[Amy]

THE evidence this week suggests we are witnessing the beginning of the end for Big Brother.

Reviews and ratings have, of course, been awful, while the decision to put the tiresome "Kitten" in the house was a real killer. ("I know! Let's put someone REALLY irritating in!" Yeah, like we all want to watch that!)

But the moment I knew Big Brother was in real trouble came, ironically, during the sort of scene the show's puppet-masters would have been longing for.

For me, topless mud-wrestling rang the death knell for Big Brother.

Why? Because it was a bore - a total non-event.

What would in the show's heyday have been a front-page sensation/"water-cooler moment" par excellence actually passed without a ripple (as opposed to a nipple).

Even before the mud-wrestling started, Vanessa and Michelle were bored by the prospect of it - and rightly so as it turned out.

In previous years, the sight of three of the Big Brother girls going at it topless in the muck would have had half the phones in Britain buzzing.

Now, it is about as predictable as this year's other BB "bombshell" - the presence in the house of a transsexual (the gruesome Nadia - who, by the way, unsurprisingly flattened all challengers, male and female, in said wrestling).

The sexual frolics in Big Brother have become a yawn. Compare the column inches devoted to Helen and Paul in BB2 with the indifference aroused by Michelle and Stuart (Bimbo and Dimbo) in BB5.

Far from outrageous or erotic, the way Michelle coerced Stuart into soaping her down after the wrestling only looked desperate. And without scandal and gossip what is Big Brother left with?

They're left with a parade of vacuous vanity that has left Ahmed - the group's only grown-up - unsurprisingly bewildered and appalled.

Channel 4 has learnt another harsh lesson from its selection this year - that lesbians, transsexuals, nymphomaniacs and gays lusting after straight men can be dull too.

After Big Bore IV, once again their choices have been deadly.

Just look at them: the allegedly heterosexual males - Jason, Stuart and Victor - are all rampantly narcissistic misogynists. Jason looks like a gay Shane Warne; Victor has watched too many bad home-boy movies ("If you DO survive, I've got your back. That's all I'll say" to, um, Michelle).

Stuart uses the word "mega". Ahmed, the token mad Muslim, might usefully stab one of the others but he certainly was never going to win it.

As for the girls, the supposed pin-ups - Michelle (the queen of the push-up bra) and Vanessa (full of white South African superiority) - are wholly one-dimensional, not even appealing enough to bother watching on E4 with the sound down.

Emma and Shell get less and less attractive the more flesh they flash.

The only intriguing development about this year's show is the presence of Daniel, Marco, and - to a lesser degree - Jason (meticulously waxed air stewardess) and Nadia (Geoff Capes without/with the beard).

Big Brother has been longing for someone on the show to get laid, but you wonder if it has occurred to them they might end up getting gay sex.

That said, the idea of Marco or Nadia having any kind of sex at all is alarming, not to say improbable.

We're left with the mindless monotony of the drones' conversations (Emma to the diary room: "I'm bored." No, Emma, you're bor-ing).

And of course Davina is still absurdly over-excited at non-events, such as the Big Brother granny flat.

"I am now going to talk to the house!" she keeps boasting. Rather you than me.

Then there are the traditionally pathetic "challenges".

These included such fascinating TV spectacles as wheel-barrow races and, um, housemates hanging from a bar - or in poor Victor's case, not hanging from a bar.

So much for "Big Brother gets Evil". The only good moment this chellenge produced was the line: "This is Big Brother. Housemate one, prepare to hang."

An encouraging idea, certainly.

Article Daily Mirror