Big Brother saboteurs rock the vote, by Asher Moses - The Sydney Morning Herald - 7th November 2007

Big Brother likes to call the shots, so he could be in for a nasty surprise after agreeing to throw part of the audition process for the 2008 series open to an online vote.

Following flagging ratings for this year's outing and criticisms the show had become tired and predictable, Big Brother's producers have promised to give viewers more control over who goes into the house next year.

Would-be housemates have been invited to submit a 90-second audition clip on the Big Brother website.

The submissions will be put to an online vote from next month with the top three guaranteed a spot in the house and the top 50 guaranteed to go through to the second round of auditions. The remaining housemates will be chosen by the producers, Endemol Southern Star (ESS).

"The view is that we'll probably attract that bigger and wider pool of people who might not be able to get somewhere to do an audition but they can certainly get online to do it," Ten's head of digital media, Damian Smith, said.

But Big Brother fans are already plotting ways they could rig the voting system to ensure their favourite gets into the house.

Members of the Behind Big Brother fan community are in the process of deciding which of them will be the guinea pig.

"Someone here must be foolish enough to want to be a Big Brother Housemate?" wrote forum member Warren_Oates.

"This place has thousands of members. If we all voted for the same person we should be able to stack the voting system."

Mr Smith said people would need to register an account on the Big Brother website in order to vote and only one vote would count per registered user. However, it's not clear whether there will be anything stopping someone from registering multiple accounts.

"We're doing everything possible to ensure that the voting is legitimate," Mr Smith said.

He said the online vote would be final one but the show's producers would still have veto power because Ten and ESS owed the other housemates a "duty of care". They had to "make sure that [the selected] people are capable of doing the housemate thing".

Ten recently created its own channel on YouTube to promote certain shows but Mr Smith said the Big Brother '08 audition process would be done exclusively through bigbrother.com.

In another attempt at renewal, Big Brother institution Gretel Killeen was dumped as the show's host last week in favour of radio personalities Kyle Sandilands and Jackie O.

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