It’s time to say bye-bye to Big Brother
BIG BROTHER VIRGIN MEDIA TWO, TONIGHT, 10pm
Is it...? Could it be..? No, are are you really sure..?
They were the words most of us uttered when it was announced earlier this year that this would be the last ever season of Big Brother, and tonight’s Grand Final is the last ever episode.
Over the course of 19 regular seasons, 45 different spin-off seasons, 18 years and two different TV networks, Big Brother helped to create and then define a genre that has spread through the TV listings like a particularly noxious form of Japanese knotweed.
Having started in the pre-social media environs of 2000, the first few seasons were actually quite interesting.
Of course, that was largely down to the fact that the early participants, notably the likes of Anna Nolan, were all relatively normal, sane people who approached the game show with a degree of innocence and enthusiasm which simply wasn’t possible in later seasons.
By that stage, the observer effect had kicked in and ensured that everyone who subsequently entered the house was a deranged, pathological narcissist who was only interested in securing their 15 minutes of fame.
Big Brother ultimately became a victim of its own success and also began to look old and tired in comparison to the vulgar shag-fests of Love Island.
There was also the sense that a show which thrived under the face of controversy no longer knew how to keep up with a culture that now fuels itself on outrage and petulant fury.
Every season seemed to bring new complaints to the police along with the inevitable allegations of racism, sexism and homophobia and that would have been fine if the producers had stepped back and allowed nature to take is course.
Instead, once they started to kick people out for incidents which they would then refuse to air (the Roxanne Pallett incident on this year’s Celebrity Big Brother aside), even the viewers who had stuck with the show for the last 18 years began to tire of a programme that encouraged the most flamboyant and stupid people to say the most flamboyant and stupid things – and then kicked them out for their sins. That will even be the legacy of this last season, when fanfavourite Lewis was expelled for a joke, which they won’t show, about Hitler.
A little piece of TV history passes into the great beyond tonight, and I for one will be tuning in – if only to drive a stake through the heart of my telly when the credits roll, before burying it at a crossroads with a load of garlic stuffed into the screen to make sure it never comes back.