Ben had a Bad Day: Schadenfreude and the Big Brother Australia “Big Sting” farce

So who caught Big Brother: The Big Sting last night?

The show that went to air could have been edited to half the size, but it was still comedy gold for anyone keen on a bit of Ben-and-Rory schadenfreude.

For background, Ben and Rory were two-thirds of the gang of thugs who tormented and assaulted Travis, and Rory has been sexually harassing housemates.

There are five housemates left in the house. Terri (the middle aged redhead Hansonite “nanna”), Alice (the blonde vet, and the most grounded and sensible one left on the show), Travis (the eternal teenager), Ben (arsehole law student), and Rory (arsehole brickie).

Big Brother faked them out last night by telling them they were having a snap eviction with no public vote – that the housemates had to vote each other out. There was sturm und drang, whining, complaining, crocodile tears. Big Brother may have stage-managed the contriving, but BenAndRory were playing the game right along with him.

There is a three-part play-by-play of the “sting” at the Big Brother site – one, two, and three.

Unless I’m missing something, the official Endemol play-by-play oddly omits who nominated who. In the first round, Alice nominated Rory, Rory and Ben nominated Alice, and Terri and Travis nominated each other; Alice was fake-evicted. In the second round, Travis and Terri nominated each other again, Rory and Ben nominated Travis, and Travis was fake-evicted.

If you’re interested in this bit, here are a couple of the nominations and “evictions” (sorry about the sync). As you can see, Ben and Rory could do with some acting lessons.

Alice and Travis were “voted out”. The people still in the house lounged around holding their heads in their hands, shell-shocked, I say, shell-shocked, and pretending to weep. Alice and Travis wept for real.

Then Big Brother revealed that it was all a fake. He gathered the housemates, and explained that it had been an exercise in revealing their true characters to the public.

Rory and Ben could have frozen Big Brother on the spot with their basilisk-like glares. Were those boys pissed. Pissed with a capital P. White-hot infuriated that what they had thought to be their near-assured victory had slipped out of their grasp. Check it out.

Their anger had nowhere to go but to Big Brother, so they made up excuses for it. There were whines of “OMG how INHUMANE”, mostly from Ben and Rory. “Travis is like my little brother in here,” gargled Rory, as he denounced BB for making him do such a terrible thing to him. Oh, Teh DRAMA. Whatever, dudes. It’s a game show. Travis and Alice were fucked over. By you. You’re not the victims here. You don’t give a shit about them, so cut the fakery. It’s downright embarrassing.

I can’t be the only viewer tempted to songvid a Ben montage onto Daniel Powter’s “Bad Day“.

Of course, as The Eye On Big Brother notes, this is all a smokescreen to distract us from the fixed Brigitte eviction and related producer betting scandal. But hey, if that distraction involves a little bit of Ben and Rory getting their comeuppance, it could be worse.