Hopefully Big Brother will be considerably smaller this time round

With depressing inevitability, and exactly as predicted on this very blog, Big Brother makes its reappearance tonight, this time within the tawdry confines of the Channel 5 schedule, with a 'celebrity' version launching this evening.

God help us. With a recent bout of societal self-examination following the rioting, I would have hoped that this is the very last sort of thing that people would get behind. My first ever entry on this blog, back in June 2010, bemoaned the cultural bankruptcy and vacuity of this vehicle, but predicted it would be picked up by one of the other channels when C4 were done with it. Channel 5's output is not exactly overflowing with high quality original content as it is, and this will do nothing to raise the bar generally. It seems they're quite happy to recycle Channel 4's rubbish for them.

I sincerely hope that, particularly in the light of the recent trouble, this will bomb completely and disappear from view once and for all. If it does, I know, of course, it will not be as a direct result of what's gone on in our cities lately. But I do believe that such trite celebrity bollocks is one very small reason among the myriad causes that sparked the trouble. Not Big Brother specifically, you understand, but the celebration and elevation of celebrity regardless of the talent or achievements of the people enjoying it, which in turn leads to a sense of entitlement to wealth and fame without any discernible reason for gaining it. Maybe, just maybe, there will be a negative reaction BB in the post-riot television landscape, and it will suffer from its own emptiness.

I'm not holding my breath, though - the fascination some people have for these Z-listers seems endless, and there is talk that Charlie Sheen will be one of the 'guests', which will doubtless draw in those who regard car-crash television and live personal breakdowns as entertainment, just in case he goes nuts. Frankly, I don't care if he starts sawing his housemates' heads off with a butter knife, though I suspect the producers would be secretly delighted if he did. I won't be breaking what's now a years-long habit and watching so much as a minute of it.

What's the opposite of a virtuous circle?

How does already micron-thin televisual credibility shave yet another nanometre off its already translucent girth? Somehow they (whoever the mysterious 'they' may be) keep suggesting, and another 'they' keep approving, increasingly mind-numbing ways to do so. There's an episode of Come Dine With Me, a show which is already solely redeemed by a catty, knowing voice-over, due to air shortly in which all the contestants are former Big Brother 'winners'. This is TV turning in ever-decreasing circles, clamping its sucker-mouth onto its own belly, one already distended through lack of nourishment. How much more self-referential, how much more pointless, how much more banal is it going to get before it disappears up its own anus and, please, please, some quality TV appears to fill the resultant void?

Everybody who's tried to create a perpetual motion machine has failed - the law of diminishing returns always wins. TV is trying to feed off its own excrement and part of me hopes it gorges itself - with any luck it'll leave the landscape clearer for something interesting to follow on behind. Regrettably, this will doubtless result before that happens in "Come Dine With Celebrity Cash in the Big Brother Attic", or "X-Factor Flogs Talent", or some other monstrous hybrid.

One of these shows' 'concepts' has given me an idea, though. I believe there's one where people set their house up as an instant restaurant, produce food for visitors, and the visitors pay whatever they think the meal's worth. Would that we could do the same with the licence fee. "I've seen your offering for the past year, and frankly, it was shit. Bland, texturally disastrous, soggy, unimaginative, derivative and it left me feeling queasy. You get twenty quid, and nineteen of that was for the new Attenborough documentaries." That'd learn 'em. Unfortunately it would only give them the budget to make even more such tripe.

Thank whatever it is you swear by for books, DVDs and Radio 5Live Sport.

Watch and learn

Interesting contrast on the Channel 4 schedules tonight. Just watched an extraordinarily moving documentary on the efforts to recover and identify the bodies of the Australian and British soldiers killed in the slaughter at Fromelles in 1916, and the resonance the loss of these lads still has for their relatives and descendants today. Made with sensitivity and intelligence, and showing the suffering and futility of the trench warfare, it brought a couple of the lads' and their loved ones' stories alive powerfully. Quality TV and it shows Channel 4 can still commission bloody good programmes.

What was on directly after it? Big Brother. I have nothing whatsoever against any of the people in the Big Brother house, indeed I know nothing about them having not watched any of it, but I'd suggest that the Fromelles documentary should be required viewing for anybody entering that house, just to give them all a sense of perspective.

The oscitant and the desperate

My first entry. Given that this is likely to be dominated by my thoughts on football and complaints about the banality of modern culture, I guess I'd better start with one that does both. The World Cup has finally got interesting - all those first games played by teams desperate not to lose are over at last, and Uruguay last night finally showed everybody else that it's actually OK to try to attack and score goals, it won't kill you lads, honest, as they succeeded where FIFA and everybody else had failed, and silenced the vuvuzela.

However dull many of the first round games were, though, I'll say one thing for all of them. Yes, even the Portugal/Ivory Coast 'match'. At least they're not Big Brother. One of the main joys about the start of the tournament is that, even if you're not into football, you can't avoid it, so it completely overwhelmes everything else. I have, wonderfully, not heard anybody utter a word about that wretched exercise in self-preening, self-regarding, self- self- self- bloody self shite on Channel 4, which I believe, mercifully, is coming to an end this year.

I couldn't tell you a single thing about any of the contestants of either this or any of the last 7 or 8 series, and the thing is, unless you're one of those oddballs whose idea of entertainment is watching a collection of solipsists leading even more banal lives than our own, having ever duller conversations about ever thinner subjects than we do, then neither can you.

That's the thing about Big Brother. With a few exceptions, everybody on it has disappeared back into the obscurity they came from. The only difference between them and me (and probably you), is that I don't want to be on telly, delude myself I'm famous or miss the bloody World Cup. How does that make them watchable? What discernible talent or interest do they have that holds people's attention? Apparently, just being on there makes them watchable and, by extension, famous. They, and Big Brother generally, are the absolute standard bearers, the very epitome of the utterly vacuous, utterly banal, entirely self-generating circus of 'celebrity' that so many, bewilderingly, seem to have an interest in.

I did actually think the first one or two series had moments of interest, and some small merit as a social experiment. By about series three though, it was already beginning to fill with the oh-so-knowing desperates who see it as a route to fame, so I gave up on it entirely. I ask this as a genuine question, because I freely admit to not having seen any of it for a number of years, but has anybody heard any of the contestants hold a conversation about anything of substance or moment, indeed, about anything going on outside the house? They're in there and seem to think it's the entire world and, most horrifyingly, when they come out, they're met with a sub-cultural frenzy which encourages the delusion that they were right.

I even think the Celebrity Big Brother (how ironically titled, given the nature of the 'standard' Big Brother and its contestants) has some merit, a couple of days of ennui quickly stripping away the sparkly but gossamer-thin veneer of fame that they all seem to coat themselves with.

So, nowadays, they're on Big Brother, therefore they're in those magazines, the bastard offspring of Hola that feed off it and similar carcasses, so they think they're famous. Well, in the strictly modern interpretation of fame, I suppose they are. For a few weeks, next year's Big Brother intake wannabees know who they are. Then they're gone - as inconsequential and insubstantial as the medium which spawned them.

So, thankfully, this year's is (we're told, I'm not counting my chickens until it's clear nobody else has picked it up) the last BB, and nobody seems to have even noticed. It's been subsumed by the World Cup. I realise that there are plenty of people out there who reserve the same antipathy for football and regard the World Cup entirely as I do BB. I'll come to that later I suspect. But consider this. Can you see an already simmering and bitter relationship descend into outright war over Honduran Federico 'dissing' Salvadorean Juanqui in the El Gran Hermano diary room? No. Neither can I.