I’m a fan of Big Brother, chums. It’s shameful to admit it, but I have watched every single series of Big Brother since it launched back in 2000. Apart from that Teen Big Brother; I don’t make a habit of watching schools programmes.

It’s suffered a bit in recent years though, which has been a shame. I’ve always maintained that the basic format itself is sound; stick a bunch of folks in a house, surround them with cameras and the odd staged situation and see what happens. What happened was that they flung so much shit at the format that it went downhill. And got covered in all shit. That’s why it’s become a bit of a pariah; racism, sexism, violence, you name it, while one newspaper has been praising it, the other has been calling for the show to be axed, for the producers to be shot in the head with guns.

It’s not all the fault of Channel 4 and Brighter Pictures though; with success comes the mainstream, and with that comes a need to build more success. When it’s a little cult show, nobody has high expectations, there’s no need to grab big ratings to grab the big advertisers, so you can be a bit more imaginative, or at the very least take the programme at a slower pace. Cult audiences stick with shows, the mainstream audience is much more fickle and wants to drop in and be entertained immediately, without having to catch up on what has gone before. Clearly defined heroes and villains are the order of the day, and Big Brother from series three onwards pretty much served those on a plate.

At first there was some minor tinkering with the show; try and increase the conflict a bit by separating the house into “rich” and “poor”. Fine, it’s all part of expanding the idea and it worked well, so the next logical step was to take it further. And they did. “Evil” Big Brother was the result; series after series of twist after twist, all designed to make the housemates more and more uncomfortable in each other’s company, to increase the chances of entertaining conflict, to increase the ratings.

And the housemates themselves had changed. The producers by 2007 had long since given up choosing interesting people entertaining in their own right, favouring a cavalcade of stereotypes – the outrageously camp, the outrageously stupid, the frankly fucking annoying, and a couple of token average, nice, tolerable people lobbed in just so that the mainstream audience could vote them out early for being “boring” or “stuck-up”.

And then there was the racism row in the celebrity spin-off in 2007, which you know about and I’m not going to talk about in any detail other than this; it led to Channel 4 killing Celebrity Big Brother.

And it was the best thing to happen to the franchise the best part of half a decade.

The main 2007 series of Big Brother was a little bit dull, the production pulling back a bit, wary of any big scandals. It pulled back probably a bit too far – the production was nervous, and it showed. And that’s why Big Brother: Celebrity Hijack has so surprised me.

It really is the best Big Brother in years.

They’ve buried it on E4, so there isn’t the need for big ratings again, and there aren’t any celebrities in the house as housemates. The celebrities are the voice of Big Brother (during office hours, mainly, but that’s pointless niggling, and this is a happy place, so on we go.)

The housemates are all great choices. It helps that there isn’t really anyone in the house who entirely deserves contempt; there are folks I dislike, but all of them are reasonably intelligent and entertaining in their own ways. None of the housemates have particularly domineering personalities, and they’re all successful in their fields already and so do not appear to be on the show simply to get famous for the sake of it. They’re there for the experiment, just like in the first couple of years of the show.

There are still twists of course, but playing with the format in a good way has really refreshed the show. Instead of going for EVIL TWIST AFTER EVIL TWIST (A secret room! A Surprise Eviction! A second house!) they’ve gone for fun twists.

The celebrities have been given (faux-)free-reign over the house; they can change the rules of the show, they can go into the house to chat face to face with the housemates. It’s lead to some fantastic set-pieces; Russell Brand staging an elaborate stunt in which a disgruntled cameraman broke into the house and had to be hauled out by burly security guards (and gangly Brand) was terrific to watch simply because the housemates could not decide if what they were witnessing was for real. Chris Moyles taking the politician chap for a drink in a pub upstairs could have been awfully dull, but it wasn’t. Somehow it was interesting to watch a softly-spoken Scottish politician sink a pint with a boorish DJ.

It’s all worked to make for some relaxing, interesting viewing.
Yes, interesting; I’ve used the word a lot, sorry. But it is true; without the artificial conflict of recent years, it seems closer to the original social experiment concept than it has been since 2002. 

They all get on. It should be boring. It isn’t. And they’ll probably ignore all of the good this spin-off has done for the format in favour of yet more dull, predictable twists in the main summer show. Which is a shame.

Oh, and Amy is great.

That was the other thing.