There’s been murmurings of discontent among devoted Big Brother fans this year at the absence of the red button service (aka the live feed). After a barrage of comments and criticism on the official site’s blog, angry messages on forums like Digital Spy and even an online petition it looks like the producers have finally seen sense…

On this evening’s Big Brother’s Little Brother, presenter George Lamb read out a prepared statement from the BB producers (in response to a viewers phone-in question):

They explained that the number of viewers using the service had dropped significantly, and that most people were chosing to watch clips via the official website instead. However, the producers have now promised that the live feed will return for late night streaming! WOO HOO!

And if that isn’t good news enough in itself, our top picks of hottest babes this year have all secured official housemate status – after passing various tasks in the past 24 hours:

• Noirin Kelly for shaving her eyebrows
• Karly Ashworth for having a motorcyle driven over her
• Sophie Reade for ‘officially’ changing her name by Deed Poll to Dogface Reade

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edit/update: – on second thoughts and after properly digesting the statement, this isn’t the red button service that us die-hard fans crave… just a few hours of late-night live coverage from the house (like we got last night). Why do Channel 4 feel it necessary to bombard the schedule with repeats of Friends, when they could be showing live BB10 coverage during the day

Sign the online petition and keep the pressure up on CH4!!

update2: News Of The World blogger Peter Briffa has a brilliant piece on The Ten Biggest BB Moments that never made the highlights – arguing that without the live feed we’d have never known the true facts of many scenarios in the house; especially the selective editting decisions the BB producers take to guide the ’story’ and sway the public each year. The live feed is an essential part of Big Brother as it allows us hardcore fans (who watch around the clock) to form our own opinions.

Briffa also has a few more opinionated BB blog articles that make great reading:
The Ten Worst Decisions of Big Brother – EVER!
No Live Feed – How Will it Play Out?

update3: here is the official Channel 4 statement about the red button in full:

No Red Button facility on this year’s Big Brother
The red button 24-hour streaming facility was discontinued prior to the last series of CELEBRITY BIG BROTHER and we have no plans to reintroduce this service for the current edition of BIG BROTHER.

The main reason behind this decision is that we’ve found the number of viewers choosing to use the red button facility has dropped significantly and more and more viewers chose to watch the clips provided on the official Big Brother and other websites. So we have shifted our resources to cover these areas and have new fanzones, on Twitter and Facebook as well as our own site, and we’ll also be working extensively with partners such as bebo, youtube and MSN to deliver footage to Big Brother fans to keep them fully up-to-date with what’s happening in the house.

However, live streaming will be available on both E4 and Channel 4 late night/early morning and we will be showing all the other great shows that make up the BIG BROTHER experience, like BIG BROTHER’S LITTLE BROTHER AND BIG BROTHER’S BIG MOUTH.

We appreciate that viewers may be disappointed by this decision, but we hope that despite the lack of the red button service, you will enjoy this year’s series.