I watched it so that you didn’t have to: ITV2’s Big Brother reviewed

Big Brother is Nineteen Eighty-Four rewritten by Aldous Huxley. The detail that George Orwell got wrong is that far from being terrified and brainwashed into submission by Big Brother, the populace would embrace the all-seeing eye as their route to fame, prosperity and freedom.

Some of the populace, at any rate. We met 16 of them – there were 30,000 applicants, allegedly – on ITV on Sunday night, mugging and pratting around and enjoying their newfound semi-celebrity en route to entering the new-look Big Brother house, vying to win a £100,000 prize and, presumably, a career in minor-league showbiz by abasing and humiliating themselves in public.

I watched so that you didn’t have to and you should be grateful that I did because I suspect I may have saved one or two of you from a new and terrible addiction. This is not, let me stress, because Big Brother has got any better. On the contrary, this new series – the first since 2018 when even Channel 5 decided it was too awful – is more cringeworthy than ever. As well as being the most diverse, sustainable and inclusive yet, it has an eco-garden, a hidden smokers’ room, no Geordie voiceover and no Davina McCall. But it’s amazing and a bit scary how, despite all that, the formula still manages to draw you in.

It’s a formula probably unchanged since the Romans hit on the genius idea of pitching a man from Nubia with a trident and net against a man from Gaul with a fish on his helmet. Despise yourself though you might, you cannot help rooting for one or the other, often for the silliest of reasons: you’ve always been a Neptune fan; a man with a Gaulish accent once stole your bird and so on.