The final day of Big Brother 7 arrives, and for the first time ever, after seven twelve series, I will say ‘not a moment too soon’. (Yes, tonight’s winner will be the twelfth to emerge from a UK BB house, not the eleventh. Maybe you didn’t watch the youth version for Channel 4’s schools programmes? I did.)

I realised within a couple of weeks that BB7 was shaping up to be the least interesting of the lot, and so it has proved to be. Not content with having a badly thought out mix of housemates and some of the vilest representations of womanhood that I’ve ever seen on television (foulmouthed Lisa, nasty Grace, flatulent Jayne and childish, pathetic Nikki), Channel 4 then robbed us of money that we spent on evicting people, by allowing them back in. I’m waiting for the Ictsis ruling to give me my refund, and I hope it hits Endemol/C4 hard (but it won’t - it will hit the service providers instead). They’ve conned us, they’ve betrayed us, and they’ve made voting irrelevant because you can’t trust them, which is why I’m not voting for a winner this year.

There was something seriously wrong with Endemol’s selection process this time around. It makes me wonder why they bother with the auditions and the video tapes. People clearly lie on them, or play characters that they just don’t deliver when in the house. Mikey’s promise to ‘really shake things up’ proved to be particularly ludicrous, and pointless in the first place. I didn’t notice him shaking anything more than a bottle of ketchup and his messy hair in his entire eleven weeks. His raison d’etre, in his audition tape, was that he was an anti-feminist (yawn). Oh whoopee do. He then spent five weeks subserviently fumbling with Grace, proving nothing except that he’s a bad judge of character, and the remaining time flirting with Imogen. Radical!

The failure of the selection process this year isn’t just my humble opinion; it’s borne out by the fact that Dawn, Shahbaz and George were all thrown out or walked very early in the run, which makes you wonder why they didn’t just pick a dozen people off the streets of Borehamwood the day before the series started. There’s every chance they would have picked a more interesting random bunch of people. If you’ve forgotten about Dawn, thank your lucky stars you don’t live here in Birmingham, where her presence in the papers was maintained for weeks as the poor demented soul bleated on about how it was all a fix, without saying exactly what was being fixed, and how she’d been badly treated.) How Sezer ever got in, given what’s happened to him before and since, should be a serious cause for concern. What psychological testing did he have, and how did he get past it? (Don’t Endemol run police checks either?)

They even managed to set up a process which meant that Jonathan, who would surely have been one of the most interesting housemates ever, was booted out before he even saw the main house; a ridiculous state of affairs, especially given that Jayne, one of the people who got a place instead of Jonathan, had no regard for the rules of the house at all. Strangely though, unlike Dawn (and Nasty Nick), she was allowed to stay. Why?

On top of that, Sam and Lea (although I liked them both) were carrying emotional issues (lack of self-confidence and emotional neediness respectively) which would be better sorted out with a psychiatrist than on national television. Lea’s statement at the start that she wanted to be ‘accepted’ by going on TV for thirteen weeks should have set alarm bells ringing at Channel 4 before she ever got into the house. It was bound to end in tears, and it frequently did.

Nikki needs a lifetime’s supply of Ritalin, a bed in a psychiatric unit and the key thrown away, not her own TV series. More than anything though, Channel 4, because they’ve already promised her the E4 series, need her to be the most successful female contestant tonight. Hence the negative editing of Aisleyne over the last two nights in the highlights show, to suppress her vote.

Whoever wins tomorrow, for the first time ever, I won’t be watching. I’ll be in Edinburgh, watching a play called 'Jack The Lad’, which is described thus:

Once upon a time, a gay hustler forces his sado-masochistic client to listen to his brutal childhood story - with tragic consequences. A disturbing white-trash version of a classic 'fairytale' to give grown-ups nightmares.

Sounds fun, doesn't it?(!) For all we know, it could well be the story of Richard from Big Brother, but he (or the editing) never revealed anything that interesting about his life at all. I never once even heard him talk about Canada. Why?

It looks very much as if, like in Australian Big Brother 18 days ago, the contestant with the hugest cock will win. (Watch the other contestants discuss his penis in awe here. See it for yourself here.) But the bookies’ favourite didn’t win down under, so you never know if Pete will fall victim to the complacency factor, whereby people don’t vote for the contestant who they already think has won, because all media are pointing in that direction. This is known in TV circles as Gareth Gates Syndrome, the Andy Scott-Lee Factor or the Javine Incident.

Do I care who wins? Not really, but Pete’s emotional blackmail this week over his deceased friend has, after twelve weeks of me hoping that he does, now reversed my opinion. Grace Dent sums it up perfectly in her Radio Times BB blog, so I don’t need to. That leaves Glyn as the deserving winner, because he has been constantly excited and challenged by the whole experience in a way that none of the others have been (and, I must say, in a way that I would wholeheartedly embrace if I were thrown in there). It’s also been a delight to hear all the exposure the Welsh language has been given in the last thirteen weeks, so I think Glyn should feel very proud. His falling off the diary room chair when the female Big Brother first spoke Welsh was a series highlight for me, as was his swimming on the floor to the Baywatch theme. I will never be able to hear Snap!’s ‘The Power’ again without smiling, and remembering his hilarious, drunken dancing to it, also in the diary room chair.

And thereby hangs another problem with BB7. Many of the highlights this year (and most of Nikki’s lowlights) have been in the diary room. Two people said to me half way through the run, ‘do they ever talk about anything with each other?’ and I drew a blank. It’s hard to think, in thirteen weeks of 24 hour filming, of any interesting conversation that anyone has had, about anything at all. In previous years, there have been debates and memorable quotes aplenty, but what can you remember from this year, discounting Nikki’s incessant whining (which she even caricatured herself in this final week, as if it wasn’t ridiculous enough already)? They were all so lacking in intelligence or so inward-looking that they had nothing to say for themselves. The whole ‘he said, she said’ atmosphere was irritating and tedious in the extreme, especially when one entire midweek highlights programme was devoted to bitching about something that someone might have said, but didn’t, and the housemates’ reactions to each other discussing it. Boring!

Aisleyne also deserves to win, if only because she’s been given a hard time by Big Brother and the other women in the house. It would be worth her winning, just to see the faces on Grace and Nikki. Aisleyne hasn’t always covered herself in glory - the melodramatic wailing after she evicted Jonathan really got on my nerves in particular - but at least she has developed and seen for herself that she has changed for the better. She is the exact opposite of ‘fake’, which Grace accused of her of being; she has been ‘real’. (Being ‘fake’ is seemingly the biggest crime possible in the world of female airheads like Grace, worse than being a spiteful, stirring liar, apparently, although they never seem able to define what being ‘fake’ is. It’s just a word they throw around to each other.)

Every single person in that house has done things they should be ashamed of, but we all would. We all do. None of us are mad enough to volunteer to submit ourselves to such scrutiny, but when you watch a bunch of people for thirteen weeks with so little to say to each other and such a lack of social skills and empathy, it does, to those of us who actually like other people, who have opinions about things and can, occasionally at least, be entertaining, wonder if there will ever be another series, or if we, sorry I mean ‘they’ have left it too late…

End of rant.

Just two more things nagging at my mind:

The doubt over the whole ‘Susie fix’ incident. Why were we never shown that there were balls in the bingo machine with every ‘lucky ticket’ winner’s number on? We’ll never know whether or not all the balls had Susie’s number on, so C4 have left themselves open to continued speculation on that one.

In the real world, why does Richard have no male friends? On every programme, every eviction, it’s always been women. Notice that no one has been saying he ‘has the gay vote’. He just doesn’t. Gay people don’t seem that bothered about him, one way or the other (my extensive research has revealed). He’s just ‘there’. He did, however, produce my favourite moment of the entire series, when he argued with potty-mouthed Lisa in the bedroom and infuriated her so much that she threw a bike in a strop. He imitated her attention seeking, ‘running on the spot’ tantrum and I applauded, because I would have done exactly the same thing. She deserved, at that moment, to be made a fool of, and he did it very well. Well done Richard.


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