A boring showcase for exhibitionists

'There is nothing that Channel 4 can do to obviate the fact that all the Brotherites are skull-crushingly dumb'

And so we arrive at chapter 102 in my massive, magisterial but pessimistic master-work, provisionally entitled New Lows in Western Culture. And, coming directly after my thoughts on "Jerry Springer and the High Tide of Voyeurism", chapter 102 deals with that remarkable new nadir in popular programming, Channel 4's Big Brother. I will attempt to show that Big Brother - the show in which 10 young people are locked up together and filmed - is a uniquely damaging and vicious piece of television, pandering to the worst instincts of viewer, broadcaster and participant, degrading all three in the process.

And so we arrive at chapter 102 in my massive, magisterial but pessimistic master-work, provisionally entitled New Lows in Western Culture. And, coming directly after my thoughts on "Jerry Springer and the High Tide of Voyeurism", chapter 102 deals with that remarkable new nadir in popular programming, Channel 4's Big Brother. I will attempt to show that Big Brother - the show in which 10 young people are locked up together and filmed - is a uniquely damaging and vicious piece of television, pandering to the worst instincts of viewer, broadcaster and participant, degrading all three in the process.

Or maybe I won't. Because it isn't true. As a piece of television, as a cultural artefact, Big Brother is singularly unimportant. Not only is it not a new low, it isn't really a low at all, merely a logical extension of the docu-soap genre, in which "ordinary people" live their lives while being constantly filmed. It isn't The Truman Show, because Truman didn't know that the cameras were there (the key thrill for the fictional audience). For that reason, as others have pointed out, it isn't genuinely voyeuristic.

It is, of course, the opposite: a showcase for exhibitionists. But even here it fails to go much beyond karaoke night at the Dog and Duck. True, there was a scene early on in which the bald girl persuaded several of her fellow inmates to press their naked bodies on to the wall of the living-room while covered in a brown paint (thus creating a mural worryingly reminiscent of the "dirty protest" in the Maze). Even so, this came nowhere close to the gut-churning self-flaunting to be found in Denise Van Outen's vehicle, Something for the Weekend. The experience of watching an unclothed middle-aged couple telling their daughter - in front of an adrenalised studio audience - that they most liked to be kissed on their "private parts" (what "private" parts?) is something that only global war will efface from my memory. Thank God Channel 4 also gives us The Sopranos.

Nor do I think Big Brother represents a technological breakthrough. And I don't say this just because I spent a fruitless morning trying to catch the nubile Melanie in the shower on the Web - and signally failing to catch anyone anywhere. Webcams have been around for half a decade, allowing the terminally boring to entertain the fatally bored. So it ain't new.

Of course, there has been significant media interest (of which - I am perfectly well aware, thank you - this article is an example), and once one hound barks, the rest tend to follow. This has created one of those strange loops in which the media's interest in the story gradually becomes part of the story. Yesterday The Sun - which had flown a model helicopter over Stalag Luft 14 and dropped leaflets calling for one particular participant to be voted out - boasted about their own appearance on Big Brother and quoted The Guardian, which had complimented them on doing it. Yet such media circularity is hardly a new story either.

The broadcasters, I suppose, might be accused of a degree of cynicism in the way in which Big Brother has been structured and presented. In the first instance it is odd, and slightly reprehensible, that - just as the nation worries about the alcohol intake of the young - Big Brother should be sponsored by Southern Comfort. I think Waterstone's or the Co-op should have been invited instead.

Far worse, though, is the punctuation of Big Brother by the "expert" vapourings of academics who ought to know better. My favourite cod-phrase this week was from the clinical psychologist at Manchester University. "The real turning point of the relationship is by the chicken coop," he said of Melanie and (the now-departed) Andrew. Apparently, she scratched her nose just after he'd scratched his, and we all know what that means, don't we? This was followed by the observation (when one of the men suggested that the washing-up ought to be done), that "what Darren is doing is adopting the role of the parent".

Yes, it really is that interesting.

The best-selling computer game for PC machines at the moment is something called The Sims. In The Sims you take charge of an individual or family, house them, choose their furniture, give them hobbies, move them around the neighbourhood and introduce them to other folks. They shower and urinate (covered by a localised pixellation), throw their rubbish on the floor and - if denied company, activity or sleep - go bonkers. And Channel 4's producers have learnt from The Sims. So their real Sims are given displacement tasks (this week it was learning semaphore, next week it's gutting wildebeest), told to perform certain chores, and forbidden from campaigning against other Sims.

Even so, many believe (and I'm one of them) that Channel 4 has introduced an agent provocateur into the house to stir things up when they go flat, or introduce topics of conversation that might lead to interesting encounters. On Monday night Nicholas (whom I am sure I've met somewhere) was to be found engaging three fellow Sims in a discussion about condom etiquette. This is almost exactly the kind of thing producers traditionally want mixed households of young people to discuss on camera.

And it's here that we at long last arrive at what is genuinely significant about Big Brother. Not its contribution to cultural decline, not its role within the media village, not what it says about broadcaster or audience. What is really interesting about Big Brother is what it tells us about young people in Britain, what it tells us about the Sim generation itself. Because poor old Nicholas (a tad older than most of them) wound up talking to himself about condoms. There is nothing that he, Channel 4 or the psychologists can do to obviate the fact that all the Brotherites are staggeringly, skull-crushingly, die-on-a-sofa dumb. You might as well talk to trilobites.

For a kick-off, they're all the same. Every one of them looks and sounds and dresses like an aerobics instructor at a third-rate health centre. In three weeks I have yet to hear any of them venture anything so radical as an opinion on something outside themselves, or anything so entertaining as a genuine insight or a flash of wit. The only art they're interested in is their own, the only time is now, and the only place is here.

Three of the men and one of the women are actually functionally incoherent. When Darren soliloquises, the words die on his lips and drop, cold, on the floor in front of him. On Monday, the lesbian ex-nun Anna, tempted to leave the house (or at least, tempted to tell everyone she was tempted to leave the house) said: "I'm not that interesting and I don't think I will be missed when I go."

Any one of them could have expressed that opinion with complete truth. You would have thought that it was statistically impossible to find such uniform bores, such conformists. The one "character" or rebel - 35-year-old Caroline - is only different in that she is noisily self-obsessed. Nevertheless, she, too, represents a generation in which adolescence seems to drag on into early middle age.

There is, however, an upside to all this. What the Channel 4 kids also demonstrate is far less inhibition than earlier generations (I might have liked to do that body-art stuff, but I'd never have dared), much greater openness and - yes - more tolerance. And perhaps blandness is a price worth paying for that. Just.

david.aaronovitch@btinternet.com