I tend to watch Big Brother each year. I wait for a few weeks after the show has started so that the public can evict the real idiots, and then I watch the relatively normal people who remain. I rather enjoy it, and a lot of other people do too, but it’s hardly unanimously popular.

As a general rule, Big Brother is on the decline. The Guardian published an article today entitled ‘Is it time to kill off Big Brother?’, and by no means is the writer the only person who is fed up with the show, but I really don’t think it is time to kill it off. Are people really saying that it makes worse television than repeats of Keeping Up Appearances or documentaries along the lines of The World’s Fattest Women? There are a great deal of TV shows which deserve the axe sooner than Big Brother.

Nonetheless, some changes are required. The producers need to remember that if you lock a dozen people into a house for 12 weeks, interesting things are bound to happen whether those people seem boring or not. You don’t have to seek out Britain’s three campest citizens, and make them perform daft tasks with their housemates, to make for an interesting show. You don’t have to deliberately seek out Britain’s two most self-worshipping inhabitants to see conflicts of interest. Perfectly normal people are interesting, and will have interesting interactions with one another. The producers do not have to consciously pack the house full of nutters and two token normaltons.

Next year, Channel Four should air a stripped-down Big Brother featuring ordinary people, and less gimmicky tasks. Maybe even put some intelligent people into the house. I guarantee it will capture the imagination of a lot more people than the current series. There is life in the format yet.

Less than a week ago, a man named Kenneth entered the Big Brother 10 household. In that time he proved himself, without doubt, to be a deluded bully and a complete pillock. Such was the extent of his pillockdom, that he made plenty of the other pillocks in the house look normal, which was quite an accomplishment. If you like a man that has severe delusions of his own intelligence and appearence, boasts of wearing £3000 shoes, and brags about how his ’security’ don’t let people near him, then he’s definitely your cup of tea. He also treats his girlfriend with less respect than he might.

Apparently, he said to fellow pillock-and-housemate Marcus Akin “I came in as a legend and I will leave as one”. I’m sure that I won’t be the only one to point this out, but the reality is that he went in as a pillock, and left as a more infamous pillock. I hope he reads this – he’s a pillock of irredeemable proportions. If the man ever attempts to strike up a conversation with you, it’d be wise to leave immediately. I’m guessing he left because he knew that the public were inevitably going to vote him out for being a pillock, and this way, his delusions may continue. Pillock.

I have seen the following quote attributed to both Arthur Schopenhauer and George Bernard Shaw:

“Martyrdom is the only way a man can become famous without ability”.

This quote is very clever, but no longer correct. What neither Schopenhauer or Bernard Shaw could have forseen was the advent of reality tv. All you have to do, if you were not aware of this already, is tune into Big Brother in order to see a group of people who have achieved a degree of fame despite having no discernible talent whatsoever. Some of them, moreover, are just plain nasty individuals.

Just consider the case of Jade Goody. She was famous in her lifetime in spite of, or probably because of, the fact that she had no talent. She was famously ignorant, and renowned for being talentless. After her lifetime, it might be argued that she became a martyr for the cause of cancer, which is noble enough, but nonetheless she was famous before this for being herself – a feat which, in her case, was nothing to brag about.

The fame of everyone else who participates in Big Brother tends to be shallow and short-lived, but they achieve temporary fame nonetheless, despite a lack of talent, and often in face of serious personality flaws. It has taken a bizarre set of events to disprove either Mr. Schopenhauer or Mr. Shaw, but they have definitely found themselves disproven.

The Apprentice is an amusing show. Where they found the people who appear on it, I’m unsure. I find it hard to believe that they are normal civilians who live amongst us normaltons. That, surely, would signify a breach of the Geneva Convention rights bestowed on the general populace. Most of the candidates believe psychopathic ruthlessness to be a good quality, and remain fairly oblivious to the concept of ‘respect’. There’s normally one or two good eggs amongst them, but the rest are below-par rotten eggs who somehow made it through quality control.

Some of the eggs are so rotten that the inept quality control team (who let my missing-button Primark jeans through) didn’t fail to detect them. As a result, they ended up on Come Dine With Me. On this Channel 4 show, four people each hold a dinner party for each other over the same amount of evenings. They make a splendid effort to spread on some fine food and entertainment for their ungrateful guests, whilst their guests criticise the gourmet food with some rehearsed Simon Cowell-isms. It’s hard to feel sympathetic for any of them, as they all rip into each other’s warm (albeit false) hospitality with inhumane brutality, having forgotten the harshness of their own treatment.

So, if any of the bizarre individuals who appear on this programme offer to cook me dinner, and hope that I’ll reciprocate, then I guess I’ll have to politely make my excuses and go get a Big Mac.