Big Brother is back!

Staff Writer | Wednesday June 23, 2010 00:00

 

The Word Cup ends on July 11, thus paving the way for the fifth season live screening to start for 91 days on DStv Channel 198 for DStv Premium and Compact subscribers. Contestants will once again be drawn from 14 countries - Angola, Botswana, Ghana, Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Big Brother Africa season five will be produced by Endemol and filmed on location in Johannesburg. This year, the house will feature 53 cameras and 100 microphones ensuring that, as always, Big Brother is watching!

M-Net Africa Managing Director Biola Alabi said that Big Brother fans in over 40 countries across the continent are going to get a show that is more edgy, more tactically challenging and more intensely strategic than ever before.

'What a great moment this is - to bring back a show that our audience loves for an incredible fifth time. We wanted Season Four (Big Brother Revolution) to be special, but it exceeded our hopes. With the volume of interaction the show received from fans, it was clear that Season Five was definitely on the cards.  So we've been developing what we believe will be thrilling new format changes,' Alabi said. This time around, however, M-Net has announced it will not be calling for entries for the new show. The company has revealed that having run the series four times previously, they are now head-hunting contestants from a database of previous entries submitted for the show.

'We want to invest more broadly in season five and having already been introduced to a world of interesting characters from previous searches, there's limited value in spending extensively in another search for contestants,' Alabi said.

 'We'll still be looking for entertaining persons with a sense of humour, a love of adventure and the ability to enjoy the very exciting Big Brother experience. In the past, we've spent widely to find contestants in 14 countries.

This year, we're using these funds to develop a gutsy new series, recreating the house in a very different way and focusing on putting new technology into place,' she added.  One technological change already in place is that this year DStv Channel 198 will feature two television (TV) feeds so audiences can choose to move from one Big Brother feed to another. At any one time there will be two streams of video and audio coming out of the house and audiences can simply pick the one that they wish to watch.

Season Five will maintain some of the key characteristics that make Big Brother Africa so popular - the ability for audiences to send their text and web messages direct to DStv Channel 198 and see their thoughts and opinions on air. In addition, the ultimate power of who is evicted from the house and who remains is firmly in the hands of the voting public.

Nigerian TV and radio star IK  Osakioduwa, will return to the Big Brother stage for a second time.  The star, whose credits include Comedy Club and Studio 53, is a familiar face to DStv viewers and a long-time fan of the Big Brother series.

Participants in the previous Big Brother shows from Botswana are Warona Setshwaelo, Justice Motlhabani, Tawana Lebani, and Kaone Ramontshonyana.