Big Brother and the Curse of Modern "Celebrity"

Aaahh, a new season of Celebrity Big Brother: the tears and the tantrums over shopping lists, the mindlessness of grown adults, desperate for adulation, sitting around a squalid house all day doing bugger all, the inexplicable watchability of such vacuous crap... what is it about this programme that endures?

Since the late-nineties, there has been an explosive growth in our fascination with other people's lives. It started with Candace Bushnell's New York Times(?) column based on her life as a thirty-something singleton.Helen Fielding penned a similar column for the Independent. Both became best-selling books, and were later adapted for the visual media; Bushnell's for the small screen, and Fielding's for the big screen. Around this time, a journalistic vogue for diarised observations in weekend supplements had begun; Kate Muir in The Times on Saturday writing about living as a Briton with her young family in Paris, and later, in Suburban Virginia. This writing became far more intimate and personal when Ruth Picardie serialised her battle with cancer in The Observer, and John Diamond produced a similar account of his own illness in The Times on Saturday (Diamond's story was also showcased in a BBC documentary).

Our bubbling fascination with the lives of media faces facilitated what in another media age may have been regarded as the audacious interviews with the Princess of Wales (Martin Bashir) and the Prince of Wales (Jonathan Dimbleby), and which certainly became apparent in the collective public mourning that followed the death of Diana.

It was not long after this that Big Brother burst onto our screens. Media commentary at the time was focused on the pseudo-psychological experimentational aspect of 12 strangers thrown together, in what would now be a laughable analysis. But we were hooked. I am often scorned at for my long-held assertions that Bg Brother is no merely trash TV, but is in fact an ironic, post-modern look at our contemporary culture. In fact, I would argue that that first screening of Big Brother represented a ivotal moment in what has now descended into our deplorable demand for quick-fix solutions and the worship of virtuality.

The first group of housemates to enter the Big Brother house did so in ignorance of what awaited them at the end of their stay. From the second series onwards, Big Brother's raison d'etre was permanently altered. The "innocence" was lost, and contestants entered in the conscious knowledge of possible fame and fortune.

That Jade Goody could emerge from the Big Brother house a celebrated media figure is central to understanding our shifting perception of modern celebrity. Her "anti-hero" status in the house - being shockingly thick, her resemblance to (in her own words, as well as those of Graham Norton) Miss Piggy, her stripping off in front of the cameras during a drunken game and the fact that her mother was a one-armed former prostitute lesbian with a voice guaranteed to make even the most hardened smoker ditch the ciggies forever - nevertheless secured her what was at the time unprecedented media attention for a Big Brother contestant. Ironically, this was the making of her actual celebrity; now reportedly worth millions (although questionable), she has barely been out of the pages of Heat Magazine since, and has her own column in Now Magazine. She recently launched her own perfume, Ssshh (if only she would!) and having now made the transition from "lay person" to "celebrity" - and modern-day definitions are arguably practically interchangeable - she has earned 3 documentaries of her own, charting her "celebrity" life; one about the opening of her beauty salon, one charting the creation of her perfume, and the third following her search for a personal assistant.

It was the post-Big Brother "success" of La Jade that acted as the catalyst for contemporary notions of celebrity. If an "ordinary" person could become a celebrity - appear in magazines, attend parties with the glitterati and earn a bit of money - well, anyone could do that. Cue a plethora of popular "reality" TV programmes, featuring ordinary people (eg Wife Swap). Furthermore, once the notion of celebrity had been downgraded to the likes of Goody, and even worse, Jodie Marsh - who was propelled into our consciousness following her appearance in a documentary about Essex wives - it twigged that already-existing celebriies could boost their media exposure and attempt to revive flagging careers by appearing on celebrity versions of reality TV shows (I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here and Celebrity Big Brother). Thus our understanding of the concept of celebrity shifted again; you're hardly goin gto get the likes of Madonna on a show like that, so you end up with disgraced entertainers with mental health problems (Michael Barrymore), socialites (Tara Palmer-Tomkinson) and even politicians (George "Best Mate of Sadaam" Galloway). "Celebrity", then, has moved from being about glamour, mystique, a projected, controlled image, to putting it all out there, neuroses and all (Barrymore again, and - famously - Vanessa Feltz), playing the new rules with the media to win over the public.

The irony of this is not lost on the producers of Big Brother. The inclusion in last year's Celebrity Big Brother of Chantelle Houghton, a "non-celebrity" who folled her fellow "celebrity" housemates into thinking she was an actual "celebrity" was a self-consciously humorous tongue-in-cheek nod to modern day celebrity. Houghton went on to win the show, emerging from the Big Brother house a bona fide celebrity. Jade Goody herself has entered this year's Celebrity Big Brother house, this time as a celebrity. Her mother - herself a pseudo-celebrity, following her recent appearance on another reality TV Show, Extreme Makeover, in which she was filmed having drastic plastic surgery - also appeared in the Celebrity Big Brother house this year.

Proof indeed that we are all "celebrities" now. Websites such as YouTube offer instant worldwide coverage to anyone who cares to expose themselves in this way. But where will it end? Once you have a film premiere full of Jades and Jodies and no one else, you have to wonder - what is celebrity?

To me, the celebrity reality TV shows, in which celebrities are essentially selling themselves rather than the talents that have brought them celebrity status in the first place, are both symptomatic and a driving force of a modern culture in which core values and principles have been eroded in favour of style. Look at New Labour. Look at the Cameron-led Tories. It's endemic. I despair of this society that teaches us that quick-fix solutions are the answer to our woes. Flabby tummy? Forget daily sit-ups, just have a little tummy tuck during your lunch hour! An emerging generation of poorly-educated barely literate teens? Just turn any old institution into a university, lower national exam levels and hey presto, we have 20% (or whatever the statistic is) more university graduates than 30 years ago, when it actually meant something to have a degree!

Where will it all end? And yet in the meantime, I do find Big Brother so very compelling to watch...