list, anyway, rarely venturing outside the boundaries of what the Almighty Collective had already begun deciding. The Big Brother mindset is, at the end of the day, the epitome of social collectivism - of sheep mentality - but, in this way, I suppose the promotion actually effectively mirrored the dynamic of the real show (which is all about the tides of the masses... with a little help from a production company, of course). I wonder who will get to ride the biggest wave of all?

And so, today, I did something I wouldn't confess to very many people. I sat through every single video of the top 100. No, really, I did. And my brain hurts - the kind of pain one's mind finds itself in, when it is forced to watch a screen and find absolutely nothing to react to. So bored was I (and, perhaps, so desperate for the marathon to have any kind of point), I took down all the stats and genders of every one of those final 100, and then divided them into their Big Brother archetypes. Part of the sly genius of this audition method will be that the show can wipe its hands clean, if the final selection turn out to be a dud. "We" chose them, after all, after "they" applied. But now going into it's eighth season, Big Brother's own cultural enemy is not really the Christians or the Intellectuals - it's itself. The Big Brother audience of recent years have a very firm idea of what the show "is", and life now imitates the art (I use the A word, there, only because the saying ushers it, not because the show genuinely deserves the term). It fashions both who applies, as well as who watches and how they vote. It's now a partly self-perpetuating formula. The most worrying element of these auditions being how (at a time when the show is struggling to move down a slightly different path) the nature of these wannabes, and the public who vote for them, seems to have reduced what are now the typical BB "roles" even further, narrowing the narrative with thousands of individuals all replicating only a handful of personalities and cliches.

Out of the top 100, there are only 36 females, and over all, I wrote the tag, "Pretty", next to 53 entrants' names. Gee, what a shock! But these, then, break down into what are basically rehashes of all the past characters. With the boys, there's the Aussie Larrikin™, The Dashing Young Model Partyboy™, The Farmer™, The Weirdo™, The Sleazy Wog™ and (interestingly enough, if we remember my discussions regarding the trend being set by Zach) the Camp Fag™. These can occasionally morph into shades of various archetypes - the Dashing Young Model Partyboy Aussie Larrikin™, for example - but, on the whole, that's pretty much it.

The girls, however, are what are really quite disturbing. Ignoring that about 70% of the top 100 have blonde hair (about 10% of them, I'd say, are natural blondes), there's two kinds of smutty sex objects - the Young Bimbo Country Girl™ and The FHM Slut™ (of course, some Young Bimbo Country Girls™, post Big Brother, can graduate and turn into an FHM Slut™). Apart from this (rather dominating) field, there's only two real slots left: the Loud Young Weirdo™ and the Loud Older Mother™. Of course, most of the Loud Older Mothers™ are also pretty strange.

On the whole, for me, the Pretty Girls™ (both young country bimbos and the kind who might as well have a Gold Coast satchel across their spray-tanned, naked flesh) are divided, between those who stepped over the line, where by they take any sympathy I have with them - such as Breeana ("I often get blamed for being a dumb whore," she openly smiles) - and those of the more strikingly tragic variety. In the end, they all end up on the same pages of soft-porn men's magazines, of course; but some scream the insecurity beneath the social constructs they have fallen victim to ("fashioned" is the term I'd use for the more intelligent amongst us - if you know what I mean). In this bunch, I think Charlotte wins the gold medal for the quintessential five-minute FHM queen in the making. A painfully self-conscious young girl (a pre-requisite, mind you, in so very many awful ways), Charlotte manages to spend two minutes backing up her written application claim - that the reason she should be on the show is because she "is not an actor, model, (or) singer" - whilst performing a series of soft-porn poses, in low cut dresses, her perky little breasts seeming to whisper, "Here we are". Take the "C" out of her name, and what does it spell?