[Amy]

THE book was closed last night on an embarrassing chapter of British social history, with the mercifully final instalment of Big Brother 5.
Big Brother was, on paper, a half-good idea, given that people like zoos. Put some humans in a cage, and observe their behaviour under mildly stressful conditions.

Unfortunately, the appetite of humans is insatiable, cruel and perverse; they quickly tire of watching other members of their species picking their nose, breaking wind or being nice to each other. They want to see them copulate, fight or preferably kill. No Roman ever left his seat in the Colosseum flushed with satisfaction that he had watched a pillow fight.

When the first series was launched on July 14 2000, accompanied by worthy suggestions that it was a “social experiment”, it attracted a regular audience of some 8 million. The second series retained some charm with its dippy Welsh blonde contestant Helen Adams, but the ratings went down. So for the third series they lowered the tone with Jade Goody, a housegirl from South London, branded as stupid and treated as a punchbag.

By series four, the format seemed to be running out of steam. Housemates were selected who were determined to be nice to each other; the winner was a Bible-reading Scottish virgin. Desperate measures were called for. The producers grasped the handwheel marked “taste”, and wound it all the way down until it registered “sleaze.”

For the latest series the ceilings were lowered to create a feeling of claustrophobia, the toilet fell under the eye of one of 36 live cameras, and the entire household was thrown into one bedroom with insufficient beds.

The occupants, picked for their ability to annoy each other, were gay hairdressers, anarchist lesbians, moaners, narcissists, toe-suckers and Nadia, a chain-smoking Portuguese transsexual who was formerly a waiter called Jorge. They indulged in flashing their breasts and buttocks, simulating oral sex, swearing a great deal, smearing their mammaries with jam and inviting others to lick it off, shaving their hairy bottoms, vomiting, wrestling topless in mud, committing full-scale sex under a table, and breaking into a riot so real that the live cameras had to be turned off for an hour, security men had to be called to separate the combatants, and the police demanded to see the videotapes.

The tactic has not really worked. Before last night’s final, peak viewing figures for the current series, achieved on Wednesday of this week, reached only 7.69 million, compared with 10.5 million for the first series.

The satanic genius behind Big Brother in Britain is Peter Bazalgette, chairman of Endemol. He is the great-grandson of the Victorian engineer Sir Joseph Bazalgette, who built London’s sewers and rid the capital of a great stink. Some say that the present generation has reversed the flow.

Article from The Times

[Red Moon]

What it fails to tell you is it was the second most popular of the UK's five series, behind Big Brother 3.