Reality Bytes

Well shucks and gosh - isn't it a long time since I last posted?

I wish that I had an excuse for this.

I could claim to have been busy - but I've not been particularly busy.

I could claim to have been working on building up my army of atomic-powered badgers for the day when I intend to wreak badger-flavoured mayhem - but that would be absurd (or perhaps that's what I want you to think).

The truth is that inspiration has been lacking - and life has taken on a post-Xmas 'meh' feeling. Even the thrills of augmenting burrowing mammals with tactical thermonuclear weaponry begin to pale.

January is an odd month - it starts off with all the bells and whistles of New Year, but when you're past all that you are left with the sinking feeling that you only really have Burn's Night before the prospect of a stale chocolate egg in a couple of months time.

Luckily Tallulah and I have our anniversary in March! Hurrah!

Anyway, I've spent the last month or so as I spent most of last summer - studiously trying to avoid watching Big Brother.

It seemed to be a particularly difficult task this time around as, thanks to the shameful behaviour of some really rather ignorant and hateful housemates, Big Brother - or rather it's celebrity incarnation - seemed to have colonised current affairs programmes as well.

I won't comment on recent events except to admit that I succumbed in a small way recently and watched one of the housemates (you know the one) on her eviction interview. I wanted to see how the programme makers would handle such a situation and I was reasonably satisfied to see that she was closely questioned and forced to see herself making the comments and the reaction they had provoked.

Many have commented on the irony that the career of the individual in question was 'made' by the programme and this career now appears to have been broken by it too. Even more ironically the reverse is true - her third series antics made the programme's reputation (such as it was) and now appears to have damaged it severely.

Big Brother is an odd TV programme - the Marmite of televisual broadcasting. You either love it or hate it - in fact I'd go so far as to say that people either seem to love it or react to the very mention of the show as if someone had pulled down their pants and defecated in front of them. Some people also proudly announce the fact (quite loudly) that they've never seen more than a snippet of it - often before you've asked them.

I, on the other hand, have no time for such shameless TV snobbery and admit to having been a past Big Brother fan. I loved the experimental format of series one, tired of series two, rekindled my affair with series three, and then got addicted to series four (when, briefly, a student from my old university looked likely to win). As a result decided to gradually wean myself off the show until I reached the point where I didn't see any of series seven AT ALL.

I wish that I could say that I stopped watching it because I felt it was a tasteless programme, that it took up too much time, that the programme had been turned into a money-spinner or that it had become cruel and arbitrary in it's attempts to grab ratings. All these comments are true - but that's not why I stopped watching.

Truthfully - and it's a rather sad truth - the reason that I stopped watching the show is that I felt that the mere fact that I admitted to watching it led people to make judgements about me. It became a bit of a joke and I became so tired of the shocked "You can't really mean you watch that? - you're reasonably intelligent" response that I gave up trying to argue the point. The fact that I used to watch series one with my late father meant that the "Only stupid people watch the show" argument didn't go down well with me either. It seemed easier to 'go with the flow' and drop my not-so-secret shame.

Stopping watching Big Brother remains the only time that I've ever altered my behaviour or modified my taste to 'fit in' with the prevaling mood. While I'm glad, in retrospect, that I jumped ship before the programme really began plumbing the depths I still see my decision as a betrayal of my personal principles and one I'm (frankly) embarrassed to admit to.

A lot of people seem to think that 'Big Brother' is the worst thing to have happened to television - part of an unspoken theory that merely showing it on Channel 4 has lowered BBC's house prices. It is apparently the nadir of British televisual entertainment and the herald of a coming apocalypse and all of these opinions become harder to deny after the recent debacle. After all, the programme makers could have - and should have - stepped in sooner to deal with those involved in the comments.

Personally, I now think that Big Brother was a once-entertaining television show that's now getting increasingly desperate and nearing the end of it's life. The choice of abrasive housemates and an increasingly manipulative Big Brother means that the programme seems to have become the show it was always depicted as being in the tabloid newspapers - it's just unfortunate to reflect that there are people who don't realise it was ever anything else.

Therefore, I feel, another summer of avoidance beckons...