Big Brother is watching...and being watched

While the current season of Celebrity Big Brother continues to get a new lease of life on its ratings, courtesy of some racial slurs from B/C/D-list celebs staying in the house and the international furore this is causing, the creator of the BB format, Endemol, is also getting the once-over in the press.

We have a good article on the site today, actually posted yesterday, from our lowlands correspondent Erik, on Endemol and its will-they won't-they selloff by majority owners Telefonica. It's timely, given all the attention industry people are paying to the future ownership of this reality-TV megaproducer. Dow Jones today published a similar sort of story, and I suspect there will be more in the weeks to come. My soon-to-be-former editorial director, David, suggested an alternate lede for the article, which I thought would have been a perfect start to a pulpy novel on the reality TV business:

One day in October 2006, Jon de Mol looked out the window of the tenth floor office in Madrid.
The skies were clear, he noticed, all but for one bank of dark clouds away to the west.
Oncoming gloom was what he felt, too.

The offices were not his, but those of Telefonica, Spain's national telco and parent company of his previously wildly successful TV production outfit Endemol. And he had just been told by the board to prepare for some bad news.

"Your ratings are down Jon. Your stocks down- the company's worth half what it used to be. We need to do something. Get Jade Goody on your show...."