It’s goodbye to Celebrity Big Brother, but is it also good riddance?

As many of you sad TV watchers will be aware, the seventh, and final, Celebrity Big Brother (CBB) is currently on our screens on Channel 4. But as the show’s launch drew in more viewers than last year’s CBB, and the show continues to attract healthy viewing figures, is Channel 4 making a mistake by dropping this show? PRmoment commissioned research to find out what the online media are saying about the latest CBB.

 Research supplied by Echo Sonar

The good news for Channel 4 is that twice as much online coverage is positive than is negative, and by far the majority (88 per cent) is balanced. Interest peaked during the launch, but now appears to be fading fast. The launch got mixed reviews. For example, on 4 January mailonline wrote: “The last and final series of the doomed show began last night and – just when you thought reality television could sink no lower – down, down down into the showbiz quagmire it went.“ Yet, on the same day, a far more positive story appeared on dailyrecord.co.uk: “around 6.2 million viewers tuned in to watch contestants enter the Celebrity Big Brother house last night – making it the biggest show of the day across the terrestrial channels. The average figures for CBB7 were up 10 per cent against last year's launch, which saw around 5.6 million tuning in.”

Research supplied by Echo Sonar

Gareth Dimelow, senior creative strategist at marketing agency Jack Morton Worldwide and writer of pop vulture blog believes that it is right that Celebrity Big Brother should be dropped. Speaking to PRmoment he said: “Big Brother used to have an unbeatable track-record for staging incendiary water-cooler moments of must-see TV. But a lot has changed in the last decade, and the proliferation of celebrity-infused fly-on-the-wall ego-tastrophies has made Big Brother seem like a rather archaic relic of what used to be.

“The definition of ‘celebrity’ has been stretched to breaking point, to include glamour models and girls who dated someone famous, to such a degree that they’re barely distinguishable from the summer’s regular contestants.” Dimelow is also rather tired of hearing about Katie Price, and as two of Price’s partners are in the house, it is difficult to get away from her: “the show’s producers have learned nothing from ‘I’m A Celebrity...’

That show’s ill-advised decision to drop Katie Price back into the jungle like a past-its-sell-by-date food parcel derailed the entire series. This time around, Big Brother makers Endemol have picked Katie’s current squeeze and her ex-boyfriend as two of the housemates, meaning that once again it’s Jordan who seems to be dominating the headlines.”

For those who have managed to miss the show so far, this year’s line up has included footballer/actor Vinnie Jones, actors Stephen Baldwin and Stephanie Beacham, former Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss, rap star Lady Sovereign, singers Sisqo and Dane Bowers (also an ex-boyfriend of Katie Price), Swedish DJ Basshunter, cage fighter Alex Reid (Katie Price’s current on-off boyfriend), glamour model Nicola T and Ekaterina Ivanova (ex-girlfriend of Rolling Stones' Ronnie Wood). American socialite Ivana Trump was a later entry to the house on 8 January.