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| 2 July 2001 |
| 2 July 2002 Nice Guys Don't Come Last By Kathryn Torpy and Catriona Mathewson AUSTRALIA'S reality television tradition continued last night when Big Brother "nice guy" Peter Corbett trounced pin-up Nathan "Marty" Martin to take the $250,000 first prize. After 85 days in the Big Brother compound at Dreamworld on the Gold Coast, Corbett was voted Australia's most wanted to win series two of the Channel 10 reality game. Corbett emerged as a late favourite yesterday, with Centrebet sports betting manager Gerard Daffy saying events in the house on Friday night - which saw both finalists confess to having undergone anger management counselling - hurting Martin's chances. Corbett, 23, was said to have won sympathy early in the series after speaking about the death of his parents and his struggle to care for his younger brother and sister. However, television viewers were prevented from seeing a darker confession from Corbett on Friday in which he admitted he had violently assaulted another man and had experimented with drugs. "I had a crowbar to my head ... I went to town on this bloke like there was no tomorrow. The bloke survived, didn't press charges, didn't do nothing. No record of it. I haven't told anybody. Very, very f...ing lucky," a transcript on the Big Brother website read. The full confession was not screened on the Big Brother eviction show on Sunday. Last night's series finale had uncanny echoes of the first Big Brother, which saw "Aussie bloke" Ben Williams beat Blair McDonough, now a star of Channel 10's soap Neighbours. The fact the show again came down to a battle between two men - as it did in the first series of Big Brother - has fired debate about an apparent bias towards men. Despite the fact most viewers are women, there have only ever been five female winners emerge from 35 Big Brother shows around the world. Australian women would never see a "sister" win Big Brother and they only had themselves to blame, QUT media and communications lecturer Jason Sternberg said yesterday. "Women don't want to see other women win," Sternberg said. "I think women generally are taught to judge each other very harshly ... they fight for a boyfriend. They fight for a job," Mr Sternberg said yesterday. "This doesn't exist between men as much." Consequently, the women judged female housemates more harshly than the males. Mr Sternberg said both Martin and Corbett represented old-fashioned, conservative Australian values. "Big Brother is a really interesting way for us as Australians to identify or celebrate the people we see as being the most typically Australian. I don't think we're quite enlightened enough to let a woman walk away with $250,000." Women represent about 53 per cent of Big Brother's Brisbane audience, with recent research from the UK suggesting female viewers were more likely than men to vote in the evictions and to vote several times in each eviction. Article from Courier-Mail |