Big Brother bandwagon rolls on

Axed Claire: Big Brother experience "brilliant"

LONDON (CNN) -- Events behind the doors of the most talked about house in Britain are continuing to grip the nation as the Big Brother TV show passes the halfway mark.

Claire Strutton became the latest contestant to be evicted from the Big Brother house after around 1.5 million Channel 4 viewers voted for her departure on Friday night.

The latest eviction highlighted the growing popularity of the show with more than 5.3 million people -- 21 percent of the audience share -- tuning in to the Friday evening programme to watch the results of the vote.

Later in the evening, 4.4 million viewers -- 32 percent of the audience share -- watched Claire leave the Big Brother house in east London..

The television programme focuses a group of housemates living in a specially-constructed house without any contact with the outside world.

And each week the housemates nominate two for eviction with the public then deciding in a telephone vote who should be removed. The final person left wins £70,000 ($105,000).

Claire, speaking on Saturday morning just hours after being evicted, described her time in the Big Brother house as "brilliant."

"I got to be a child again for a few weeks," she told CNN.com. "It was really lovely."

It is not only television viewers who are hooked on the programme. Hits on the Big Brother web site had averaged around 2.4 million per day, but trebled when the contestant dubbed "Nasty" Nick was evicted two weeks ago to be replaced by Claire.

The housemate, Nick Bateman, had written down the names of his preferences for eviction -- a move strictly against the show's rules.

Since then, the number of hits has reached a new average of three million per day -- putting the Big Brother web site far ahead of the top 50 UK sites.

It is not just the British gripped by Big Brother fever. The programme was last year's most popular show in Holland, while in Spain, where football enjoys mass support, more people watched Big Brother than watched soccer.

But in Germany, a politician called for a ban on the programme, claiming it violated the human dignity of the participants, while a UK bishop has also questioned whether the programme is ethical.

Yet with the Big Brother obsession showing no sign of ending in the UK, latest evictee Claire attended a press conference on Saturday to talk about her time in the house.

She said at times life in front of 24 cameras day and night could be "challenging."

She said: "You don't realise how much you watch television or listen to music until you haven't got it."

"I didn't ever think of it as an experiment. I was very determined to enjoy my time there and that is what happened," she went on, adding that she had seen the show's psychiatrist shortly after her eviction.

Asked to sum up her time in the house, she said: "Brilliant. Awesome. Fantastic."

Following Claire's eviction, bookmakers have made Liverpudlian Craig favourite to win the competition.

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Big Brother UK

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