So Big Brother number five comes out of the final bend and enters the home straight. By this time next week Dan, Shell, Jason, Nadia and Stuart will already have started their slide towards obscurity. Soon we'll struggle even to remember their names. The good-looking one who was bunny-boiled by the Geordie maneater, what was his name again? And hers? It will be like that.
Some of them will pop up on television again, but nowhere that really needs to bother us. You'll turn on breakfast TV one morning to be greeted by a familiar cackle, and there will be Nadia prattling on about her sex change. Dan the hairdresser could put in a non-speaking guest appearance on Cutting It. Stuart, I think, will turn up on children's television, reading a story while dressed as a pirate. Flicking through the obscure outer reaches of cable and digital one day, you could stumble across Jason's body building show, or Shell doing a wholesome cookery programme. Shell's Kitchen, it may be called.
Two years ago, on Big Brother three, there was a broody guy with smelly feet who used to be a punter in Cambridge (not a gambler, but a person who operates a flat-bottomed boat with a pole). Remember? What about his name? Well, it was Spencer - Spencer Smith. He's done bits and bobs on TV since, on GMTV and Rise, and here he is again, presenting his own show, a fishing programme called Cast Out (Home and Leisure). Cast Out, get it? Spencer was cast out of the Big Brother house, now he's casting out his bait, or his lure, or whatever he happens to be using. They could have called it Fishing for Fame. Or Still Angling for the Limelight.
Spencer is a charming enough presenter, if a bit clueless. He turns up in Vancouver Island, salmon capital of the world, struggles a bit with driving on the right and seems surprised when, at the end of the day, it goes dark. But he eventually finds the small logging track that takes him to his floating lodge, and the next morning he's out in a boat with fishing guide Ivan, surrounded by watery, pine-clad Canadian gorgeousness.
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