"And then he said..."

You can save yourself the bother (and frequent distress) of having to watch Big Brother by reading Grace Dent’s excellent Radio Times blog. She was better when she wasn’t writing every single week day - her material gets stretched a little thin sometimes - but she’s never worse than readable and at her best she absolutely nails everything that’s good and bad about the show.

For example, this is her on Mikey:

Mikey isn’t an idiot by any means, but he behaves a lot like one in fights. Just say, for example, Ash gets into a spat with Mikey over “who drank the last of the milk”, so they both begin bickering and she snaps and says something innocuous like: “Oh, whatever, do what you want! Just go away, Mikey! Get out of the kitchen!”

Et voilà: now Mikey has his foothold in the argument. Mikey could argue about that “Get out of the kitchen” line for hours and hours on end: “Don’t be sayin’ dat dis is your kitchen! Don’t do dat, you can’t be sayin’ dat. It’s not what you said, it’s dah way you said it. Yooo said to me get out of the kitchen! Well, I’m saying to yooo that you don’t have the right to say dat dis is your kitchen and…”

Two hours later, everybody has forgotten about the lack of milk, but it has been established that nobody has the right to tell Mikey to get out of the kitchen. Nobody! Mikey has won the argument.

And on Glyn:

Glyn wanders into the diary room and begins jamming his mitt on every number and sniggering. He hits six, then nine. “Six…nine,” says automated Big Brother. “Sixty-nine!” gurgles Glyn, making a perv face like Rik from The Young Ones. “Sixty-nine!” hoots Glyn, who is overjoyed by this comedy gold dust. The more I look at Glyn, the more I think he’s a virgin. How convenient that all Glyn’s sexual partners appear to be mysterious women he met up hills that he’s never spoken to again.

Glyn reminds me of the boys in my class who’d come back after summer break with tales of mystery “dead-pretty girls on holiday” they’d been rutting senseless. It was always glaringly obvious that they’d actually spent two weeks in a caravanette with their mum and dad, drooling at girls over the top of their Terry Pratchett novel, with their cherries wholly untroubled. “Sixty-nine!” shouts Glyn again, working himself up into an accident.

And Richard:

Richard is the king of the passive-aggressives: get on the wrong side of him and he will non-aggressively chide you through vaguely mean jokes that you can’t quite put your finger on why they annoy you until the end of time. It will be a death of a thousand paper-cuts and ultimately he will win.

One of the good things about her writing is that she’s resolutely independent of the conventional wisdom that comes flowing out of Channel Four and the tabloids - Nikki good / Aisleyne bad, stupid people = excellent TV / people with brains = bad. She’s particularly strong at seeing the good points of the “villains” and the bad points of the “good guys”. She watches it the way I do, in fact - to see what happens when a group of interesting people are left alone to see how well they can get on with each other. Not poked with a sharp stick and starved to make them argue.

Yesterday, in a post with the slightly baffling title “Back by dope demand“, she was spot-on about the sheer stupidity of the latest twist, whereby a contestant eliminated by the public vote will be put back in the house with a chance of winning. I want to quote the whole damn lot, but here’s a bit:

Not only were they were turfed out by a majority* vote because of their unpopular behaviour; since then, they’ve all been home to their families, slept well and recharged their batteries. They’ve eaten nice food, been down the gym, seen all their mates and had their hair coloured and cut. They’ve bought some new clothes, had a good look through all of their tabloid clippings, and now they’re allowed back into the house once again - fresh as they were on day 1.

Meanwhile Pete, Richard, Ash, Imogen, Jennie and Glyn sit in the house feeling addled, flabby, homesick and slightly deranged.

Big Brother can experiment with fake evictions, golden tickets, secret houses and secret gardens, but the moment they simply just change the rules so they can re-instate Nikki, Grace and Lisa, whose deranged behaviour wins ratings, and then give them the chance of winning £100,000, the whole concept of Big Brother begins to feel utterly pointless.

If nobody at Big Brother gives a hoot about the last ten weeks of texts that everyone has spent money on, then why are we still lining their pockets by voting at all? It’s just a thought, but why not just stop voting? Then the producers can decide among themselves who wins and why, while at least we enjoy the ongoing antics for free.

I can’t see the point in voting any more for Big Brother 7.

If Endemol are losing people like her, they’re in trouble.

* She’s wrong about this in the case of Nikki, it was a plurality, but the point stands.

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In Big Brother, that is.

Last night's announcement that they're letting four evicted contestants back into the show, and one of them could win, shows there is no longer any point in spending your money voting to evict someone. If Endemol don't agree with your opinion they'll just put them back in and make them eligible to win.

Whoever makes it back into the main house - and we all know who it's going to be - will arrive back too late to be evicted, and slap bang in the positive voting stage where you can't even vote against her.

It just shows utter contempt for the viewer.

Well, screw them.

Heartbreak - those crazy kids didn't make it after all…

This year's Big Brother is, to all intents and purposes, already over - despite only six days of its 13-week run having passed.

The truly dreadful Shahbaz, a walking exemplar of everything defective in the human psyche, has left the house, but not before becoming the victim of a shocking extended period of bullying in which almost every single other contestant behaved quite appallingly.

I have to say that had I been in the house I would certainly have joined in with them - Shahbaz went so far out of his way to be obnoxious to as many people as possible that I think any collection of strangers would have eventually formed a pack to hunt him down without mercy. The villains are Endemol for creating the situation in the name of entertainment.

Meanwhile, 12 of the remaining 13 housemates are about to be hit by a backlash of monumental proportions. Shahbaz is being reinvented as a poor, sad, deluded loon who was wildly irritating but nevertheless didn't deserve to be on the receiving end of such uncaring savagery. A firestorm is gathering pace, and even long-running BB addicts on the Digital Spy forums are shooting off complaints to broadcasting watchdogs.

However, there is one person in the house who is likely to escape most of the criticism, and that's Pete - the amiable singer whose basic compassion and good sense are never entirely obscured by the tics and whistles of his Tourette's Syndrome. He was already the bookies' favourite to win, and the sight of him in the diary room after Shahbaz left, in tears, saying “I didn't know *how* to stand up for him”, has simply cemented it.

So - Pete to win, everyone else to get roundly booed as they leave. Probably, it would be best if they just called the whole thing off now and saved us all a lot of bother.

So Mark Owen won Celebrity Big Brother… I'm kind of glad, although I wanted Anne or Sue to win at the start. When they first entered the house, it was like, here are five C-list celebrities and one person you'd forgotten ever existed… and that was Mark Owen.

Once again, that little voice is nagging at me… “Go on… send off for an application form… what harm can it do? You don't have to return it… you probably wouldn't get in… so where's the harm in getting a form?” Nope, I have to be strong and resist :o)

Wasn't it Oscar Wilde who said the best way to deal with temptation is to give in to it?

I missed Celebrity Big Brother last night, so I didn't know who'd been evicted until I saw a newspaper on the train. And guess what - once again the white guy stayed and the black guy was booted out. Goldie (entertaining streetwise DJ with youth appeal) has gone and Les Dennis (washed-up hasbeen comedian) stayed. It happens again and again - as soon as the voting public get a choice between white and non-white, they choose white.

I'm pretty sure there was one occasion in BB1 when it didn't happen - Darren survived a four-way vote when Tom was evicted - but Mel, Narinder, Amma, Alison, Adele, the boxer Chris Eubank in the first Celebrity Big Brother, and now Goldie. Not very subtle, is it? Oh, and guess who were first out of I'm a Celebrity - Get Me Out of Here? Uri Gellar (white, but with a funny foreign accent) and Nigel Benn, another black boxer.

Yeah, I know I can get boring on this subject. Yeah, I know I reveal a disturbing level of knowledge of crap reality TV. But it's things like this that mean I find it very difficult to dismiss the BNP's Blackburn victory as an unrepresentative one-off.

What sort of country are we?