Celebrity Big Brother

It pains me to use that as the title for this blog but seeing as it was the only thing on TV yesterday other than Top Gear, it will take up the majority of this post. I could waffle on about the incredibly difficult assignment that I have due in two weeks and which I have so far got NOWHERE with but I will save that for next week when I am really panicking.

So of the eleven housemates that were in there, I have heard of just four of them but would probably only recognise one or two of them if they came up to me and asked me for the time. Vinnie Jones is the only real famous person in there as far as I'm concerned and the only other person I might recognise is Basshunter but that would only be from seeing him on NMTB a couple of times. As for those other two that I've heard of, Dane Bowers rings a bell from somewhere although I still have no idea why, I was never an Another Level fan and am not aware of any solo material he has done, Lady Sovereign is final familiar name and that's only because I listen to the radio.

On the plus side, seeing who the line-up is now means that I have little if any interest in watching the rest of the 27 days of hell and so have effectively gained 27 hours of my life back. I'm sure if anything remotely out of the ordinary happens I will hear about it on the internet or through twitter. I can't imagine what the rest of the world was thinking when all of the trending topics were taken up with the names of the contestants, they must have thought we were mad for having let the torment that is Big Brother carry on for so long.

The last Top Gear in the series was a fun filled episode with the highlight going to Richard Hammond for crashing his electric skateboard into the Christmas Tree. I still haven't quite worked out if Jeremy's over exuberant film was a hoax or not because surely there would be someone in the BBC to stop him wasting all of that money travelling to those places for no good reason. Some of it could conceivably be a mix of green screen and stock footage but the water skiing and snow driving for example would have been very difficult to forge. Despite James being left with a supposedly very limited budget, I thought he did a pretty good job. It just goes to show that there is no need to spend millions on these sorts of projects when you can get a couple of amateurs to do the whole thing for very little money (I assume). The fact that the signs they developed are still in use today is testament to the methods that were used in those days and that perhaps the government should consider going back to those roots for there next big projects. The IT systems for example could easily become university masters projects and think how good that would look on a CV. The Tories at the moment are considering holding a competition with a £1 million prize for someone to develop a website for public policy making and I think they might be onto something there.

Imagine if the big government projects were all done like this - or at least those that it would be feasible for then. Rather than giving one company the task, you would get several companies all submitting their entries and you would get to pick the best one. Perhaps it would need a bit of tweaking afterwards to make sure it satisfied all of their requirements but at least the initial phase couldn't run over budget and 99% of the work should be done. Even better, the entrants would all be motivated to produce the best that they could so that they can win.