It’s fashionable – compulsory in some circles – to knock Big Brother. In fact, the show is one of the small handful of genuinely indigenous forms thrown up by television. It’s important for all sorts of reasons: it wouldn’t be possible in any other medium, it adds much to existing formats, it changes the terms of the relationship between viewer and subject…
The celebrity variant is honestly even more compelling. If you’ve been avoiding it because you think it’s lowbrow, get off your high horse and tune in (and while you’re at it, think about how you might integrate a blog with the house… Should the producers add a ‘blog room’?).