Brooker, in the early stages of ingesting faeces (maybe)

To tie-in with next week’s debut of Charlie Brooker’s E4  zombie/Big Brother-fest, Dead Set, we’ve got an interview with the man himself.

Among other things, he reveals why he could never survive in the BB house: “If I’m sharing a small bungalow with people and there’s one loo, I can’t bear it. I have to wait till they’ve all gone to bed before I’ll have a shit. Knowing there’s cameras around, I just wouldn’t be able to poo. I’d probably start ingesting my own faeces…”

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Jaime Winstone crashes Big Brother

Charlie Brooker’s new comedy-drama, Dead Set, was launched to the press tonight. A zombie drama set in the Big Brother house, it stars Jaime Winstone, Riz Ahmed, Andy Nyman, Davina McCall (who’s very good indeed) and, er, Bubble from BB series two.

The screening was introduced by Andrew Newman, C4′s Head of Entertainment and Comedy, and a fittingly Nathan Barley-esque (now that’s a phrase that’s gone out of heavy rotation) figure. “It’s gripping, dark, excting, gruesome and really original,” he said, before going on to rubbish rival networks.

“E4 stands out as a digital channel that really commissions quality stuff. With so much clutter and millions of programmes coming out in multi-channel TV, E4 only really does good ones. There are other channels, which I won’t name, that launch millions and millions of sketchshows and sitcoms and things. They get the odd good one, but most of them are rubbish. And there are other channels that commission loads and loads of good things that sound very grabby, but when you watch them, you think, ‘God, of course this was going to be rubbish’. E4 doesn’t do that much, but really does programmes that punch their weight in the proper telly space.”

So there.

Brooker himself also had a few words, describing how the idea of Dead Set came to him.

“It sort of started a few years ago. I was watching 24 – and I’m a big fan of 24. Jack Bauer was sort of slicing a terrorist’s knee-cap off and feeding it to him, and I thought, ‘This is great, I love it. But the terrorists aren’t very realistic, they might as well be monsters or zombies’ – because I love zombies. And I thought this was an obvious idea, someone was bound to do it. And, nobody did. A few months later, I was watching Big Brother, and I thought, ‘That’s a good place to hole up during a zombie apocalypse,’ because I’m a big fan of the original Dawn of the Dead and in that they holed up in a shopping mall because that was seen as a symbol of the times. And I thought, ‘Yeah, I bet somebody does that’. And nobody did. So I ended up having to write it, which, frankly took ages. And my arm hurts.”

The five-part series airs later this month on E4.

First up, there’s the viral-style email sent out by PR company Holler. It arrived in my inbox today and reads: “Check out this extreme Big Brother Violence spotted during a live feed at unseenscreen.com – seriously disturbing! Only watch it you have a strong stomach.”

At pretty much the same time, E4 emailed journalists with invitations to the Dead Set – cos that’s what it’s called – press launch, to be held on Wednesday 8 October.

Oh, and one more link: you can visit the actual site here.

Firstly, that unlike the previous few years, E4′s schedules haven’t been cleared to make way for live coverage from the house, with only an hour’s worth of shouting peaking through in the middle of a weekday afternoon, then through the night footage of them either sleeping, trying to sleep, being drunk, or doing some more shouting. Secondly, the channel has suddenly seen fit to begin broadcasting one of my favourite series of this past decade, the Emmy Award-winning Gilmore Girls , with the same daily episode appearing at 8:50am and 11:30am.

Gilmore Girls began in the US late in 2000 and quickly became one of the highest rated shows on network television. The premise sounds twee and horrible. It’s about the relationship between a single mother and her daughter – the daughter having reached the age the mother was when she gave birth. They live in a small town. The daughter, Rory who’s smarter than everybody, is going through the usual teen angst about not being the most popular girl in school and fancying some boy. Her mom, Lorelai, is the manager of a hotel and has her own issues dealing with her own – up until recently – estranged mother.

I was hooked after the second minute of the first episode.

A woman, who we later discover is Lorelai, walks across the street. On the soundtrack is There She Goes by The Las. Which is a bit of a cliche, but keep watching. The woman walks into a coffee shop and approaches the counter. The owner won’t serve her coffee. He’s cutting her off. She pleads with him and eventually he relents. Somewhere in there I realise that it’s being played as though she’s a junkie and he’s her dealer. Then I remember that one of the few things most TV producers (and Sixpence None The Richer when they covered the song) also miss is the fact that There She Goes is reputed to be about heroin. “The racing through my veins” lyric being a dead giveaway. At which moment I realise this show is intertextual. It selected the music and then played a scene based on the audience being able to understand a really, really zetgeisty pop culture reference. Wow.

Then the real dialogue begins to flow between the woman and her daughter and it’s funny. Not in a forced, sitcom, stream of punchlines way, but like a 1940s screwball comedy, reams of smart dialogue. Apparently each script for a 40 minute episode ran to eighty and it shows. I’ll say it again. It’s really, really funny. At one point, the dynamic between mother and daughter is compared to the Iran-Contra affair. This is one of those occasions when the premise of a show and its potential plotlines are transcended by the script, the performances, the direction, the editing and the production. It doesn’t treat the audience like idiots, yet manages to be accessible. Just look at this mile long memorable quotes page at the imdb.

It feels authentic. It has realism. People pay for taxis. They have snappy arguments that don’t mean anything in the long term. People have to catch a bus to get places. But there’s a weird undercurrent of darkness too. Something that isn’t being said. It’s Capraesque that way. Everything seems sweetness and light but … It’s set in a Bedford Fallsian town and you really get the sense of a community trying to be a what a community should be like. One of the (very) few problems I always had with Dawson’s Creek was that you never felt that there was anyone living in the place outside the main cast. Stars Hollow is teeming with people, people saying hello to each other even if (and this is important) they’re not a massively important element of the plot of the week.

The show eventually ran for seven seasons, the first six of which were largely written by creator Amy Sherman-Palladino (before an unresolved contract negotiation led to her and her husband leaving the series), aided by the likes of Jane Espenson, a Buffy alumnus who would go on to write Battlestar Galactica. It has wobbles here and there, apparently in the later seasons which I haven’t had a chance too see yet. But the first three seasons are as good (in their own way) as any of the imported series which have tended to be lauded over here and if this had been broadcast in a prime time slot I’m sure it would have been mentioned and remembered along with the likes of ER or Desperate Housewives (even though its certainly more entertaining than that). Instead it’ll hopefully build a loyal following in these early slots, even if it deserved much better treatment.

One of the best moments of the series came when one of the contestants wangled her way on to Des and Mel to demonstrate her entirely fictional “Lion Therapy” courses, only for the item to be rejected at the last minute by Des O’Connor, who’d refused to wear the lion mask she’d brought along, lest it mess up his “hair”. She did however, end up on This Morning, being quizzed by a bemused Phillip Schofield.

It’s also been satisfying to see two contestants independently end up as guests on The Joan Rivers Position, thus exposing So Television’s clearly quite hopeless production team – but fortunately they never make an issue of that aspect of the show. Nobody ever refers to “media terrorism” here.

They clearly frontloaded the good stuff at the start of the series – kicking off with the infamous “Kelly Homes” tattoo incident. But even if the hoaxes are largely now restricted to Points West and London Tonight, it’s great to see that absurd “and finally” you remembered about someone setting up a company enabling Fatima Whitbread to come to your house for dinner being revealed as a scam.

Presenter Alex Zane is surely the indie Alan Partridge, and does that thing of speaking entirely in inverted commas, but he’s likeable enough, and even the presence of Ed Hall and Ian Hyland on the judging panel (the weakest element of the show) can’t really spoil things. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that Emma Fitch (“Fitchmeister!”) wins, following her sterling performance as a robot dancer on Dick and Dom, not least because of all the footage of her working in a Teddington off-licence.

Such is the majesty of Curb Your Enthusiasm. So much is crammed into each half hour that the thought of having to sit through it a second time to properly take in all the throwaway gags and nifty plot twists is not something to regret but to relish. Even before each episode is finished you’re anxious for the moment when you can rewind the tape and start from the top once more.

That’s quite a remarkable achievement, certainly for a US comedy series. But it’s all the more impressive given how those painstakingly constructed plots are not only carried off with such ease and consummate charm by the cast, but have also arrived on screen in the form of almost wholly improvised scenes. This lot are making it up as they go along, having a great time, and it’s still genius!

Saying that, it’s likely the return of Curb Your Enthusiasm will have passed most of the viewing nation by. Promoted in this country from day one as an acquired taste, the programme has never been in a position to garner massive ratings or even cumulative critical appeal. Perhaps that’s not surprising – after all, a sitcom whose main callings cards can, if so desired, be depicted as an obsession with extreme obscenity, TV taboos (incest, paedophilia, blasphemy) and downright amateurish photography is clearly, even today, an inflammable proposition for most broadcasters.

But at the same time its core elements can also be ticked off as an unrestrained celebration of accidental misfortune, the comic potential for misunderstanding, and an individual struggling through a world dead set on making his life a misery: themes as ancient as the written word. And herein lies a clue to the show’s brilliance. Anyone can in theory identify with its central character Larry David and his desperate tactics to avoid embarrassing social situations, or to call in tricky favours – or even to engineer petty retribution on a close associate. Anyone would love to be able to have Larry’s ability for killer one-liners, on-the-mark put-downs, the guts to howl outraged complaints at the smallest thing, and the intelligence that sees people and situations for what they really are. Few of us, though, would ever dare to do so in real life.

It’s certainly asking the viewer to make a large leap in their perception of how rich celebrity Californians have to go about their business. The show does foreign audiences no favours, being littered with American cultural jargon and numerous special guests. On top of all this, the way in which Curb Your Enthusiasm turns the everyday into the extraordinary in such an ostensibly unfettered, unselfconscious manner (you’ll never hear “cunt” used more often in a sitcom) can only have hastened its acquisition of cult credentials.

But like all programmes that attract and sustain loyal if tiny audiences, there’s an exclusivity about it that seems to work in its favour. Maybe it was just as well there have only ever been three episodes shown on terrestrial television. When Curb Your Enthusiasm debuted in the UK last year on BBC4, it immediately helped that channel turn from a largely downbeat, cheerless ghetto into a much more dynamic and addictive endeavour. Now it’s been snapped up by E4, however, and you can’t help feeling the Beeb were very unwise to let it go. It’s doubtful it can enact the same magical influence upon its new home, chiefly given that E4 has never had any coherent identity, even a downbeat, cheerless one. Where next for BBC4′s comedy output?

In the meantime there are 10 brand new helpings of Larry and co to savour over the next few months. If you’ve never watched Curb … before, the start of this series is as good an entry point as any, especially as there’s to be a loose overarching theme to this run: Larry’s involvement in a restaurant business, in which he’s decided to invest along with other celebrity friends. It’s a hugely unlikely conceit upon which to hang his weekly dose of escapades, but it’s also a resolutely typical one, being redolent of many a scenario he sort of just blunders into knowing nothing whatsoever about, but which he immediately seeks to commandeer for his own ends.

Indeed, one of the highlights of this opening episode was the incongruous yet hilarious sight of Larry purporting to “chair” a discussion with his fellow investors – all of whom clearly knew far more about catering than he – about the menu (“I will not be giving you any money if you serve kebabs”), the service (“every table should have a bell on it”) and even the uniforms. “I was put in charge of uniforms,” he later reported to his wife Cheryl, “this is something that I’m very interested in!”

Larry out of his depth, seeking to impose his own system of values and prejudices onto others, is one of Curb‘s great recurring themes. You can’t help but warm to his valiant attempts to talk even the most stubborn of opponents round to his way of thinking – after all, if he believes he’s right, why shouldn’t? It’s mirrored by another habitual element of the show, where a supporting character that Larry has wronged is merited the opportunity to seek unexpected revenge, usually through another quirk of fate that has left him in some demeaning situation. Here it was a dentist, his invitation to dinner rubbished by a horrified Larry (“that’s the end of this dentist … everybody’s got to get together … the whole world’s got to get together”) before finding his reluctant guest seeking urgent treatment after being hit in the mouth by a baseball bat wielded by Ted Danson’s daughter.

The means by which Larry found himself receiving such a ludicrous injury, and why he was then more concerned by the blood stains on his new shirt than his missing teeth, all flow from the programme’s greatest strength: its structure. The complex yet utterly natural, freewheeling feel to the plots harks back to the very best of Fawlty Towers or One Foot in the Grave, in the way seemingly inconsequential incidents return to play a hugely significant role in proceedings. Hence the very first scene of this episode, involving Larry innocently tossing an apple core into a neighbour’s bin, supplied the perfectly-timed dénouement in the very last scene. This might be merely a variance on the kind of crude signposting that underpins most mainstream US comedy, but it’s a hundred times more entertaining for being so cunning and executed in such low-key fashion.

In fact, this series opener had almost everything you’ve come to look for and expect in a textbook Curb episode, from Larry trampling all over the feelings of a bereaved friend to getting involved in an undignified comical punch-up, scrambling around on the floor and flailing like a girl. As time’s gone on and these signature elements have become more obvious, the programme feels like it’s got funnier. There are certainly far more laugh-out-loud moments than in early episodes, partly, no doubt, because we’ve become attuned to all these ingredients, and partly because – well – even Larry’s face is somehow funny now.

It might be into its third series here, and shortly to embark on its fifth in America, but Curb Your Enthusiasm is no less fresh and sublime than when it first began. From the most modest of premises, and really the most flimsy of conceits, a sequence of expertly synchronised and mutually dependant plots continue to spin. Against a backdrop of equally inspired and quirky incidental music, chaos usually reigns by the time the 30 minutes are up, but it’s all happened so perfectly, so naturally, and with the most contrived events imaginable somehow acted out in the most uncontrived way, you’re left bowled over with joy.

Quite simply, television doesn’t get much better than this.

President Bartlet’s White House used to be a place you’d have longed to be able to work in. Now it’s more likely somewhere you’d happily run a mile from. The West Wing‘s sincere, coherent, meticulously mapped-out storylines and characters, executed and sustained with audacious, sometimes neurotic, precision, have been almost completely junked. Taking their place have come abrupt excursions into somebody’s hitherto irrelevant and deeply boring private life, or poorly-delivered smug one-liners. Simultaneously the number of combustible set-piece crises have been stepped up, increasingly taking the guise of an unsubtle cliffhanger clumsily tacked on the end of an otherwise staid and uneventful episode. Virtually all the show’s long-term trademark themes and obsessions have also been ditched: the President’s all pervasive and once-worsening MS never mentioned, a recent illegal assassination of a Middle Eastern potentate and subsequent US military occupation seemingly ancient history, the Vice-President’s resignation from a sex scandal forgotten forever.

Instead, we’re now faced with a world where people act in totally contrary ways from one week to the next, contradict themselves through their words and actions in the space of one episode, and look as if they all hate each other and the very place they fought their political lives to occupy. From this, a terrible sense of insignificance has come to infect the bones of the show. After all, if even The West Wing‘s cast and crew don’t seem able to take things seriously anymore, the programme’s not worth sticking with even – as proposed on OTT this time last year – out of routine, let alone respect.

It probably makes for a jumbled mess to the casual viewer, a thorough rubbishing of everything for the long-term fan, and no small nonsense all round. But if the present series of The West Wing, the fifth in its history, is vying for the title of worst to date, sizing up whether it’s happened by chance, or conspiracy, is even more depressing. Because there’s a strong case for laying blame not with the programme’s numerous battery of script associates, consultants and staff writers, but the executive hierarchy of Warner Brothers, specifically the ones who engineered the resignation, or sacking, of key personnel Aaron Sorkin and Thomas Schlamme.

Sorkin had created The West Wing, penned the bulk of its scripts, and was executive producer along with Schlamme (who also directed the majority of its episodes) and John Wells. For reasons best known to themselves, Warner endorsed the departure of the pair, and at a vital moment in proceedings: the end of the fourth series, one that had seen The West Wing struggle through superfluous plot strands and character overload to climax in an ambitious storyline involving the kidnapping of the President’s daughter. As ever, the exact circumstances surrounding the exit of Sorkin and Schlamme were and still are a mystery (Sorkin’s brush with the law over cocaine abuse supposedly a factor), but the removal of two of the three people who played the most part in setting and sustaining the programme’s agenda and tone was always going to portend change. And doing it in a manner suggestive of panic, and at a point when you’d have thought the show’s big guns were needed more than ever, was always going to portend trouble.

So John Wells has been in sole charge of this series, and it’s sorely tempting to accuse him of letting his preference for emotion-led, visual stunt-based drama, patented in his other job as executive producer of ER, run amok. Certainly a sense of things playing out in real time, and of revelations having real consequences which made themselves felt in a deeply resonant way through a neatly-constructed subplot or a slow-burning quirk in a character’s personality, has all but disappeared. The kidnapping, which had prompted a constitutional showdown leading to John Goodman taking temporary charge of the White House, was laughably wrapped up in five minutes and has been barely spoken about again. Ironically Goodman’s tenure in the Oval Office, advance news of which had carried an air of desperation, was quite good fun, not least because he displayed the kind of bravado and intensity Martin Sheen used to bring to the role of the President but is now all too scarce.

Yet it’s this question of character portrayal that also exonerates John Wells of complete responsibility for The West Wing‘s prevailing poor form. Virtually all the seasoned cast have been turning in appallingly lazy, will-this-do performances this series. Perhaps it’s disillusionment with exchanges like “You think James Madison ran this Presidency off a message calendar?” “Yes.” It’s unlikely anybody could bring a sense of excitement to lines like “The First Lady’s got some last minute budget requests.” Even still, there used to be a conviction to the way the central characters carried themselves on camera, one that made all those signature fast-paced conversations buzz and crackle, and in the process rendered even the lamest of dialogue forgivable. That’s gone now, replaced with a bunch of people behaving as if they’re tired with their roles, lapsing into cliché at the first opportunity and, most irritating of all, content to wander in and out of context with each passing scene.

Ultimately we’re left with a group of decidedly mean-spirited, jaded-looking caricatures who it’s impossible to like, engaged in a free-for-all exchange of abuse and outlandish plot twists. Everyone was nasty in this week’s episode – a dramatic strategy not in itself a crime by any means, but one made to look hollow and pointless due to it happening for no reason, completely without precedent, and representing an ill-explained inversion of the characters’ entire history and motivation. “She has to be here to want things – and you don’t have to be here at all,” the President snapped at his wife’s assistant. “Are we surprised our polls are down?” wailed CJ. “How many months are we going to spend making calendars?” moaned Toby’s deputy. Grouchiest of them all was the usually sage-like Chief of Staff Leo McGarry. “We are here to serve the country,” pleaded CJ, to which Leo hissed, “We are the country.” A TV programme like this, with no heroes, not even anti-heroes, is simply not worth bothering with.

Once this show illuminated and celebrated politics and the business of democracy. So far this year it’s ridiculed, abused and generally disowned those pursuits, in the process mocking much of its own past and serving notice on its own future. Next week we’re promised the sight of Josh yelling hysterically at the imposing façade of Capitol Building, “Do you want a piece of me?” It could once be claimed that, to paraphrase, if The West Wing looked like changing anything – either to do with politics or television – someone would abolish it. Now it’s perfectly happy to see through that particular task by itself.

The West Wing is in a trough. At the moment it reels wildly between any one of a dozen or so concerns, which themselves no longer take the form of thought-provoking expositions or craftily paced arguments but instead resemble almost lazy and half-defined efforts at point-scoring or shooting at open goals. What used to be an ever-present atmosphere of rigorously plotted tension and menace has ended up dispersed amidst great blundering plot revelations and, perhaps most unlikely of all, sickly emotional outpourings. It’s all a very long way from what this programme was doing just a couple of years ago, when it made merry with clichés and conventions in an audaciously blatant fashion and rustled up some of the most unpredictable TV drama around.

The decline has not been sudden. For some time now the show has dared viewers to accept it has the right to take itself off on tangents of its own choosing, even if that means virtually ignoring all the foundational work put in to date to create a palette of challenging, exciting people and ideas. The key moment was the climax to the second series, shown in this country on Channel 4 just 12 months ago. This took the form of an almost operatic mix of grand locations and tortured self-expression, and ended up such a devastating sensory ride you sort of wanted it to go on for ever – a spiral of enticing implications and speculations that needed no resolution. Everything was funnelled towards a final dénouement, where the President was scheduled to announce if, in the light of confirming his hitherto-secret Multiple Sclerosis, he was to run for a second term in office. Lightning flashed, crowds jostled, faces were flushed. The camera faded on Bartlet about to deliver his answer.

You kind of hoped there was the outside chance the show’s creators would defy probability and condemn The West Wing to a brutally short-term life span. As it was the near-inevitable happened, and so began the long haul towards re-election. This week’s episode, a whole series and a half later, marked the arrival at long last of polling day and the cue for what could’ve been another watershed moment in the programme’s history. But instead of a mouth-watering epic of, say, bleak political realism and thrilling personal confession, all we got was a deeply unsatisfying jamboree curiously devoid of feeling that really made you sorry Bartlet had, by the end of it all, won.

It’s now clear the business of driving the show to that point where Bartlet had to say publicly he’d run for office again, rather than the matter of him actually saying it, actually conspired to help tip The West Wing into such a precarious state. The episodes immediately in the aftermath of his declaration smacked of a feeling akin to that of being winded: on the back foot, unnaturally disabled, incoherent. It felt like all the energy invested in levering the programme up to one particular point of dramatic consequence – and a fantastic one at that – meant there was nothing left in reserve to follow through with anything of note, let alone sustain that same level of exhilaration.

In turn along came a messy procession of new spin doctor-esque characters that were never properly introduced, and plotlines that spun off into dark corners rarely to be seen again. Rather than the broad sweeping canvas of series two, or even the neat, perfectly-formed playlets of series one, The West Wing did something it had never ever done before: rambled. Scripts felt untidy and last minute. Characters behaved implausibly for a bunch of people that’d been on TV almost non-stop for two years. What substance there was within episodes was repeatedly obscured by side-stories involving staff relationships and endless personality clashes, rather than, as once had been the case, going hand in hand with illuminating, enhancing secondary subplots.

Again, the very fact all this was going on, and being allowed to go on by the programme’s famously protective production team, was the most curious dilemma of all. The West Wing has always been unpredictable – indeed, a playful manipulation of a viewer’s preconceptions of life inside the White House has remained perhaps the show’s one enduring defining quality. But you never dreamed proceedings would veer so far off the rails as it came to do towards the end of series three (aired on Channel 4 earlier this year), with all trace of the trademark big political picture exchanged for endless scenes of the previously steely press secretary CJ Craig debating the contents of her wardrobe, and the sight of the erstwhile rakish deputy chief of staff Josh Lyman squabbling with his girlfriend amongst the bedclothes.

The upshot was that, until this week, what had been earlier been established as the notional fulcrum of The West Wing‘s existence – a capable President under threat from afflictions not of his own making – disappeared completely. Now, at the point of his re-election, that same scenario has finally been re-introduced, but almost as an afterthought. We saw a couple of moments where Bartlet’s hands started shaking, and his secretary dropping hints about him not being able to remember who he’s phoned. It was useful to be reminded of the President’s condition, and how it might manifest itself more forcefully in years to come. But the almost throwaway manner in which it was done compounded the feeling that here was a programme brought sadly low by a lack of focus, a wayward script and the absence of any sense the show’s makers know just what they want their characters to be doing in the next scene, let alone the next episode.

Even with a subject like a national election to play with, The West Wing can’t seem to rekindle the fire and energy of its earlier years. With the Republican opposition having virtually conceded defeat in last week’s story, all that was left was to see how the Bartlet team adapted to the responsibilities of four more years in office. Would we get a study of triumph out of adversity, or a sober meditation on the awesome task that lay ahead? As it turned out, neither. The team didn’t even seem that bothered, and by extension it was desperately hard to feel that enthused or even mildly interested by the implications of what was happening on screen.

Despite all this the outlook isn’t entirely gloomy. Not only did this episode deliver The West Wing a second term, it also planted the seed for Rob Lowe’s departure from the cast. With his character off to become a congressman in California, hopefully his former colleagues will be able to benefit from not being constantly upstaged and undercut in every other scene. As for Lowe’s replacement, the omens look good: a nerdy campaign manager with the requisite predilection for talking insanely fast but with a depth and humanism his predecessor never had. The dull anonymous spin doctors have also disappeared, plus there’s evidence the show’s recovered some of its wit, demonstrated chiefly in a nicely staged pre-title sequence depicting Josh visiting a polling booth and being accosted by a host of Democrat voters who’d all spoiled their ballot papers, but who in reality were an acting troupe hired by communications director Toby Ziegler as a practical joke.

The show’s not beyond salvaging, then, nor is it in any way cursed by a cast who get lost amongst the deluge of words and contrary plot twists. If anything the reverse is true, with the actors often going a long way to save the series from the kind of slow-motion dismemberment you feel is only just around the corner. Still, the prospect of what happens next is both intriguing and unsettling – after all, the possibility that you’re about to watch one of your favourite TV dramas unravel into an embarrassing amateurish free-for-all before your eyes doesn’t exactly make tuning in an experience to relish. So The West Wing remains a programme with which to keep a regular appointment, albeit more out of routine than respect. Besides, you never quite know where it will dare to go next. John Goodman joins the cast in a few months time. To find out just what on earth that’s all about is, in itself, worth one hour of your time every week.

“Big Brother is getting tougher this year!” announced a slightly jaded-looking Davina McCall at the outset, and one might have hoped for a return to the raw, urgent ethos of the first series as opposed to the more prefabricated and rather too easy-going (aside from the oleaginous Stuart and hyped-up, highly strung Penny) spectacle of last year. However Davina’s statement was immediately a little hard to square with the new flashy house set in the environs of Hertfordshire’s Elstree studios, complete with swimming pool and pebble duvet covers.

Big Brother stood out as an entity very much aware of itself and its viewers and as such the induction of the new group of guinea pigs and the ease in which they slotted into their predesignated roles seemed to connote a certain cynicism and the vague feeling that this time around the show was taking the piss – selecting contestants with little individuality who could be easily flattened out into banal archetypes. Kate was the love interest and unlike Mel, her audition tape had already covered the bases that she was a “girl’s girl” who appealed to the boys thus immediately signifying her as a strong candidate for the eventual winner. Spencer was the laconic alpha male, Jonny the comic relief, Alison the larger-than-life “character” à la Caggy or Bubble (thus ensuring her early eviction). Adele came across as another Anna in the making, astute, self-possessed and determined not to sell herself out to the cameras and upon viewing Jade’s audition video it was obvious that the producers were going for the Helen “dim but lovable” gambit once more. The fact that the two obvious mould-breakers – Sandy the dour Civvy Street personal shopper and Lynne, the mature student who transmogrified into a carping fishwife with a drink in her hand – were also the least likeable did not inspire confidence. Whilst the first week did offer some points of interest – Sunita being the first British contestant to leave the house of her own accord, a budding romance developing between Adele and Lee, and Jade’s hysteria upon realising that her housemates would be deliberating whether to boot out herself or Lynne was an uneasy taste of things to come – it was strangely devoid of the similar curtain-twitching appeal of its predecessors. Big Brother 3‘s initial defining quality was its ironed-out blandness.

Following on from Claire and Josh, Sunita’s replacement Sophie brought similar gravitas to the household, establishing herself as being basically “nice” but not much more than attractive sofa decoration. Nevertheless, the surprise dual departures did appear to kick-start events in the house. Male model Alex initiated a one-man crusade for cleanliness and proper hygiene, delivering a speech that most students would have heard when one of their new housemates turned out to be a complete control freak, and one which only served to alienate his fellow contestants. Effectively distanced from the others and finding solace in an oddly matched friendship with Sandy, the fastidious, pedantic Alex soon developed a bizarre comedic appeal in his clashes with the others. Fault-lines and cliquey relationships seemed to be forming in a similar manner to the initial boys vs girls divide early in the first series. Jonny and his band of happy campers (PJ, Kate, Spencer and Alison) on one side and a more cerebral faction (Sandy, Alex and Adele) on the other, with Lee and Jade floating in between as nominations preyed heavily on the housemates’ minds.

It was gratifying to see that instead of blithely booting out the most fascinating housemate up for eviction as had been done with Sada and Penny in previous years, the British populace exercising some savvy judgement and sacrificing Alison on the altar in order to exacerbate conflict in the house. Whilst it was sad to say goodbye to the jovial Alison, it was intriguing to witness the effect her departure had on the fractured community. Alex and Sandy gaining ground, and the realisation on the part of Spencer, Jonny and Kate that their clique might not be as popular as they thought.

If a primary concern of the second series was to entice the housemates into having sex hence the presence of the “den” (brilliantly parodied in Dead Famous, where the contestants are assigned the task of building their own Indian sweatbox), then this time Big Brother moved to sow seeds of conflict between the group, unveiling the most striking innovation of the third series. Derived from the American version of Big Brother, the “divide” split the house into two separate “poor” and “rich” areas, where one group would make to do with outside washing and cooking facilities as well as basic rations, and the other would live in comparative luxury on a £400 shopping budget. Despite the somewhat arbitrary nature of the selection process (the first five housemates to throw a ball through a basketball net – followed by games of darts and musical chairs), here at last was the gruelling test in group dynamics so sorely lacking from the second series, splitting up the established cliques and forcing the housemates to form new alliances as they survived the week.

A few weeks down the line, Big Brother‘s offer to remove the divide by setting the group a task of answering trivia questions was another well-intentioned conceit, obliging the housemates to actually work to achieve their objectives. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was the inmates on the poor side who came across the best, being united in adversity and obliged to pool their resources. Certainly, the bandana-clad Alex appeared to be in his element during his “poor” week preparing chickpeas and tending to the outside stove. Sandy, however, was singularly underwhelmed at being stuck on the rich side with his enemies Jonny and Kate. Increasingly disillusioned with the banality of his housemates and the whole Big Brother experience, he took to the house roof and made his great escape. Despite being a forthright presence in the house, nothing quite became Sandy as much as his exit. Either a brilliantly conceived stunt or sheer shallow attention seeking, Sandy’s escape duly highlighted the largely unexciting events in the house so far, reaching a nadir when Jade drunkenly pleasured PJ under the covers in the “poor” bedroom. Compare and contrast with Paul and Helen’s more gentle, credible and palatable flirtations during the previous series. With allegations across the tabloids that the great taboo of sexual relations had finally been broken in the third series, it was a further depressing sign of Big Brother pandering to the lowest common denominator.

With Sandy’s flight and the ejection of Lee (easily the most nondescript housemate), BB3‘s assortment of dramatis personae was further extended by the arrival of the speciously upper class Tim. A genuine product of the Thatcher generation, no sooner had Tim had his feet under the table than the British public had found another figure to love to hate. As Tim sat in the diary room delivering his party political broadcasts to the nation, he came across as self-deluded and petulant. Here indeed was a housemate we could legitimately dislike purely due to his personality rather than behaviour amplified by the editing team. If BB2‘s Stuart had at least been a loving family man, then Tim lacked any such redeeming qualities. The fourth week was mainly focused on the rival elements in the house, as the “rich” and “poor” schism came to a head. The “champions” of each side, Spencer and Alex, faced eviction and fingers were poised on mobiles for the hottest head-to-head since Amma and Paul. Spencer, who had curried favour with his sly sense of humour and rebellious streak (being the first housemate to receive a disciplinary “strike” from Big Brother), was the one to go. True to the semi-iconoclastic status constructed for him during his time in the house, he proved to be an endearingly uncooperative, monosyllabic interviewee for Davina. However, with the clash of the titans now over, there seemed to be little point in continuing to watch as Alex now appeared to have a clear run. Events in the house were however to take a darker, shocking turn.

The unprecedented faction-led bitchiness of series three came to a height during the fifth week with Adele and Jade forming an unholy trinity with Tim and singling out Sophie for some horrifically petty nastiness. Coming into the house at a later stage had immediately put Sophie at a disadvantage with no discernible game plan. Never properly accepted into the community as a whole, she had instead formed individual relationships, predominantly with Lee, which had clearly alienated Adele. After Lee’s eviction, Sophie was an isolated figure in the group with no clear friends to cement her position but some definite enemies. Having previously regarded Sophie from a viewing perspective as “the dull one who came in after Sunita”, it was genuinely chastening and sobering to realise that this was in fact a real human being with real feelings who had committed no offence other than to be herself in a game show and who deserved so much better than living in this unpleasant environment.

Once again, BB3 had demonstrated that there are limits to viable voyeurism and Sophie confessing her unhappiness to Jonny in the garden was easily the most distressing moment in the entire run of Big Brother. As Kate nobly stepped in to sort out matters and Sophie and Jade appeared to resolve their differences, it was heartening that Sophie so effectively managed to break the mould of previous intruder housemates and complete her time in the house as a genuinely engaging participant who inadvertently changed the course of the entire third series, precipitating a wave of antipathy towards Jade, Adele and Tim. Although being voted out when up against Jonny, Sophie emerged butterfly-like from the Big Brother cocoon, coming across as pleasant, demure and elegant and her post-eviction interview was one of the best ever. For once, the crowd’s cries of “Get Jade Out!” which, brilliantly, was overheard by the housemates, seemed genuinely righteous.

Before we move on, a few words about Jade Goody. Did she slip through the psych-check net, or was she caught? Jade’s early demeanour and conduct, treading a taut line between endearing immaturity and being plainly aggravating, had failed to win the affection of the viewers leading to her facing the housemates’ vote alongside Lynne. Her subsequent histrionics was the first disturbing warning sign that BB3 would be a bumpy ride. Why had the producers selected a contestant who was rather obviously insufficiently equipped to deal with the trauma of eviction? In the heightened atmosphere of the Big Brother house, Jade has of course been somewhat demonised. Her alcohol-fuelled antics would not look out of place inside any nightclub. Her sustained spiteful diatribes against Sophie, egged on by Alex and Adele’s laughter, appeared to establish Jade as anxious for acceptance by her peers and essentially too childish and dumb to be taken seriously as a force for malevolence.

Jade’s coarseness could be pinned down to an alleged background only glimpsed at in Mike Leigh films, and her overall outlook hinted at a side of British culture best glossed over, but her overall unpalatable personality was thoroughly eclipsed by tabloid journalists out for easy point scoring. The Sun’s Dominic Mohan’s scornful highlighting of Jade’s “porcine” visage duly provoked many broadsheet counter-meditations on the unacceptable face of voyeurism. A walking mass of contradictions and extremities, Jade was stupid but shrewd, pretty but grotesque, overweight yet comfortable with her body shape, ignorant but often surprisingly thoughtful, vocal but never acknowledged, good and bad. In a rare moment of reflection in the diary room, Jade eschewed the use of “tictacs” but instead maintained that she has presented all aspects of her personality and people could either like her or not. In a strictly qualified way, Jade’s “game plan” apparently paid dividends, being greeted by cheers and a hug from Davina on her final night eviction. Whether or not she will look back through the videos and learn anything worthwhile from the experience remains to be seen. Jade bestrides BB3 and will remain rightly or wrongly its most multi-dimensional and perversely charismatic contestant.

With concerns over the baptism of fire Jade might face upon eviction, it was interesting to see the media backtrack and switch its attention to Adele. Attentive viewers would have noted her sounding out her housemates’ opinions of each other and then whispering into the ears of her “minions” Alex and Jade. Dubbed “the black widow” on Internet forums, it is difficult to decide whether Adele was genuinely playing a spider’s stratagem or honestly vacillating between contradictory feelings regarding her housemates. Yet she had already accrued sufficient unpopularity to guarantee her eviction when she was nominated. With the possibility that there may be no other chance to evict Adele before the final week, the public got what the public wanted.

Almost like a Christian thrown to the lions, she stepped out of the house that Friday to be greeted by a hate-filled chorus of opprobrium. Another desperately uncomfortable moment to relegate Big Brother to the status of a sick pantomime, it should however be noted that, unlike Mel and Elizabeth in previous years, the contempt shown for Adele’s magnified in-house conduct was not entirely without foundation. Undeniably, the jeering was totally out of proportion and Adele’s evictee status was chiefly as Jade’s scapegoat, but still her role in the bullying of Sophie should not be forgotten. It should also be remembered that during her fracas with the “minging”, varucca-stricken Jade, she was the first housemate to explicitly threaten (sincerely or otherwise) physical violence – “I’ll fuckin’ deck her!” – upon another. You reap what you sow. It was nevertheless a relief to watch Adele apparently unfazed by it all during her interview, conducting herself with dignity. Easily the most calculating (and therefore the most interesting) participant, Adele’s major failing would seem to have been a Nick-like overestimation of her own cleverness – her alleged game plan would’ve been sound enough, if only BB was not being televised. Certainly, in view of the public perception of her, the sight of Adele discussing Othello’s Iago with Alex shortly prior to getting the boot was pleasingly ironic.

Sadly, with the focused and intriguing Adele gone, BB3 had lost any kind of dramatic impetus. The divide was arbitrarily removed the day after Adele left, resulting in an utter loss of import in the housemates’ activities. The task where two housemates agreed to be up for eviction (decided by the drawing of straws) in exchange a video message from their loved ones was utterly pathetic, given that they would shortly be seeing their families anyway and came across as a gimmicky stay of execution for Jade. It was hard to really care as PJ was the next contestant to be spat out of the Big Brother machinery since the aspiring solicitor had made precious little genuine contribution. His sharpness with Jade was later overshadowed by Alex’s drunken vindictiveness and the assertion that he had “rumbled” Adele, being the first to nominate her, was spurious. It was in fact Alison who had first posited the possibility of a duplicitous Adele in her eviction interview. With Jonny now running the show with drinking games, his habit of manhandling the two women in the house disquietingly suggested a closet misogyny that went far beyond a joke. If anything, his mordant bleakness whilst interned on the poor side had been rather more amusing. Alex and Kate were chiefly content to Follow The Van and Jade was now relegated to a faintly grating background noise, comprehensively ridiculed by her housemates. As in previous years, the final few weeks were characterised by a perfunctory, disengaged air. The sole entertaining aspect of waiting for it all to end was to see Tim pontificating in the diary room knowing he would shortly get his comeuppance. When Tim was finally evicted however, his apparent ability to laugh at himself when presented with chest-shaving footage and his hollow bravado facing the booing crowd did merit at least some grudging respect.

It was a welcome relief as the final night finally arrived as it had all become frankly tedious. Whilst one might have expected Alex to have attracted the “girlie” vote that previously secured victories for Craig and Brian, the identity of the winner had, in retrospect, been well signposted. Whereas Alex, Jonny and Jade had all experienced difficulties in the house that influenced their outside popularity, Kate had remained stable throughout, coping with being on the poor side for three weeks with good humour, winning respect for being willing to sacrifice her place on the rich side to reunite the group and becoming a progressively stronger candidate. Her presence in the house somewhat analogous to that of a female Craig, the £70K once more went to the most easily accessible, least ambiguous housemate. Sadly, no one in the third series has truly matched the charisma of previous leading players such as Nick, Anna, Brian, Helen or even second division contenders like Sada, Tom, Narinder or Dean. It seems overall that on the basis of personal appeal, the real winners of BB3 would have to be the likes of Alison, Sophie (who both emerged from the house with good reputations intact) and of course Sunita, who had the good sense to wise up and get out fast.

It would no doubt be ridiculous to compare this run of Big Brother to say, the rotten to the core sensibility of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s infamous film Salo – 120 Days of Sodom, which pushes boundaries of good taste and challenges through alleged allegory issues of audience complicity and voyeurism played out in a confined setting. Yet in its own circumscribed way, BB3 has provided thoroughly shallow, queasy viewing, trading almost exclusively on the grim spectacle of friction and full throttle misanthropy. Amidst the glitter and histrionics of the tawdry final night, it’s too easy to forget the sight of Sophie reduced to tears by in-house bitching, an inebriated Jade being tricked into stripping naked by her housemates and the unsavoury undercurrent of Jonny’s drunken horseplay. This series has indeed offered precious little moments of genuine psychological insight beyond fuelling the fire of media manipulation and misrepresentation, highlighting the nasty underbelly of “reality” TV. The fact that this review ultimately constitutes more of a chronological overview as opposed to being genuinely analytical is telling in itself.

It is impossible to deny that Big Brother has been a magnificent achievement for Channel 4. If the first series was about setting out the stall, benefiting hugely from its comparative freshness, then that’s not to say that the follow-ups didn’t offer anything of merit. The second series showcased the virtues of generally positive collectivity and the third depicted the pretence of community amidst thinly disguised tension and nastiness. It’s difficult to conjecture what a fourth run would genuinely bring to the format. All angles and possible trajectories for a community of housemates have now been comprehensively explored. Davina is allegedly thinking of moving on to new projects. Let’s hope they have the sense to quit while they’re ahead.

As the notion of “multi-platform media” begins to become more than just a phrase buzzing around London pubs at lunchtime E4 has self-consciously led the push to blur the edges between TV and the internet. Its on-demand coverage of Big Brother and play-along-at-home comedy quiz Banzai are both important steps in shaping the future of interactive TV. Now taking it a step further they’re plundering from the source and championing what was formerly an unambitious comedy website as a TV show in its own right. As a portent of a possible future, it’s not very promising.

Part of E4‘s remit has to be to innovate. Not only must it draw material from new and unusual sources, it must be seen to be doing so. To stay afloat and to continue to serve a notional audience of media-savvy yet counter-cultural twentysomethings E4 has to exhibit some of those facets itself. The internet is the new fanzine-culture, certainly, but more important than that, it’s easy to access. Whereas 10 years ago a TV channel intent on drawing upon grassroots talent would have to make some effort to locate that subculture (and that would mean distasteful things like reading fanzines and maybe – just maybe – writing letters to people) nowadays they’ll get it all in an email entitled “Have a look at this site” sent from a mate who in turn had it sent to him. Yes, there’s still a word-of-mouth element at work here, but all in all the grassroots is suddenly in your face and all too easy to exploit.

Thus, although E4 are bandying about “from the cult website …”, in reality it’s debatable that they’re getting much in the way of kudos at all by exploiting a commodity that’s well-circulated already. Even subs on The Observer are sufficiently au fait with tvgohome.com to insert a mention of it into an article about TV-related websites. Of course, none of that’s a criticism of the site itself, but rather a swipe at E4 and a misplaced notion of pushing the envelope.

That rather sour analysis aside, what of the show itself? Unfortunately it’s not up to much. If we’d played along with the notion that the existence of a TV Go Home programme was innovative in itself, this realisation would have been doubly disappointing. Utilising a format that looked tired when Peter Richardson pressed it into service 10 years ago for The Glam Metal Detectives, TV Go Home attempts to parody modern television culture. Unfortunately the targets it hits are all too obvious (reality TV/hyperbolic kid’s programmes/pretentious discussion programmes/empty-headed celeb-centric shows etc). These are genres that have already been widely ridiculed and which themselves are now common currency exchanged in every derogatory discussion about the quality of TV today. Alongside this TV Go Home takes sideswipes at other barn doors. The “Daily Mail Island” sketch is a case in point. Here TV Go Home ridicules the newspaper’s unseemly right-wing axis. An unsubtle punchline involving gay bashing would surely have told E4′s audience nothing new: The Daily Mail is homophobic and silly. We all knew that. To take a pop at it is far too easy.

If the writing lacks imagination, the playing is worse. None of the performers strike the right note. Parody is a subtle business, and yet here we have a troupe rolling their eyes and baying at the camera. A spoof news report fails to make much of an impact other than to prompt the viewer to wonder just what we’re supposed to make of the hopelessly mannered reporter. Is he supposed to be a parody of something? If so, what? Worst of all has to be Colin Bennett who one has to hope was pressed into service for reasons other than some vague kitsch value he might carry. The nadir is his representation of a game show host which is simply another outing for You Should Be So Lucky‘s Vince Purity. It’s terrible, ham-fisted stuff.

With TV Go Home, E4 are leading the pack and establishing new trends again. Just as it’s become a cliché to say that a television adaptation rarely transcends the source text, E4 are establishing a whole new standard – “It’s not as good as the website”.