'Big Brother' is strange, cruel and meaningless

There is an overwhelming probability that it tells us nothing at all about our tastes or the contestants

For one reason or another, I haven't been tempted to write about Channel 4's Big Brother until now. In part, it is down to the sheer quantity of speculative newsprint the show has generated. That has been so great as to make one think that the purpose of the exercise, after making money for the channel and the telephone companies, has been to demonstrate that, starting with absolutely nothing at all, one can manufacture comment, and comment on comment, and so on – to which mountain one is unwilling to contribute.

Added to that, the fact is that it was fairly difficult to raise much interest in the programme this year. It was painfully obvious that the programme-makers only had a limited number of character types at their disposal, and this year's selection was a sort of anthology of the previous two years' characters – the warm-hearted thick blonde, the untrustworthy black flirt, the self-important posh boy, and so on. This, apparently, is how all versions of Big Brother go. I happened to be in Australia for the first couple of weeks of the UK show, and caught a couple of episodes of the Australian version, running concurrently. When I got back and started watching the UK version, it hardly seemed as if it were about a different group of people at all.

The general view seemed to be that the show, this year, was far too heavily manipulated, and, with the division into "rich" and "poor" sides, it did seem like a game show from beginning to end, rather than a slice of observed life. The behaviour of the people was blatantly directed, with so much alcohol available that public disgrace, rows and humiliation were happening almost nightly. And, near the end, the programme makers had obviously decided that the blonde girl ought to win, and ensured it in a transparent way. She had painted a happy birthday message to her sister on a T-shirt, and was ticked off for it in a tongue-in-cheek manner, thereby emphasising (1) her independence (2) her kindliness (3) her bosom.

My general feeling, too, is that the misery and obloquy inflicted randomly on the contestants are really no more than they should have expected: it is the price they pay for the chance of public recognition. One reported casual comment on the wretched Jade from a very distinguished source was "That fat slag deserves all she gets," and though it is not a very civil thing to say, no one but a fool would go in for this without contemplating this horrible outcome. All this is so obvious as not to be worth saying.

So in a sense there is nothing to say. But the mountain of commentary, of the utmost ingenuity, and often seriousness, suggests otherwise. It looks, much of it, like an interrogation of a strange, sphinx-like object; it reminds me of the bereaved sisters at the end of Katherine Mansfield's Daughters of the Late Colonel, staring at a Buddha on the chimneybreast: "And the stone and gilt image, whose smile always gave her such a queer feeling, almost a pain and yet a pleasant pain, seemed today to be more than smiling. He knew something; he had a secret. 'I know something that you don't know,' said her Buddha. Oh, what was it, what could it be? And yet she had always felt there was... something."

Big Brother is so strange, cruel and ugly that we do think that it knows something we don't know, that it holds some general lesson for us. The incredible ignorance, vulgarity, stupidity and gracelessness of almost all the contestants were indubitable, but the fact that many of them had no manners or any idea of how to hold a conversation doesn't necessarily show anything about education or upbringing today. It just shows something about the sort of people who want to be on Big Brother, or whom Big Brother wants.

It doesn't prove anything about human behaviour, since no one lives under such conditions, and any observations made in these circumstances are only very dubiously relevant to the outside world. It doesn't even prove anything very much about the public taste for voyeurism, since the editing and selection of material, even in the streaming version, fell short of the 24-hour total surveillance of any individual – not that that is anything worth aiming at – and the daily bulletins were as coy and selective as any drama-documentary.

In short, there is an overwhelming probability that Big Brother means absolutely nothing at all about our tastes or about the contestants. The one truly telling moment this year was at the end, when the contestants were led up on to a stage in front of the audience, and applauded; and you could see that each of them was lost, because none of them, not one, could think of anything to do at all. They had wanted to be on a stage, and now here they were; and now what? Nothing will come of nothing; and as Mr Alex Sibley, the half-wit model-superstar, would put it, that's the way, uh huh uh huh, we like it.

p.hensher@independent.co.uk