Mind you, perhaps an even more healthy use of our energies might be to spend less time trying to categorize the exact nature of Jade’s brand of discrimination, and to instead take a stand against bullying in all of its forms (including accepting that a lot of bullying takes the form of subtle behaviours that are difficult to quantify but are none the less destructive – something that Big Brother has ably demonstrated over the years).

All of this stuff is very difficult to unpick, and besides, it’s beyond the scope of the kinds of things we like to talk about here. One point though that I feel I can obtain some clarity about is just how much of a nonsense it is to hear politicians trotting out this line that Big Brother is simply broadcasting racism as entertainment. Well surely if you want to take that line (which to me seems to betray a lack of any real thought about the issue) then any television drama that has ever explored racism could be accused of doing the same, as could any factual programme that has covered similar ground.

You sense that these politicians have some vague, subconscious notion that in showing the footage of the last week,Big Brother is actually somehow throwing its editorial support behind Jade. But given the public reaction, this is clearly not the case, and I would challenge anyone to cite an example of when Jade and her group’s behaviour has been framed in a positive light. Instead, it seems to me, that the production team has bravely (and probably not entirely without an eye on the viewing figures if we’re being honest) left it up to us to pass judgement on this thorny and emotional issue. Of course tonight is the night on which we deliver our verdict.

The transformation from the character that we were presented with four years ago, to the one that we see today is quite remarkable. Now a bona-fide celebrity in her own right, Jade has become a mature, likeable person who has had to contend not only with all that the press has thrown at her over the years, but also with being confined in the house with her loud, argumentative mother. In a moment of exasperation in the diary room, Jade admitted that for a lot of the time she feels as though she has had to act more like a mother to Jackiey than a daughter.

Jackiey’s behaviour in the house has been strange to say the least. Most of the time she has seemed insensitive, and on occasions downright rude to some of the other housemates (especially in her battles with Shilpa) and it is easy to see why Jade finds herself becoming so frustrated. The other housemates all seemed to have little time for Jackiey as she was so hard to deal with. Nothing was ever straightforward with her, and just about everything seemed to turn into an argument for no good reason.

Hopefully now that her mother has been evicted from the house, Jade can stop worrying about what she might or might not do and come into her own a little more. Jade may not be the most knowledgeable in the world, but she is far from the “stupid” person that we had been led to believe she is by the papers – and she could well go on to triumph in this series.

With the restricted, experimental format of both channel and programme giving him a whole 60 minutes to question his guest, it’s a hark back to “proper” televisual interviewing and has proved for the first time in a generation that famous folk can happily and freely talk about themselves without having to gratuitously plug some project or other.

My argument there may wane a tad as I’m writing this on the back of Lawson’s talk with Jack Dee, as part of “Jack Dee Night” (yes) on BBC4 as the channel sets itself to launch its new audienceless comedy, Lead Balloon, which Dee co-writes, as well as appears in. There have been numerous trailers right through the Corporation – the audio from BBC1 and 2′s promos have also been heard on Radio 1 and 5 Live – with BBC4 pinning much on Dee’s national comic popularity and growing reputation as a decent actor to make their network just that bit more of a choice for the channel-hoppers.

So, naturally, the first 10 minutes of Lawson’s polite gossip with Dee was about the making of the series and Dee’s own feelings as an actor and the writer of a semi-autobiographical sitcom (he stars as a deadpan comic whose career has become too reliant on corporates). But this was only 10 minutes of a one-hour chat on a commercial-free network. Whether Lawson’s guests have had anything to plug or not – and in the main, they haven’t – is only incidental, as proved by the case of Dee, through whom we got a fascinating, candid 50-minute insight into a complicated life and career.

I chuckled and listened intently as Dee – always a favourite comic of mine in any event since I heard his jokes about water supply conservation leaflets on The Mary Whitehouse Experience in 1990 – told of conning his way into sixth form, telling careers advisors he wanted to change the Church of England and being the only career waiter in Covent Garden who wasn’t a RADA undergraduate (but was a dipsomaniac who wrote chronic poetry). Some of it was stuff I dimly recalled from Deadpan magazine a decade ago, but it was still intriguing nonetheless.

Then there was the successful side, and the revelation that Dee only developed his winning dour delivery when he’d decided to give it all up and therefore went into his pre-booked, final gigs with a couldn’t-care-less attitude, and got the biggest laughs he’d ever had. From here we got clips of Paramount City (“A man back by popular demand”, I remember Arthur Smith saying introducing him at the time, and I can believe it when I consider some of the other guff which went on that show) and The Jack Dee Show and the higher ground he gained from winning a British Comedy award for Best Newcomer and then, of course, advertising John Smith’s beer and overpowering the egos of Madames Feltz and Turner to win the inaugural Celebrity Big Brother.

Lawson is a lucky interviewer in that he has a lot of time to fill so he can ask numerous supplementary questions dependant on the initial answer, but as a proper journalist should, he is doing so in the right way. He is respectful to his guests, doesn’t miss anything out, reacts to discomfort in a subject (when Dee said he refused to allow any of his Celebrity Big Brother clips to be re-shown, Lawson moved on) and, most of all, he listens, and listens properly. As a consequence, Dee – not known at all as a difficult interviewee, but certainly a man with a persona which could prompt assumptions – was able to project himself as an articulate and decent chap who isn’t afraid to graft, but also not afraid to reveal the more embarrassing traits of his life and work.

The guest must obviously know that they’re going to be asked about everything, but just maybe they agree to it – even with nothing to plug, like Jilly Cooper, David Baddiel, Terry Gilliam – because they know Lawson will ask them everything in the right way.

Celebrity is a strangely-shaped biscuit whichever way you dunk it. I have found myself cringing at the screen twice lately, once in horror and once in delight, and both times guiltily. Let’s clean up the crap first. Paparazzi (Wednesday 05/01/05, BBC1) is a fly-on-the-turd documentary following the Big Pictures celebrity picture agency, in which sad (mostly) men with telephoto penises scramble and grunt over each other towards the climax of the latest Charlotte Church leaves-pub-after-having-a-drink-or-two exclusive and similar dismal missions.

I have no objection to the premiere/awards/generic-celeb-photo-opportunity assignments. However, there is something sinister as well as tragic about a couple of blokes sitting together in silence in a Ford Focus outside a hotel for hours on end in the hope that they might get a sight of a teenager going to her 18th birthday party (they didn’t). Obviously I have no time for Ms Church or her career, but regardless of her media whoreage even she does not deserve to be stalked by some raincoated fiddler trying to poke his lens up her frock, anymore than a checkout girl should have to put up with a stranger waiting outside Kwik Save at closing time to leer at her. Famous or not, it amounts to the same thing.

As for the man behind the Big Pictures operation, he has progressed from award-winning photo-journalism in the Bosnian war-zone to directing his own empire of showbiz spume. He seems to regard the bodies of famous people as his property, ordering his team to sniff around hotels and family homes, or flash through car windows outside nightclubs in an effort to catch some soap star or pop singer in their anorak or knickers, for the benefit of whatever magazine will pay out. The paparazzi are the oil in the celebrity machine. It all adds up to posh nosh and cheap thrills for Mr Big Picture (clearly a wannabe celeb himself), who presides on his office throne playing with his random cleavage generator, as supplied by the dribbling gang of ex-decorators and lorry drivers who make up his arse-crack squad of photographers.

But why go out looking for celebrities to humiliate when sooner or later they will do it for themselves? Watching an ex-royal servant squirm and chew insects on television is a money-shot beyond any paparazzo’s zoom lens. And so I have to confess to a fair amount of anticipatory pleasure waiting to see which creatures had been dredged up from the murky showbiz canal for the new Celebrity Big Brother. The in(s)ane juxtapositions, the sheer stage-managedness of the whole thing is pure disposable “kitsch and sink” drama. The first night is invariably the best as the trash talent is lovingly unveiled. It’s all downhill from there.

As the desperate cohort stepped onto the ramp I failed to recognise half of them; maybe the programme-makers had to shove some of their own researchers in to make up the numbers and hoped no-one would notice. (The celeb and non-celeb reality shows will finally coalesce into one glutinous mass – it will be a fitting end for such a fleshy genre.) However, there were a couple of jewels in the mud. Germaine Greer is that rare species, an intellectual and an icon. Big Brother is in a sense her natural habitat, a kind of pornographic cultural studies seminar to which she should add some much needed academic rigor.

And then there is Bez. Yes, that’s Bez. Bez …? Jesus Christ, it’s Bez! Sorry, my mind is still trying to assimilate this information. What a trip it must have been, from Happy Mondays’ hallucinogenic freaky dancing mascot to a life of anonymity wandering the moors befriending trapped sheep and living next door to Shaun Ryder (a couple of hopeless illiterate romantics, a kind of hash-smoking Coleridge and Wordsworth), and then into the balmy end-of-the-pier world of Celebrity Big Brother with its surreal repository of models, boy band singers and Brigitte “Tree” Nielsen.

What’s going on? I trust Bez and Grez to make sense of it all between them. Rave on, sorted, emancipation, etc.

In the end it wasn’t anything particularly remarkable or extraordinary that lifted Celebrity Big Brother out of the humdrum; it was a handful of unexpectedly human and subdued scenes that slipped through and caught you unawares.

The turning point was a day or so after Goldie had left. His absence seemed to give the other contestants more room to explore and exploit their circumstances, and in turn become a bit more aware of the game they were playing. The marathon quilting session had already helped create a situation conducive to late night confessions and one on one revelations; now these became more commonplace, further encouraging a sense that at last we were watching something quirky and unusual rather than merely a joyless parade of comedy wigs.

And so at last the programme took on more of an identity, distinguishable from previous Big Brother efforts. Somewhere along the way it was almost as if everyone’s dogged insistence in adhering to a set of unspoken rules and conventions momentarily lapsed. Maybe it was the aftermath of the first eviction, arguably always something of a watershed moment, that did the trick and shook up everyone’s concentration. Certainly the fact it was Goldie who left played a major factor in tipping the course of events away from the precocious and contrived and towards one of an uneasy resolve. From that point on, the mood in the house became stoically chipper, where the desire to bottle everything up was always being overwhelmed by the need to be handwringingly tearful and honest. Out of that came the endless, earnest theorising and analysing from Les Dennis and Sue Perkins, laid on in full for us at home, flipping between the engrossing to the irritating and back again.

It was during the quilting task that we were also able to glimpse more of Anne Diamond’s personality, in particular her attitude towards herself and her very pronounced public reputation. To hear this high-profile figure with almost 20 years exposure in the national spotlight – plus an unending barrage of media criticism and sniping – speaking candidly about her campaign against cot deaths was a genuinely absorbing moment.

Was she aware of the cameras or not? Was it unprompted, or had she been waiting for the right time to raise the topic? Whatever, the fact her responses sounded utterly sincere and self-effacing found a resonance within the otherwise largely sterile feel to the show. From then onwards, Anne became easily the most interesting person in the house, and her eviction at such an early stage was a terrible shame. To have her lose out to Sue, who seemed to spend the majority of her time on screen exaggerating her sassy, neurotic wisecracking credentials, was even more of a disappointment. The following programmes became obsessed with Sue and her mounting dislike of Les, a trend that became rather tiresome, so that eventually you found your sympathies shifting over to Melinda Messenger and Mark Owen. After all, they knew when to shut up, seemed most sensitive to the group as a whole, and accordingly were able to win this viewer’s trust and respect.

But just as various commendable and exciting elements emerged over the course of Celebrity Big Brother‘s final days, so too did more irritations. The obsession with repeating both what we already knew and had already seen became more extreme than ever before. As such huge leaps had to be made whenever we returned to real time, often requiring Davina to sum up a more recent, unaired task and its consequences in three seconds. What we’d witnessed live the night before was fussily recapitulated the night after, and so on to the extent that out of an hour’s worth of nightly screen time only half really merited tuning in for. The result was a sprinkling of choice clips undermined by an overdose of tedium, and the amount of energy invested in going over old ground might have put off as many returning viewers as it did pull in new ones.

This feeling of watching a kind of aimless meander through bits of footage pulled in from all over the place was in stark contrast to the neat and effective reels of “best bits” assembled to pay homage to each latest evictee. Loads of stuff in these montages were from scenes and incidents never ever shown during the main programmes, and they often looked a hell of a lot more fun and intriguing. There were occasional chances to glimpse a bit of it during the shoestring Celebrity Big Brother’s Little Brother, the companion E4 show valiantly held together by Dermot O’Leary who deserves much better than interviewing dream experts. As it was it seemed to be the curse that the high points of the main C4 shows were always flashed past in seconds (riding mattresses down the stairs) while the worst dragged out for minute upon minute (Sue Perkins’ pontificating, Les Dennis’ moaning).

Overall, though, the thing that most saved Celebrity Big Brother from becoming quite the missed opportunity this reviewer so confidently predicted last Friday wasn’t any sudden change of mood or emphasis, or a switch in presentation by the programme makers, or even a toning down of some of the more obvious and predictable elements of the format. It was just that, at the end of the day, and maybe in spite of rather than because of the footage we were shown, those personalities playing the game found the means and recourse to deliver us a half dozen or so moments of truly compelling telly.

They were moments of substance and clarity that will stick in the memory a fair while; they added to our understanding of those people and their celebrity world instead of just confirming our own preconceptions and prejudices. Those scenes in question may have been brief, businesslike or even throwaway – but this just seemed to add to their punch and their power.

So something did come of the programme. Mark Owen climbing into the pool wearing a giant cow head, Les Dennis’ morbid anecdotes about outliving not just Dustin Gee but the duo’s entire coterie of supporting musicians and compères – here at last were the raw materials for those crucial morning after debates and conversations. There may only have been half a dozen moments, but that was enough; and besides, they were certainly half a dozen more than either Big Brother 2 and 3 could offer.

It’s unfortunate that the return of Celebrity Big Brother has coincided with the peak of this year’s obsession with unmasking personalities as “real people”. Whether by placing them in genuinely alien and hostile locations (I’m A Celebrity …) or, conversely, attempting to capture them in their own native environments (The Entertainers), the business of unravelling the enigmas in which contemporary celebrities wrap themselves has moved on from last time the doors of the Big Brother house were swung open. As such it’s almost not enough anymore to simply watch the great and the good fool around trying to bake bread or do their own laundry.

The weather’s not exactly on side either. There’s little that appeals less than drawing the curtains on a cold, rainy autumnal night, switching on the TV, and finding a group of people standing around peering through the curtains at a cold, rainy autumnal night. Placing the show in late November has meant the bulk of the action happens indoors with only rare forays outside to a setting where the image of folk doing nothing takes on a slightly more poetic and substantial aspect.

Indeed, so much of the coverage so far has been framed solely by the four-walled forensic-lab styled décor of the house as to render it painfully boring to look at. The experience is similar in some way to when the “divide” was installed during Big Brother 3 and the visual scope of the programme was immediately undermined. This time, however, the whole spectacle may as well have been sited within a large, isolated sound stage, given the pointlessness of rigging up multiple cameras round a garden where the only notable thing going to happen is that the vegetables die of ground frost.

When the line-up of personalities slated to participate in the first Celebrity Big Brother was revealed to the world, the rather tawdry standing of some of the distinctly non-credible names seemed at first to suggest that nothing but a desperate salute to yesteryear would be in order. In fact, mixing a former member of a boy band with an ex-breakfast television presenter, a glamour-chasing starlet, a TV funny man, a self-consciously stylish “street” icon plus, well, someone else proved to be dynamite. So why doesn’t it feel like it’s working this time round?

There’s a few things that seem to be at fault. Firstly, the nagging sense that everyone is just going through the motions, and of doing the bare minimum to ensure the finished product is recognisably the Big Brother “brand”. So we’ve the trademark cutaways to show someone sniggering while someone else is making an arse of themselves; sequences of personalities alone with their thoughts, like that’s supposed to mean something; plus the way the camera repeatedly and patronisingly picks on a couple of contestants (so far Anne Diamond and Les Dennis) and decides to dwell on them at length as if to prove something significant – i.e. oh, look at them, because they’re older than the rest of the group they must be having a bad time of it.

Underpinning Big Brother‘s veneer of the unrehearsed has always been the creaky monolith of the minutely pre-planned and contrived; but this used to be well disguised by the shock of the new and the innovative. The manner in which the camera and editing orchestrated tension during the early years of Big Brother was pioneering and exciting; now it’s just stale and ineffectual. The programme really needs to shake itself up every 12 months or so to stay fresh and relevant.

This ties in with another flaw: the way the show is choked up with so many rituals and conventions. For instance, where’s the logic that dictates Big Brother must now kick off with a jamboree of hysteria whipped up to accompany six people walking through a door? Nobody cares about watching the celebrities “entering” the house, certainly not enough to justify a whole hour’s television. We want to see them inside and staking out their turf. Yet this boring preamble, forever distinguished by Davina McCall’s inability to present live television out of doors, seems to have become an unnecessary staple element of the Big Brother package.

The idea of having “live” tasks has also been maintained, and once again screws up the show’s pace by turning proceedings into a sequence of sudden bursts of activity rather than a rolling exercise of mounting suspense. Seeing the nominations live remains a bit of a novelty, but this too was botched by the decision to tell the house the names of the potential evictees a matter of seconds later, denying us the chance to see how the contestants dealt with not knowing who was facing the chop. Meanwhile the fact that a big deal is still made about how the house has only got one hour of hot water a day is a joke; if it’s supposed to make us feel intimidated or impressed or awestruck, it just doesn’t register anymore. And enough with the blasted chickens, they were barely amusing three years ago.

Then there’s the celebrities themselves, whose participation has prompted Davina to indulge in more of her patented pointless “off the cuff” outbursts – such as this, just after the conclusion of the nominations on Friday night: “Actually, out of this group, they’re all brilliant, and it’s a shame that anyone has to go – but they do, that’s Big Brother!” Last year the stars seemed more than willing to make the show work for them, be it for some unsubtle career maintenance (Claire Sweeney), exorcising personal demons (Vanessa Feltz) or a superb game of double bluff (Jack Dee). This year, so far at any rate, no-one’s been bothered to attempt anything remotely similar. Nobody’s tried to hijack proceedings, no-one’s got on their soapbox, and worse of all, nobody’s talking back to Big Brother.

In fact, the nearest we’ve come to seeing any kind of life and energy in the house has been courtesy of Mark Owen. The first instance was during the opening night when, on the receipt of some written instructions, he quipped he couldn’t read; secondly, and best of all, was during the live nominations when he quizzed Big Brother over whether his nominations were, in their eyes, suitable. His actions suddenly threw the spotlight onto the production team, who twice were accidentally heard frantically trying to cope with their subject shifting the viewer’s attention away from himself and onto the programme’s mechanics. It was good stuff.

Perhaps the most nagging aspect, though, is the Big Brother‘s context. Right from the start there’s always been a necessary trade-off between artifice and spontaneity, which if done with enough panache the viewer can acknowledge as well as enjoy and join in with. Disrupt that trade-off and things go all awry. Shorn of the overarching spectacle of Comic Relief, which was of course the whole point of the first Celebrity Big Brother and which helped turned it into a national event, there’s too much room this time round to speculate over motive and machinations.

The money from our telephone calls is going to a range of charities but these are rarely mentioned and when they are their names blur into one another. Worse, because the “winner” doesn’t win anything other than the title “Celebrity Big Brother Winner”, it doesn’t feel like the show’s building towards any single definable moment of closure, or a point where the entire effort immediately becomes justified and the viewer gets some payback for all the time (and money) they’ve invested. All that’ll happen is another celebrity will clatter down the ridiculously overlong metal staircase and that will be that.

Hopefully all of this will be proved wrong. Hopefully something absolutely extraordinary will happen between now and next Friday that will turn Celebrity Big Brother into a defining moment of TV in 2002. On present form, however, the entire cavalcade seems set to be remembered only for being another missed opportunity to exploit the notion of having half a dozen famous people locked up in one place and their every move captured on tape. The fact footage was included of Anne Diamond extolling the house for being, of all things, a “holiday camp”, reveals how far the format has come from its humble origins. If that’s how it’s to be from now on then you might as well toss Alan Whicker in as nose-rubbing narrator and be done with it.

At the end of the summer last year, as we considered the preceding 10 weeks of Big Brother, suddenly the high times seemed all too distant and we began to wonder just what it was we’d been buying into.

Questions about the quality of the actual content of the programme were, in some quarters, given voice. These were questions that couldn’t be addressed during the run of the series because then we were all too enmeshed in Big Brother culture: vote, speculate and watch. But afterwards, in that hangover period, there was a feeling of… distrust. The Big Brother experience had been akin to great saleman’s patois, whipping up enthusiasm, making us feel invigorated but leaving us uncertain about what we’d bought once it was over.

Big Brother Night at Christmas intensified this. Outside the game, the contestants were painfully normal. Tom, in particular proved a great disappointment, giggling inanely and in tow to a (presumably C4-appointed) agent, who himself appeared to be just 16, pushed into a Concept Man suit. Craig, meanwhile, expressed disbelief that not everyone wanted to be famous, and turned up handily fixing things on one of those daytime BBC1 lifestyle programmes that are not meant to be watched. Oh yes, we’d had good times with Big Brother but essentially hadn’t it sold us all a dummy?

The anticipation for Comic Relief’s Celebrity Big Brother quickly washed away this essence of hang-over, however, as once again we became compliant to the telly. Trailers on Channel 4 and BBC1 traded on the hidden identity of the contestants, with the publicity batting about names like Robert DeNiro, although we all knew it was more likely to be Roger DeCourcey. But that was okay. That was part of the joke. Instead we keenly waited to find out what it would do to us this time.

When the house roster was finally called, a tepid line-up of talent assembled. Here stood a possible guest list for It’s Only TV But I Like It: Keith Duffy (the boss-eyed one out of Boyzone) being perhaps the most credible coast-to-coast celeb.

So it all started again last Friday night on BBC1, with a strange hybrid of Comic Relief sap, and Big Brother brutality. At this stage, things were uninvolving, but that was to be expected – the peripheral business of Big Brother is nothing without the Game. Each contestant was profiled and a winsome tribute from family and friends followed. Incongruously, a “serious” Comic Relief report barged into proceedings; highlighting the uneasy union of a charity based on empowerment with a TV monolith geared to crush the weak. Still, as an aperitif it was quite successful (and an illustration that as the week progressed, BBC1 was only in for scraps, whilst C4 would gorge on the meat of the programme).

Once we were inside the house, of course, it all came flooding back. The irresistibility of the format is undeniable, and here it was intensified through the lens of (minor) celebrity. Far surpassing the vicarious thrill of looking in on other people’s mundane daily routines was the thrill of looking in on how Anthea Turner tackles her bed linen. Here was a real delight in seeing celebs doing ordinary things.

Almost from the off the customary cat and mouse game that seems to underpin Big Brother kicked in. As the rest of the group socialised, Chris Eubank could be found alone in the boy’s bedroom ostensibly speaking to a mirror, and from time to time holding up photographs to it. From our vantage point (we looked down from somewhere high across the other side of the room) this behaviour seemed utterly eccentric. Of course in his mind’s-eye, Eubank was delivering a piece straight to the camera behind the glass, and to the TV audience at home. Score one for Big Brother then, for using the footage but subverting it completely.

As the week unfolded, however, the regime did gamely concede a few moments, notably to Jack Dee who proved himself to be surprisingly ingenious. In making his last eviction nomination Dee selected Duffy citing that he hadn’t done a “number two” since entering the house. Later on that evening, Duffy announced to all that he had today succeeded in passing a solid. Almost to himself Dee muttered, “I wish you’d told me that before”: a great throw away gag that only worked because Big Brother elected to play along.

But let’s get back to the first few days. Watching the housemates bed in and size each other up made for great viewing and it was here we first got the chance to see exactly how the celebs would interact. Patently, for each of them there was a lot at stake, most particularly Jack Dee whose status as alternative turn (albeit made good) had to be maintained. As it was, he quickly seemed to side with Claire Sweeney and revealed that he’d done a little bit of swotting up on the situation with his informed comments about the house’s reaction to the continuing arguments between Vanessa Feltz and Chris Eubank.

The previous night, however (the first in the house) displayed an astonishing level of naïveté amongst a group of people one could have assumed would have a reasonable level of media savvy. As a drunken conversation about masturbation became more and more explicit a clearly uncomfortable Dee counselled caution, “Do you really want to be saying this?” he asked. Feltz shooed away any concern, blithely stating that “this is for Comic Relief, they won’t show this”. Of course, if anything such a comment ensured the inclusion of the conversation into the final cut.

During these early days it was Chris Eubank who proved to be the most entertaining character. His discourses on the nature of celebrity proved to be superbly pompous, causing the group to corpse behind his back. And of course there was the intrigue of his previous encounter with Keith Duffy, bringing the currency of BB (gossip) into the house itself. Upon learning the results of the eviction nomination, which placed Anthea Turner and himself in jeopardy, Eubank was characteristically ebullient. Turner, meanwhile, seemed pale and a little wretched – we looked closer.

Again, Big Brother was quick in delivering the goods; aside from observing the celebrities at rest we had also been lured to the programme to watch them under pressure. Turner became a little quieter and contemplative, the threat of eviction obviously quite affecting. Better was to come, though.

And so we came upon the evictions, and it was only here that Celebrity Big Brother seemed lacking. When considering the nature of the contestants, it is wholly acceptable they should be spared the walk of shame that previously characterised the eviction process, but it did rather neuter this aspect of the programme. Previously there was an immediacy to the culling of the housemates, which felt like a direct response to your phone call. Celebrity Big Brother instead presented this aspect in retrospect, as a fait accompli. In fact, so underplayed were the evictions Channel 4 even trailed the edition which saw Feltz ousted from the house with the assumption the viewer already knew she was gone (a perhaps realistic nod towards the coverage the programme was receiving, but something of a betrayal of the BB narrative). It would probably be a safe assertion to state that this, above anything else, was the reason for the relatively low turnout in the phone polls throughout the week.

So Eubank was gone with little ceremony, and Dee was stepping up his amusing campaign to subvert the maxims of Big Brother (staging a break-out). The roller coaster rattled on, with the group having to adjust to the loss of one of its own, and finger the next housemate for eviction all within a matter of hours. The required truncation of the format was actually a great benefit, heightening those manufactured moments of tension.

Now it was Dee and Feltz up for eviction. This section probably represented the high point in the week of programmes, with Feltz’s much-celebrated break-down, as she scrawled phrases of despair on the kitchen table and told Big Brother to “fuck off”. It’s great fun to play the amateur psychologist, and even greater to do so based upon the actions of someone off the telly. But as it happens, Feltz was all too keen to take on this role herself.

Perhaps the best single sequence in Celebrity Big Brother occurred later in the episode as she clumsily tried to look for emotional support from Dee, offloading upon the clearly uncomfortable comedian her own muddled diagnosis of her distraught reaction. This was a fascinating collision of worlds, with Feltz genuinely in distress, yet overstepping a distinct boundary by foisting her emotions upon Dee. In turn he was left looking a little standoffish, asking (rather pathetically) “Do you think you’ve learnt anything from being in here?” when patently what his housemate wanted was a hug.

Acquiescing further to the emotionally charged atmosphere Dee began to make a telling admission – “I know I’m an oppressive presence…” – to be undercut by an announcement from Big Brother rousing the housemates to complete their day’s challenge. Here was the best ever encapsulation of what Big Brother is really about, as the machinery continued rolling, regardless of the personal dramas being played out within.

With Feltz on the wane, our focus turned more upon the characters of Keith Duffy and Claire Sweeney. Both entered the house with relatively little baggage as far as we were concerned, whereas Feltz, Turner and Eubank each trailed in with a load of negative publicity and Dee with a level of anticipation as to how he would react.

Duffy and Sweeney, it transpired, both gave a good account of themselves; both highly likeable and pleasant with a great sense of humour. Sweeney’s puerile cockatoo gag (at Turner’s expense) proved an early highlight while Duffy proved to be a continuing amusing presence in the house, regularly eliciting laughs from Dee with his foul language and good-natured jokes.

On the outside, an evicted Feltz expressed her puzzlement at Dee’s conduct, citing her theory he was operating to a hidden agenda within the house. This was probably true, as he rarely let up from his performance as a crotchety and hopeless loser, desperately trying to find a way out. It could have been a high-risk strategy, with the level of affectation required possibly bordering on the irritating for the viewer, but as confirmed by the final results in the Celebrity Big Brother experience, it paid off marvellously. The constant appearance of Dee at each eviction in flat-cap and coat was a joy.

Upon the final eviction process, three names were up: Dee, Duffy and Turner. This time round Turner was relatively unmoved upon hearing her name come up. It seemed as though she had proved something to herself and was now happy to meet her fate. Out of all the housemates it’s arguably Turner and Dee who have benefited most from the experience in terms of public profile. Over the week she came across as slightly obsessive, but open and pleasant. As Dee questioned her about her (apparently) Cadbury sponsored wedding, she seemed genuinely frail and elicited real sympathy for the way in which the media had treated her. Whether this was justifiable or not is another story.

Come the climax of Celebrity Big Brother and BBC1 returned to get the final scoop. As part of the overarching Comic Relief night, however, it all seemed a little lost. On an evening that saw continual links to different OBs, and a myriad of celebrities pushed into unfamiliar roles,Celebrity Big Brother was unavoidably diminished. As mealy-mouthed viewers plagued the BBC with calls querying how much the climactic fireworks display cost (and couldn’t the money have instead been donated to the charity?) Dee walked out the ultimate winner. However there was little time for reflection, or even celebration as he was pushed into a fast car and the machinery ground on.

And indeed, it was back to Channel 4 the following night for our last helping of Celebrity Big Brother.One might question the morals of showing a special compilation without there being an associated mechanism to generate more money for Comic Relief. This slight bitter taste aside, the final edition continued the trend of surpassing expectations by including almost all-new footage. Whilst the previous programmes had been preoccupied with telling the stories of challenges nominations and evictions, here we were able to prod and poke our famous folk just a little bit more.

Within a loose framework acknowledging just briefly the usual Big Brother day-to-day mechanics we were able to enjoy Jack Dee’s further attempts at anarchy (throwing a chocolate cake at a camera, playing around with fire extinguishers and – finally – climbing onto the roof of the Big Brother house), pick up on a few more of Duffy’s quips and hear Dee ask Vanessa if she was undergoing counselling. The best of these extra snippets though was eavesdropping on Claire Sweeney and Jack Dee talking in their sleep. Banal as it seems, this was a fantastic moment of television, capturing at once the omnipotence and intrusiveness of the viewer’s position. Even unconscious housemates are fair game for our entertainment in Big Brother.

Little in the way of incident was added throughout most of this programme, yet it was in the depiction of details such as this that the final edition sought to achieve an appropriately satisfying conclusion.

In terms of the Big Brother story though, this final edition usefully sketched in the events of the final day (passed over during the Comic Relief broadcasts). Unfortunately, this (as with the first series proper) was the most disinteresting part of the programme. The programme makers need to recognise that throwing a party for three people does not make for good television. Perhaps they feel the pangs of homesickness and nervous tension will be juxtapose nicely with a good shindig, or perhaps they feel that music and streamers will re-invigorate the – by now – jaded trio. Whatever, Sweeney, Duffy and Dee may be fascinating company within an ordinary context, but – like their three predecessors from series one – they make for boring party guests. Big Brother has always been more interesting when the participants have to use their ingenuity to concoct their own fun.

One such example followed as we saw Dee strategically place two fire extinguishers on the kitchen sideboard. He was, he told us, going to set them off when he was finally allowed to depart the Big Brother house and walk down that little pathway with a spurting extinguisher in each hand (one suspects an unseen reprimand from Big Brother put paid to this act of disobedience).

Keeping to BB tradition the final day’s evictions were shown in this last compilation purely from the perspective of those inside the house. The mix of the sound allowed us to pick up more clearly final conversations of each of the evictees, yet in the process revealed that curiously Davina’s crowd of avid fans sounded a lot smaller than it had on the previous night’s live broadcast.

Undeniably this has been the highest profile Comic Relief for many years, and it would be hard to dispute that a lot of the attention has been due to the extraordinary broadcasts from that house in Bow. At the time we revelled in cheap delight at the deterioration of Vanessa, now though we can recognise the enormous cash value of her dining room table scribblings. She – and her five fellow housemates undeniably brought the viewing public to Comic Relief in their droves. This was a programme that took us all by surprise with its unflinching representation of its contestants (apparently some of the inhabitant’s agents applied considerable pressure to force Channel 4 to tone down the broadcasts after being shocked by the first couple of transmissions), yet the concept of Big Brother has always been an “oppressive force” and to fail to appreciate that is to miss the point of the game.

Within its own context it was a marvellous piece of television, but one afflicted with an anticlimactic finale: there was no real prize for the winner and so the final result could only remain pretty pointless. Yet I am sure that Jack Dee (who has a new series starting on BBC1 shortly) will have found the experience hugely profitable – Comic Relief certainly did.