In Russian television show Dom-2, which is similar to Big Brother, participants frequently make reference to a particular product, after which the camera zooms in on said product.

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Competition for viewers included Channel Five's Celebrity Big Brother, which took 1.5m viewers and 7.6% of the audience in an identical timeslot, C4's Million Pound Drop and BBC Two's Proms coverage.

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The broadcaster said it had already started to allocate funds which would have been spent on Big Brother into new drama.

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Peter stated in court papers that he was always looking up to big brother Bernie, which was not that hard to believe since so many people had a high opinion of the guy for so many years.

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Apple's profit ascendancy over IBM is also a turnabout from their positions decades ago when IBM was the behemoth and Apple the scrappy upstart that aired its famous 1984 Super Bowl commercial showing an athlete hurling a sledgehammer into a Big Brother-like image, which many inferred was IBM.

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Channel 4 has followed up Wife Swap with a celebrity edition, which featured Millionaire cheat Major Charles Ingram and his wife and former Big Brother contestant Jade Goody, and with a new series Boss Swap.

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There's already an on-screen logo counting down the days to the start on E4, which will be streaming live coverage of goings-on in the Big Brother house from 2130-2245 each evening, and again through the night - and whose ratings and share of audience rise dramatically whenever Big Brother is on.

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The broadcaster, which has faced calls to axe the show completely, was ordered to conduct a review of Big Brother by its board earlier this week.

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Talpa TV, which began broadcasting earlier this month, is owned by television mogul John de Mol, responsible for the Big Brother format.

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The programme, in which 11 contestants "date" and compete for public votes, was beaten by Channel 4's Big Brother and Only Fools On Horses on BBC One.

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