Watching You: Gran Hermano

What fabulous news for Mallorca. What publicity. What the heck.

There are two contestants from Mallorca in the latest edition of "Gran Hermano". Now, come on, you should be able to work out the translation of this for yourselves. Think oh-my-God-ing inanity in a palatial concentration camp in Elstree transported to somewhere called Guadalix de la Serra, toss in some smouldering Latin sexual chemistry and add bucket loads of hyper hysteria, Mediterranean style, and you have Big Brother's Spanish half-brother.

While Big Brother UK awaits possible Desmondisation and a transfer-window move to Channel 5, there are no such uncertainties with Gran Hermano. This is number 12 in a series spared the rantings of a Jade Goody and the even greater rantings of disapproving professional Yorkshiremen.

Gran Hermano 12 has just started. The housemates include two "girls" from Mallorca. Julia Valverde, a 30 year old "vendedora ambulante", and Lydia Navarro, a 24 year old secretary. They are the first Balearic members of the house since gardener Daniel López was the ninth-round expulsee in Gran Hermano 8. None come along for ages and then two of them suddenly appear.

Julia describes herself as a "modern gypsy", as opposed, one presumes, to being an ancient gypsy. She is indeed from gypsy stock, the first such contestant in the programme's history. Diversity is everything in Big Brother and its foreign derivatives. This year's show also has the first contestant with hearing difficulties. This might well prove to be a blessing.

(Knowledge of Julia's gypsy ethnicity is a bit of a coincidence; there has also been press coverage of gypsies in Mallorca and how they feel rejected by society and so find it hard to integrate. But this is a different story.)

Quite what Julia's vendedoring ambulante entails, I really couldn't say. The term is a catch-all for street sellers, of which the lookies are the most obvious. A looky she certainly is not. Or rather, maybe she is. A looker. Just like Lydia. Big Brother, big breasts, and blonde with it. The fact that Gran Hermano 12 can boast the biggest jacuzzi of all Big Brothers in the world should work in Lydia's favour in allowing her to display her credentials.

Gran Hermano's Davina is a Mercedes. Milá of that ilk. Quite some years older than Davina, she has the bossy appearance of a Rotary Club wife organising the annual tombola. The Gran Hermano pages of the show's TV channel, Telecinco, reckon she is "more sexy and feminine than ever". Well they would, I suppose.

If Gran Hermano is imported nonsense, Spanish reality TV can boast its own home-grown triumph of cultural sophistication, one which has itself been exported far and wide. "Operación Triunfo" dominates Spanish telly to such an extent that each show seems to last several days. It may well do, for all I know. It is a show which proves that all Spanish males below a certain age wish to be Enrique Iglesias and all Spanish females, Christina Aguilera. Spanish emoting can outdo any on "X Factor", trowelled on with the same shallow fakery but with added sun factor. So redolent is it of high Spanish culture, that Triunfo used to provide the qualifying rounds for Eurovision.

The show has produced one international star - David Bisbal - and it went British through "Fame Academy". You can't avoid Triunfo. It is everywhere, including record stores with OT special CDs and therefore pirated copies in a looky's lucky bag. Not that Julia presumably knows anything about this; she's too busy getting wet in the Gran Hermano jacuzzi along with Lydia.

Operación Triunfo, for all its triumphs, was not the model for all such shows that followed. It wasn't, say, the template for Simon Cowell. "Pop Idol" beat it to it by a matter of a couple of weeks. Both shows aired for the first time in October 2001, but Triunfo has been with us ever since, along with Gran Hermano, evidence, were any required, of the globalisation of popular culture. Froth and voyeurism. And the Spanish do them as well as anyone.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.