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The extent to which the viewers haven’t been prejudiced against these minorities is exactly the same as the extent to which they no longer offer any alternative lifestyle choice. With everyone middle-class, childless and a restful shade of beige, we’re not so much living in a melting-pot as a Cup-a-Soup. Or so we wish to believe.It’s no surprise to me that Big Brother was originated in the Netherlands, that claustrophobic cockpit of social innovation, where an ancient culture of cheesemaking supports an ephemeral one of utter cheesiness. Nor is it any wonder that its format has replicated throughout the globe, like some awful media virus. It offers us the spectacle of pure voyeurism, and its interactivity leads the way to new forms of narration that will no longer require any suspension of disbelief.In traditional storytelling, whether on page, stage or screen, the audience are invited emotionally to identify themselves with a protagonist whose fate is determined by the deus ex machina. But in television shows utilising ordinary people, the action of which is propelled by collective decision-making, there is no need for viewers to exercise that feat of creative empathy, whereby they can “become” a Prince of Denmark suffering a proto-existential crisis, or a 19th-century aristocratic Russian woman tormented by sexual desire, let alone surrender themselves to dictates of chance or fate.

Like mere servomechanisms, extensions of the wilfulness of their contemplators, the pawn-participants in these projects will be required to enact increasingly grotesque playlets to satisfy the jaded palates of their manipulators.Make no mistake, in terms of what the genre has to offer, Big Brother is a mere lukewarm entrée. Novelty, combined with the vestiges of our national rectitude, prevented anything getting too steamy or nasty in the Big Brother house, but in the future, opportunities to interact with sexual and violent experiences will become a sine qua non of such shows, as the next tumbril of entertainment to trundle on to our screens – Channel 5’s Jailbreak – will amply demonstrate.Yes, we should be worried. The atrophy of the empathetic muscles necessary for the appreciation of traditional narrative is happening in step with the development of entertainment media – the internet chat room, the interactive television show – that substitute anonymous equivalence for personalised identification. Why bother labouring to translate your being across space, time, gender, ethnicity or religion when you can watch some bimbo exactly like the one next door plucking her bikini line on live television? Or better still, on a little postcard-sized vignette, in the corner of your PC’s screen, while you employ the Intel inside to multitask your way through the next spreadsheet or corporate report.For me, Big Brother was over two weeks ago anyway, when Claire, the breast-enhanced flirt-interest, was sent packing. There was no question that poor Mel, the least psychically secure contestant and the subject of a hate campaign by the herd without, would be the next to go. There was a hideous moment when, as Mel was sprung from behind the razor wire (and how disgusting the setting for this bathos has been, a kind of Ikea Belsen marooned in Bromley-by- Bow), she heard the lowing of the bovine punters bellowing, “Whore!” and, “Slut!” It took her a split second to adjust to the correct posture of puppetry, and then she leapt up and down like a teenager afflicted with mass hysteria at a pop concert, and began screaming the triumphant affirmation of the eradication of her soul.Down to the final triumvirate of trivia, the popular vote will go with the man who best understands and exemplifies populism, Craig, while the dissenting vote will go with Anna.

And Big Brother being the kind of television show that it is – veritably powered by populism – I hardly think it likely that dissent will carry the day. A few nights ago I was chatting to my 10-year-old boy about Big Brother. I asked him why it was that the contestants hadn’t banded together ages ago and smashed all the cameras in the house save for one. Then they could’ve taken over the means of the production of the show and broadcast their own demands to the nation “They couldn’t do that,” he said. “The people who make it would’ve switched it off.” “Ah,” I replied, “they couldn’t afford to do that; it would’ve lost them hundreds of thousands of pounds in revenue, and anyway, it’d make great television.” He looked at me with the pitying expression of someone who’s being parented by an anarchistic dinosaur, while I looked back at him with an equally pitying expression.Marshall McLuhan said that we advanced into the future imposing our historic archetypes of communication upon the new media that we invent; thus we steer the car using the rearview mirror. I think he had a point, but what I can see in the rearview mirror is Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 And another episode of The Family is about to be screened.. I thank God for my life, my family, my friends and my photograph.