I've said it before, I love British tv. I've grown up on Britcoms and soaps. People are quite surprised when they find out I've got about 20 years of Coronation Street in my head. Lately we've been delving into more documentaries and reality tv. I've loved reality tv since the first episode of MTV Real World which I saw down in Texas, and who didn't become obsessed with the first season of Survivor?
I watched every season of Big Brother except for 2001 (I was a bit busy that summer :) ) and loved it, but Big Brother here is so much better! First of all, its shown every day. Every evening we get an hour-long edited episode showing the previous day's activities in chronological order. There's also two talk shows devoted to Big Brother, and live footage late at night every night. Friday evictions are also shown live, and the evicted houseguest gets interrogated by the lovely and witty Davina, her other guests (usually including a psychologist or body language expert) and the audience. This season has been pretty exciting, with boyfriends and exes entering the house unexpectedly, rebellious housemates breaking the rules by talking about nominations (here nominations must be kept a secret, and the viewers vote people out), and one guy even climbed over the wall, making quite a memorable exit.
Other notable reality tv shows we've watched (Derek will watch them with me most of the time, but if it was up to him we'd probably only turn away from Bloomberg business news when monkey shows were coming on) include Spendaholics (twenty-somethings in deep debt but with tons of clothes or tickets to the footy), Freaky Eaters (teens to middle age people who have very weird eating habits, often only eating chips and chocolate), and Project Runway (ok, only I watch that one, making fun of Kelly Osborne trying to fill Heidi Klum's shoes). We probably would have gotten into the UK's Biggest Loser, but we were home in Canada when most of it aired.
The latest one we've started watching is Young, Dumb, and Living off Mum, a reality tv show where 8 guys and girls between ages 17 and 25 who still live at home and don't work are moved into a house where they must fend for themselves, buying and making their own food and cleaning up after themselves, in order to win a trip around the world. Each week one parent assigns a task for them all, like a 12 hour shift in a hotel, or organizing and running a fashion show in 6 hours, and then the parents watch the footage and boot out the kid who did the least. We were a tad annoyed when they changed the rules in the first week and booted out the best working kid, who really should have been in the running for the trip.
There's also some great series and documentaries about real life and real things. One of our favourites is Monkey Business and Monkey Life, which documents over ten years of adventures and happenings at Monkey World rescue centre in Dorset, UK. We're determined to go there sometime. Its a great show featuring all sorts of monkeys and apes, including chimps, orangutans, gibbons (my favourite) and lemurs. Sometimes very sad things happen, like when a head chimp gets ousted or a little one gets sick, but seeing a tiny baby wooly monkey cuddle with its carer or cling to its stuffed animal surrogate mummy is just the cutest thing! Needless to say we've watched almost every episode of Monkey Business, and the complete first season of Monkey Life.
So here's hoping that I get back on my feet soon, so that I'll have more to write about than what I can see from the couch. Odds are we'll be seeing some pretty amazing things by the end of the week, so we can look forward to that!
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