Police have launched an investigation into a drunken row between contestants in the Big Brother house. Officers from Hertfordshire Police were called to the house in the early hours of Thursday after calls from viewers. Live coverage of the Channel 4 reality show was cut in the early hours after violence broke out in the house.

Digital channel E4, which screens the show throughout the night, suspended coverage between 2am and 3am while the situation was defused. Producers eventually sent in security guards to divide the warring parties.
BBC

The warring parties had to be held apart

Channel 4 [UK] has opened the doors of its fifth Big Brother House [2004] - which is designed to be as small and unwelcoming as possible. The house has shrunk and been daubed with uninviting green decor as producers aim to raise tensions among housemates, as well as viewer ratings. BBC

Professor David Wilson said his warnings that the re-introduction into the house of dippy duo Emma and Michelle from the bedsit would cause conflict.

The remaining housemates believed the pair had been evicted, but they were secretly watching and listening to all the goings-on.

Only hours after re-joining the group, a drunken brawl erupted and security men were forced to enter the house and intervene.

A police investigation is now underway and Professor Wilson told Channel 4 News that he could not be associated with the show.

I was simply not prepared to lend my credibility to what was happening, he said.

It seemed to me to be an ethical decision to either stay or to go. When it was quite clear that some of the advice I had given in terms of how difficult it would be to re-introduce those two women without their being conflict, when I realised that advice hadnt been listened to, it was at that point I thought I should go.

Professor Wilson continued: It seemed to me to be a great irony that all week people have been phoning me up asking me about football hooligans on the Algarve, and here I was lending my name to something whereby there was hooligan-esque behaviour happening for our entertainment.

If hooliganism was wrong on the Algarve, it was wrong in the Big Brother house.
The scotsman

Big Brother is made by Endemol

In the prison-conscious autumn of 1971, when George Jackson was killed at San Quentin and Attica erupted in even more deadly rebellion and retribution, the Stanford Prison Experiment made news in a big way. It offered the world a videotaped demonstration of how ordinary people middle-class college students can do things they would have never believed they were capable of doing. It seemed to say, as Hannah Arendt said of Adolf Eichmann, that normal people can take ghastly actions.

Details of the experiment are well known. They are included in most basic psychology texts and in a public television psychology course, "Discovering Psychology," that Zimbardo wrote and narrates. Movie rights have been optioned, "60 Minutes" has filmed a segment on the experiment, and even a punk rock band in Los Angeles calls itself Stanford Prison Experiment.

In summary:

On Sunday morning, Aug., 17, 1971, nine young men were "arrested" in their homes by Palo Alto police. At least one of those arrested vividly remembers the shock of having his neighbors come out to watch the commotion as TV cameras recorded his hand-cuffing for the nightly news.

The arrestees were among about 70 young men, mostly college students eager to earn $15 a day for two weeks, who volunteered as subjects for an experiment on prison life that had been advertised in the Palo Alto Times. After interviews and a battery of psychological tests, the two dozen judged to be the most normal, average and healthy were selected to participate, assigned randomly either to be guards or prisoners. Those who would be prisoners were booked at a real jail, then blindfolded and driven to campus where they were led into a makeshift prison in the basement of Jordan Hall.

Those assigned to be guards were given uniforms and instructed that they were not to use violence but that their job was to maintain control of the prison.

From the perspective of the researchers, the experiment became exciting on day two when the prisoners staged a revolt. Once the guards had crushed the rebellion, "they steadily increased their coercive aggression tactics, humiliation and dehumanization of the prisoners," Zimbardo recalls. "The staff had to frequently remind the guards to refrain from such tactics," he said, and the worst instances of abuse occurred in the middle of the night when the guards thought the staff was not watching.

The guards' treatment of the prisoners such things as forcing them to clean out toilet bowls with their bare hands and act out degrading scenarios, or urging them to become snitches "resulted in extreme stress reactions that forced us to release five prisoners, one a day, prematurely."

The Stanford Prison Experiment

site #2

So...let's examine this statement.

Once inside the Big Brother 'compound', could the 'contestants taking part in BB be described as the same as the ordinary person on the street?

The contestants know that there are cameras watching their every move, that what they say and do is being watched by millions of people purely for entertainmnet.

Are the restrictions placed on these contestants the same as those placed on ordinary people in the 'real world'?

Is this the same for the folk walking around outside YOUR window right now?

What Mr Bazelgette has revealed is that by accusing detractors of one thing, [IE not being 'with the program'] he is unwittingly admitting that Society is in itself an experiment, just like Big Brother. In fact the programme is just one part of the experiment. It doesn't just end inside your TV, it continues to your BRAIN as the producers use the mechanism of phone voting to judge the effects of the images and sounds, not only on your reaction to the contestants behavior, but to the entire package. The COMBINED effects of phone-ins, interviews, celebrity endorsement, trivia, games & prizes, which are firstly presented to you as a graphic laden advert which they finally brand and present to you as 'reality TV'...

They can also rig these results to reflect a positvive outlook and convince the sociologists & media autocrats of funding for further experiments...

It is the same for most programming: notice the inticement of prizes to use the phone vote mechanism. Notice also that the phone vote is a cash-cow...a big earner. It funds the programme.

"...With programmes like Ready Steady Cook, Changing Rooms and Ground Force, "my company has been accused of watching paint dry, water boil and grass grow," he said. But, "the business of Ready Steady Cook is more serious than what is seen on TV." Besides programmes in the UK and around the world, there are also books, live shows, magazines and merchandise, which he believes is a perfect example of the intangible assets that are going to drive the content economy. "Intangible assets are going to be very important. It's the way the new media economy is going." ...-Keynote speech by Peter Bazelgette Michael Jackson, Chief Executive of Channel Four, interviews Peter Bazalgette, producer of Big Brother - LSE

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