Big Brother’s Stacey Wren: ‘Every time I went to the diary room, I thought the show was being axed’
Big Brother contestant Stacey Wren, an account manager at Frost Design, has said that every time she was summoned to the diary room to talk to Big Brother, she was going to be told the show was being cancelled, because the contestants were too boring.
The 24 year-old told Mumbrella: “I thought that I was the most boring person in the whole world. Even with 24 hours of footage edited into half an hour, I thought it would be hard to make what we were doing watchable.”
“Five hours of talking shit on the couch every day can’t make for great viewing. I was always thinking, let’s get off the couch and make people want to watch us by actually doing something,” she said.
“Every time I was called into diary room I thought, we’re going to get axed.”
Wren was the ninth person to be evicted from the Big Brother house on 29 October. She has since conducted 47 radio interviews, seven press interviews and just one TV interview, with Big Brother broadcaster Nine.
She said: “Big Brother viewers want to watch contestants having fun and having interesting conversations. People come home at 7pm, having had had shit day. They want to have a laugh and live vicariously through us.”
Wren said that Nine did not encourage contestants to behave in a certain way to improve ratings. “We were just asked to be ourselves and have a laugh,” she said.
Wren said she is open to appearing in ads, but reckons her fame won’t last. “My fame will probably last until Friday, then I’ll be back to being normal again. Some people might recognise me in the street, and say: ‘I saw you moon on TV'”.
Big Brother fared well for most of the series, rating with 1.618m in its first episode and 1.473m for the finale, and was consistently one of Australia’s most watched shows in the advertiser-friendly demographics 16-39, 18-49 and 25-54.
Wren goes back to work at Frost Design tomorrow.
She was not the only industry staffer to take part in Big Brother – Brisbane copywriter Michael Beveridge was also part of the show.
Surely that’s the idea though.
To see what people do/how they interact in a house filled with cameras. Some degree of natural behaviour is gone as the subject is aware that it’s under observation, but the original premise wasn’t to have the contestants do stunts to improve watchability.
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Ten should get their money’s worth out of Paul Henry and put him in the big brother house next season with 800 starving hyenas.
it’d be short, but they’d be able to replay it to a huge and appreciative audience every single night for eternity.
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@Hmmmm… “This season on Big Brother, Andrew Bolt, Alan Jones, Kyle Sandilands, Paul Henry and a Pride of Lions!”
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No regional nightclub appearances on the horizon?
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@Hmmmmm… Not sure Nine would want an ex Ten “personality” on their show…
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She seems pretty grounded.
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And we didn’t think about this before applying….
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I just can’t get my head around the ratings! Do people really have nothing better to do?
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Agreed Linda, good perspective and grounded attitude. Good on her.
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ah, big brother’s on 9 is it?
my bad.
regardless, that henry bloke deserves to be fed to small animals with sharp teeth.
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