Stereotypical Guy With Tourettes in Big Brother

It's Thursday night, and Divina's just introduced the second housemate for this year's Big Brother. Pete, a 25 year old Rock 'n' Roll singer and comic artist from Brighton.

Pete's a fun-loving guy. He likes reading, draws comics, fronts a rock band and suffers from Tourette's Syndrome. He has a pet hamster, Magic, who roams about his place and lives in the wall. more info on Tourette's, visit the Tourette Syndrome (UK) Association website... - Channel 4 Big Brother Website

The issue I have with the quote above is "suffers from Tourette's Syndrome". As a fellow 'Tourette's Syndrome Sufferer' I really have issues with the stereotype. It's been labeled as 'the swearing disease', but personally I have never had that part of the 'disease', and personally I don't find it a problem, in fact quite the opposite, I think it has brought creativity and skills to my life with only minor drawbacks.

As a kid I was picked on quite a bit at school because of my Tourette's and because of this I taught myself to control my ticks while in public and let it all out when I got home. It was really hard, but got easier to do over time. Nowadays my ticks are fairly discrete movements (I have the occasional humming tick) and when people do notice something (when you spend a lot of time with people they do notice) I explain what I have... most have no idea what I'm talking about until I say "the one that supposedly makes you swear constantly", then they usually catch on, and I then try to restructure their preconceptions.

From my very quick observations so far, the housemates this year can be characterised as follows (no offense intended)

1. A Chav girl
2. A Crazy stereotypical Tourette's Syndrome 'sufferer' 'rock 'n' roll singer'
3. A stereotypical posh kid who doesn't like camp gay people
4. A camp gay Scottish born Asian guy
5. A middle-aged woman with tons of plastic surgery
6. A 'normal' down-to-earth good looking girl
7. An unfaithful chav guy
8. A strange loner Asian woman, but seems pretty normal apart from that
9. An excentric welsh lifeguard who doesn't like posh people
10. An excentric gay guy
11. A stereotypical posh girl
12. An absolutely mental chinese scouser
13. An arrogant self-made ...ionaire who boasts a lot
14. A money & man obsessed very chav slutty girl ("wannabe footballer's wife" as Divina says)

I know the point of Big Brother is to get everyone in the house riled up and cause a lot of controversy, but did they have to put someone in there who has the stereotypical symptoms of Tourette's Syndrome, when the average symptoms are somewhat milder.

</Rant> :o)

Update: 2006-05-19 00:45

Oh bugger, we've been expected... Big Brother's Big Mouth have already anticipated this sort of thing being discussed... oh well.

For the moment please mail me (blog at antimatters dot co dot uk) your comments to this post and I'll put them on the site.