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Thursday, March 28, 2024

In Italy, the TV Show Big Brother Is Now Everyone's Reality

When they leave the house today, the cast of Italy’s version of the reality TV franchise Big Brother will return to a world starkly different from the one they left behind 13 weeks ago.

Quarantined in the famous “casa” and gamely giving their best—which often means the worst of themselves—the competitors of the current season have continued with the competition 24/7, recorded by a crew wearing face masks and gloves. The rest of the productions at Rome’s storied studio Cinecittà have gone dark.

The end of this season of Grande Fratello VIP, as the show is known here, comes three weeks sooner than originally planned, due to the Covid-19 pandemic that has left more than 15,000 dead in Italy as of late Tuesday, April 7. Ironically enough, once released into the real world, the houseguests will have to deal with even stricter limitations to their freedom.

They will see themselves reflected in some weird mirror. Without ever auditioning, Italians have found themselves living in a Big Brother world for a month. There are no prizes, except survival. After a month of increasingly strict lockdown, however, we are beginning to tire. And unlike on the TV analog, Italians have no idea when the season will end. At first we were told April 3, then April 13. Few of us believe the lockdown won’t be extended again.

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The cast of Grande Fratello VIP at least have some idea what to expect when they rejoin society today. In the second week of March, the producers of the show informed them of the emergence of the pandemic and its toll in Italy and allowed them unprecedented contact with their families. That too made for dramatic television.

The sight of empty streets and closed restaurants is bound to be a shock, but perhaps they will have an advantage over the rest of us, having grown used to social isolation while locked in the Big Brother house for three months. Maybe they will immediately find work as coaches, teaching others how to live in quarantine.

Italy is about a week to 10 days further along in this disaster than most of the United States. It’s fair to say we are still not used to it. Yes, we’re managing to do some of the old basics via Zoom or Skype —workouts, yoga, therapy sessions—but other things can only be done in person. First of all: hairdressing. It’s starting to show.

Last week in Rome, the president of the Italian republic, Sergio Mattarella, appeared in what was supposed to be a reassuring message to the nation. The president usually addresses the nation only on New Year’s Eve or on very special occasions, so everyone was very anxious ahead of the March 27 video, shot at the Palazzo del Quirinale, the seat of the presidency set atop the highest hill in Rome.

Seated in his office in front of the Italian and European flags, Mattarella delivered a few reassuring words on the pandemic and then suddenly stopped when someone off-camera informed the president that his hair had a tuft. “Eh, Giovanni,” Mattarella said patting his head and giving a little smile, “I can’t go to the barber either.” (Giovanni, it turned out, is the president’s communications chief, Giovanni Grasso. The hashtag #ehGiovanni went viral.)

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Barber shops, of course, are considered nonessential businesses and have been forced to close, and we are all struggling with hair, which, like grass in the piazzas, is growing unimpeded, returning to a state of nature.

Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte has hair issues too. Recently he began holding virtual press conferences, attracting sizable TV audiences. Reporters ask questions via Skype. The spectacle is strange in itself. But what was even more strange in the latest press conference was Conte’s hair: The color had started fading to gray, especially at the temples. “Nobody knows when there will be growth again,” a friend texted me on Whatsapp. “But regrowth is definitely here.”

And here again, the contestants of Grande Fratello VIP may be showing us how to cope under quarantine. Back on March 17, still under lockdown in Cinecittà, contestant Adriana Volpe, a former model and TV personality, volunteered to serve as her castmates’ personal hairdresser, announcing “I open my salon, boys.”

Her first customer was Paolo Ciavarro, who, because of his thick blond curls, urgently needed a touch-up. “We have to remove all this,” he tells Volpe. “It would take a scissors to thin out, but not the kitchen shears!” Volpe is reassuring. “Not worry,” she says. “Let’s start from the sides. I will only take an inch but without changing your cut.”

From the earliest days of Big Brother—the show started in the Netherlands in 1999, and the franchise has spread to 54 countries around the world—the “haircut moment” has always been a classic; it happens in almost all seasons, an opportunity for housemates to bond, however briefly, in an atmosphere of easy camaraderie.

Here in the real world—if that’s what we are living in—not all of us are lucky enough to have a partner or roommate with Volpe’s enthusiasm and skills. Take me, for example. I live alone and find myself wondering if I should get in touch with Mustafa, the Turkish barber who usually cuts my hair for 10 euros. If I offered him 20 euros and provided him with a mask and gloves, would he make a house call.

The Italian edition of Big Brother aired for the first time on September 14, 2000. The name was obviously taken from George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984, where a totalitarian regime controls every aspect of citizens’ lives, leaving them no space for freedom and privacy.

The finale of that first season was broadcast on December 21, 2000, drawing a record audience of more than 16 million. The winner was Cristina Plevani, nicknamed “the sad Cinderella.” Coincidentally, she was a lifeguard on Lake Iseo, a small lake in northern Italy, between the towns of Brescia and Bergamo—the area where the pandemic has hit the hardest.

The fourth-place finisher in 2000 was Rocco Casalino. Born into a poor immigrant family in Germany, he entered the house declaring that he “managed very well to socialize” and that he was “a damned exhibitionist and voyeur.” (Years later he admitted that he is actually shy.) He ended up being eliminated in the penultimate episode.

He quickly capitalized on his Big Brother experience, turning himself into a journalist and hosting some shows on local TV. In 2004, he told students in a journalism class, “I will be your boss in 10 years.”

In 2011 he aligned himself with the populist, antiestablishment Five Star Movement, and by 2014 he was working as the head of communications for the party. In June 2018 he was appointed spokesperson and head of the press office for Prime Minister Conte. He’s considered the most powerful spin doctor in the Italian government.

I don’t know if there are other governments today that have a former Big Brother competitor as a spin doctor, but one thing is certain: At a time when the whole country has become a reluctant Big Brother house, who better than Casalino to welcome former houseguests and guide them out into the real world? The one that is not set in Cinecittà, but in equally desolate Italy.

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