Big Brother isn't watching you, it just wants to waste your time

Once upon a time I watched Big Brother. I was about eleven years old and up at midnight, sitting in front of the television like a ninja because I couldn't sleep and was fairly curious about this so called 'Babestation'. Needless to say that tits and thongs weren't what they're cracked up to be and I was soon channel hopping through Sky TV stations, looking for something to drown my sleepy sorrows with. I stumbled on E4 and a live-feed to the Big Brother house, the reality television show that I hadn't been watching, mostly because even at eleven years of age, I knew quality programming from a giant commercial on the miracles of CCTV.

Nevertheless, I watched it. The housemates were sleeping, infrared cameras trained on them like a sniper suspicious of a target playing dead. I kept watching. Literally nothing happened. Someone turned in their sleep THE CAMERAS WERE THERE in an instant, capturing all the action! Then more nothing. About sixty seconds of this passed and I continued to sit motionless, eyes trained on the screen, with my mouth slightly open, drool probably seeping out. I finally knew what it was like to be a chav! But my common sense prevailed and I switched to something else, astounded that anyone could care enough to view what amounted to a stranger being unconscious during the middle of the night. Surely a grainy old repeat of Friends would be better to show if they had to show anything at all.

In theory, it is an excellent concept: a load of people must live in a confined house together with cameras watching them 24/7 and deal with trying to act normally despite strangers and scrutiny. I'd totally watch that, because it would be an interesting sociological experiment on Human behaviour and gender/class/race interaction. Indeed, when Big Brother began in the United Kingdom in 2000, a take on the original Netherlands edition, Channel 4 had described it as reality television, but also a social experiment. So far so good. The problem is, it was on for sixty-plus days at a time with a game show presenter, a prize for 'contestants' and crucially, a public vote. Whenever you give the public any sort of control, television shows inevitably become bogged down in personalities, hype, and opinion. There starts to be an agenda, either from the press or the producers, to create entertainment through ego. It makes money, but it boils down to mass manipulation for the sake of ratings - in one year, more people voted for Big Brother than an election. An election! About the future of the country, and millions of people were too busy evicting someone they only knew through what Channel 4 showed of them. Do you see any public votes on The Apprentice? No, you see professionals creating their own drama, whilst the show itself has business skills as a focus. Thats why I like it. Perhaps Big Brother should have been more documentary-style, once an evening for seven days, less interested in petty squabbles and sex, more interested in psychology.

What is more infuriating is that Dirty Desmond's Channel 5 edition, whipping the dead horse of a format in it's eleventh year have perverted Big Brother's style further, turning it into more of a soap opera that just happens to be all real, complete with "previously" segments and production values that look like the vision mixers spilt the contents of a child's painting set onto the screen. Casually dropped is the threadbare 'social experiment' pretence, in favour of unashamed voyeurism for the sake of seeing a few arguments and maybe some kissing. I could go down the pub and see all that live if I wanted. Big Brother has become fast food television that, much like McDonalds chips, has about as much true substance as cardboard.