Howard Jacobson: It's true - this seedy liaison of talentless show-off thickos conquers everything

While others have been taking on the might of global capitalism this last week, I have been putting my mind to the rights and wrongs of sex on television. Someone has to. Is it entertainment, that's the issue. Is it something we should be watching?

The sex, or rather the nearly-sex in question – because they didn't in the end – was between Helen Adams (hairdresser), and Paul Clarke (something in computers), both participants, if you haven't been watching, in the voyeuristic game show Big Brother, which, barring accidents, will be history by the time you read this. As I hope won't be the case with Helen Adams and Paul Clarke. But then I'm hopelessly romantic. I think that what you start you should try to finish. On the off-chance it will move mountains.

Not everyone shares this view. "Romance!" seethes Lynda Lee-Potter in the Daily Mail. "This wasn't romance. It was a seedy liaison between two amoral talentless show-off thickos who gloried at the thought of being watched."

Here are compunctions which would not trouble a commoner mind. Take the matter of talent, for example. Does Lynda Lee-Potter mean us to understand that you are ineligible for romance if you happen not to have any? Is it romance if Susan Sontag gets the hots for Sammy Davis Jnr, but not romance when a hairdresser loses her heart to somebody in computers? Do you have to be able to tap-dance or to discourse on Barthes and Artaud? And if so, where does that leave someone like me, who can do neither?

I am no less troubled by the implications of thicko. Would I be wrong to detect the sinister intrusion of post-Malthusian eugenics here? First accept that thickos cannot love, as those who write columns for national newspapers understand the word, and it will soon follow that thickos shouldn't be allowed to make love. No CSEs, no penetration. Hard to police, but a thicko-free world is the glittering prize.

As for the distinction between romance and seedy liaison, try selling that to Anna Karenina. Romance, whose chief constituent is passion, not talent, will as like as not make a mockery of the decencies, that's the age old story. Romance is wholesome only in Barbara Cartland. Return the word to its original meaning of verse tale chronicling chivalry, and you quickly come up against the problem of Lancelot and Guinevere – deception, betrayal, infidelity, despair, none of them applicable to anything that happened in Big Brother, where the most grievous sin, leaving aside terminal banality, was canoodling.

All right, canoodling in a more than usually public place. Our nearly-lovers are not just amoral talentless thickos in Lee-Potter speak, remember, but amoral talentless show-off thickos. That celebrity is killing us, I do not doubt. In our time, fame is the only word some of us can spell. But there is nothing new or discreditable about lovers hoping to be bywords for love, inscribing their names, entwined in hearts, wherever posterity will see them.

An optimistic gesture, defying mortality. Anthony and Cleopatra were incorrigible show-offs, binding the world on pain of punishment to know they stood up peerless. From the Nile to the Tiber, their doings spread, and Cleopatra's barge was nothing if not meretricious. Only imagine what she'd have done on camera.

Which brings us to our original question of why – "demeaned and damaged" in the words of you know who – we do what lovers ask of us and watch them. You may as soon ask why we eat. Attending to tales of lovers is among our oldest instincts. It's one of the reasons we read. Will they, won't they? Jane Eyre, Rochester. Cathy, Heathcliffe. The everlasting story. How many pages of Clarissa do we turn to discover whether or not that bounder Lovelace gets to have his way? A one-sided romance, in this instance, otherwise known as rape, but our hunger for consummation is the same.

Prurient? You bet it's prurient. By page 1.000 Lovelace has advanced no further than the blue of Clarissa's meandering veins. Yet on we plough, waiting for the swine, by fair means or foul, to uncover the lot. And this, dear reader, is Literature!

A life instinct drives us, presumably. Just as we seek to perpetuate our own genes whenever we do the thicko thing ourselves, so we watch over the future of humanity every time two other lovers kiss. Film calls this impulse out in us communally. How still the cinema becomes when an embrace is imminent. We might care nothing for the characters, and still less for the actors who play them, but only let a kiss be on the cards and our palms begin to sweat and our throats begin to prickle. Embarrassment's the reason. Embarrassment at having to acknowledge, in the presence of others, that this is what we're for. That this is all we're for.

There is an added urgency to it today. We are so poisonous to one another now, seething with infections below, breathing deadly viruses above – clubbers' TB the latest: dance too close and you're dead – that we welcome any sign of erotic continuance. "Sick voyeurism"? The very opposite. We watch in order to believe again in health.

Myself, I thought Helen Adams shed her daffiness in Paul Clarke's arms and was transfigured by the dalliance. This not in spite of the drivel that they mumbled into each other's ears, but because of it. Amor vincit omnia, as Chaucer's Prioress had engraved upon her brooch. But then the Prioress thought as I do when it comes to the affections – "Love conquers everything, even on the telly."