It is well known that an off-the-cuff challenge by a friend at a barbecue started the man from British Gas, Jon Tickle, on the path that led to him to become the first housemate to go back into the house by the popular vote, and pin-up boy for geeks everywhere.
He is one of only a handful of contestants who rose again, to fill our screens in his own right when he became a presenter on the popular science programme Brainiac. He is the contestant with more websites dedicated to him than any other, his face is on T-shirts and he does a number of “Things that make you go Ooh”
Yet, throughout this Jon has turned up at work as Information Architect, for British Gas at Centrica. He is the ordinary man’s celebrity.
How does the ‘man next door’ actually get to become the fifth most popular Big Brother character over the last decade? What makes Mr Tickle tick?
We met for dinner at Strok’s Restaurant, in Sir Christopher Wren’s Hotel (Windsor), which has a glorious setting overlooking the Thames by the bridge to Eton. I don’t know what I expected but I have to tell you we did not get out of there until 3.30 in the morning, one fine dinner and several ports later.
We started talking about what he does when he clocks in long before we managed to order starters. Like explaining a piece of modern art, Jon enthuses and describes until the architecture of the systems he designs are exposed for all their qualities. “The systems that I design, the data models, they are things of beauty. The way that the work that I do makes a system work is art. Yes, it is science, but it takes a creative angle.”
As Jon chooses what to eat in which order, he talks about the nature of complex systems as a framework by which you can investigate how anything works together to produce some result, he reveals what drives him. He describes nature, society and science with the same rigorous application of systematic thinking. This is what he does and what motivates him, whether he is playing Warcraft – he is a level 80 by the way, but I am sworn to secrecy as to what his avatar is – or creating the future of Smart Metering.
So is this how he approached the Big Brother audition? “Absolutely!”
Carpaccios of Venison, with parmesan shavings, Sakura and surfines capers
I make a mess of my crunchy Parmesan nest, while Jon tells the story of having a projector connected to the cable box and a PC streaming Big Brother 3 on the wall on his flat the year before. “When the 2002 World Cup wasn’t on Big Brother 2 was, it was interesting wallpaper,” he says with a smile, he is used to telling the story. He’s been doing it for six years.
“I have stock answers as to what led me to being on Big Brother. The story is I was made a senior manager on the 1st January 2003, and it meant a change to the way I approached work. I wanted to do something different, I didn’t want to become part of the corporate machine without having done something else life changing first.”
“It was a last hurrah before I was going to be a cog. Well, I perceived it to be that way“ he said, “I think I was wrong, now.”
“Lamb is my favourite meat,” he says eyeing my plate “I was 18 when I had my first kebab. What a day, I can still remember it.”
Under that kind of pressure you have to share, and we lose track of what we were saying while we compare dishes.
“I had a list, it was a very short list, climb Everest, ride down the Nile, go on Big Brother. Given that I had to put in the form [application for Big Brother] in the fourth week of January it was the first thing I had to do, and very quickly it became the thing that I had to do, something to fulfill. I never got round to climbing Everest. Big Brother became that year’s challenge.”
“I like being challenged, something that stretches me in itself”
When it came to submitting his application for an audition he sat down and worked out what would be effective, the variables, what Endemol would be looking for, and then set about implementing his plan. What he doesn’t always admit is his commitment to the challenge. “I worked solidly on my audition process, every day, for 4 months prior to being successfully accepted.”
“I was very calculated about the risks of going into Big Brother.”
“Someone else saying I couldn’t do it, had me thinking there was a risk. Even though I believed that I could do it, there was a risk there that I would fail. But I calculated that it was a risk worth taking.” Of course he knew it didn’t stop there, “Then when I did do it, there would be risk of failure at any point during filming.”
Then he added, “There are still risks, there still is, there’s a massive risk, it only takes … well, nobody would bother printing a story about me now. But, I keep my nose clean.”
That’s the moment the sweet menu chooses to arrive, and I find it all to easy for the thought of chocolate pecan mousse, marshmallow and caramelized banana to momentarily take my attention. Jon settles on warm apple trifle.
The things you have tested most is friendships? “Yes, you know that rule that you are allowed to inform close family but they recommend you keep it down to two or three? I told about 50 friends that I was on it, and not a single one sold a story.”
That was a big risk? “I knew they wouldn’t, but also if they had and I got thrown off the show, I was prepared to risk that to know who was a true friend.” Jon is endearingly sincere about how important people are in his life “The easy answer is that’s because I can choose them. But, they have been true to me.”
Through mouthfuls of slurpy appleness, Jon opens up, “Dermot [O’Leary, presenter of Big Brother’s Little Brother] and Chris [Moyles, BBC Radio 1 presenter] were both exceedingly helpful. I can only point to one conversation each, but they listened and offered advice. Dermot, in a particularly understated way, when he, I, Frederico and a couple of crew, were in a pub near Elstree Studios after filming BBLB.”
“Chris, tremendous bloke, I was on Chris’s show twice, the last time for the whole two hours, I don’t think anyone has ever done that before or since. He still reads out my texts messages. After that second time he said “Do you want to come to the pub?” In that pub, without realizing it, he offered some very, very helpful advice. How to rationalise the experience, how to deal with the attention, how to survive the publicity, and how to remember to value friends rather than get sucked in.”
The best advice is telling yourself something you already know? “Yes, to help you to that understanding.” Jon drops his gaze, “But I’m very lucky in my friendships, we make sure we are part of each other’s life, we’ve maintained friendships from school. They have always been .. I’ll stand by my friends and say I don’t think there are stories from them.”
“One of the most important lessons that I’ve learned is about “truth” and the media industry. I think that it’s useless to expect anything on TV – from entertainment shows to politicians – to represent the “truth”, whatever that is. Certainly I watch TV with a far more critical eye nowadays.”
“Sir Terry Pratchett (I think it was) calls us the “story telling ape” – that’s how we differ from the other primates. TV shows have things to communicate and they do that by telling stories – simplifications of the truth; metaphors that are easy to understand. TV works when everyone communicates the same story. TV feels disjointed when the participants don’t contribute to the telling of a consistent story – and at its worst, fails miserably when guests try and tell their own story in conflict with the story that the presenter is trying to communicate.”
“I came out in a ‘shock double eviction’ with Frederico, and we were a double team. We gave Dermot material he could work with. It’s a story that has to be told, you have to create that story, you have to communicate. That, I think, is why Dermot enjoyed working with Federico and I. We helped him tell his stories. With that assured, then the effort of a presenter is in improving the telling, making it colourful, embellishing it, enjoying what you’re doing as a performing art – rather than fighting to maintain control of the story. I’d like to think that Federico and I gave Dermot a week off work and allowed him to shine.”
You appear to know what you are doing most of the time, and this appears to keep you safe? “There is a lot of work involved in planning and being in control.”
Is that what keeps you safe? “I work very hard to make the world how I want it to be.”
And yet you pitted that safety in the most public of arenas? Jon’s face lights up, “Pursuit with a purpose is all-encompassing.”
“I’m the laziest person, but I work extremely hard, effectively. I don’t do anything that isn’t necessary, there has to be a point to it, an achievement. Like in Warcraft, there is achievement. There is no point in activity for activity’s sake.”
“Activity is only good if you have a goal in mind and that activity helps you get there. If that activity is pushing you in a different direction that’s not going to be getting you there, it’s wasted activity.”
“I have good parents, who encouraged creative play. We didn’t have a TV between the ages of 4 and 14, that’s the late 70 to the late 80s. I was playing and reading voraciously whatever was on my parents bookshelves, Mum had a lot of Penguins, Dad had science books, and Scientific American, National Geographic ..”
“I didn’t get into Cambridge, which is a good thing. I didn’t like it, lots of people in scarves who didn’t know how to drink beer.”
“I went to Leicester, because they have a great physics department, and got a bad Richard – I don’t know really how bad, I never found out the actual score of my third class honours degree. I don’t mind the process, I have just never studied for an exam in my life, didn’t feel the need. 8 As and a C at GCSE, a BBC and 2 fails at A level.”
“What I did learn at university that is useful, I learnt to set my own goals and realise them. If I didn’t have that attitude I wouldn’t have got through living in the Big Brother house.”
by Doug Harding
He flashes one of his appealing uneven smiles. The one that popped up on our screens day in and day out for weeks, and in every repeat of Brainiac, with the quirky spots about things your body can do, and walking on custard in Richard Hammond’s pool.
Jon was memorable in ‘the house’ not for his calculating focus, but for talking to tomatoes, spending hours in the diary room, trying to heat the pool using a plastic bag wrapped around the hose, being nominated in every eviction by housemates driven to distraction with his sci-fi stories, and, in turn nominating Justine for using too much ketchup! The moment when he recites Hotel California while watering the vegetable patch has been voted 13th most memorable, by Radio Times readers in their poll of a decade of BB.
There’s a polarity, a conflict between the free-living life and going strongly with considered decisions.
He’s a speed junkie, of the ‘going fast’ variety, who feels he hasn’t traveled enough. “It takes organisation and paperwork, never been very good at paperwork, I hate paperwork, never open my post.” He’s worked in a chicken factory, “and slaughtered pigs in my time” yet, unfashionably, he is working for the same company he has since he graduated.
He talks about his experience with Big Brother with all the planning and the thought of a person dedicated to a career in the media. But he talks about that communication being the same as what he does at work, “most of what I do is talking and sharing new information …”
And he is back to what he really does for a living. “My job is massively important, it’s what I like doing, it is absolutely my identity. I could not design a better job. I am an Information Architect.” And Jon loves the Company, “British Gas is my family, I have a massive allegiance to it.”
Jon is the data strategy guy who was signed up to “Science. So what? So everything!” organised by the Science Minister, Lord Paul Drayson. Which has the role of increasing the effectiveness of public Science. He has breakfasted – “It was only a couple of tiny croissants!” – at number 10 with Heston Blumenthal and sir David Attenborough, both of whom he clearly idolizes, but will do an interview with Beat because a mutual friend on Facebook asked him to. “It’s a whim,” he says simply.
The evening was what every memorable dinner should be; good wine, great food and better company.
I spent eight hours in the company of a person consistently attempting to live by his own rules, rationally, reasonably and empathically whilst being keenly aware of the inherently flawed nature of human thinking when left unchecked. He would argue that “while that statement is defendable, checked thinking isn’t thinking at all,” but “that is going to take a lot more port to resolve, I’m sure.”
That is what endears him to people, he’s smart and playful, it’s a mix that is easy to be around. I would describe him as a critical-thinking hippy. I think he would like it.
Thank you to Strok’s Restaurant and the staff who were note perfect, they made us feel indulged.
Strok’s Restaurant can be found at Sir Christopher Wren’s House Hotel & Spa, Thames Street, Windsor, Berkshire SL4 1PX. Tel: +44 (0) 1753 861354
Our photographer for the night was Doug Harding, of Kaptured Moments
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