Ten years ago, the TV show that was supposed to mark the end of television as we know it, and might just wreck civilised values while it was at it, was a satirical cartoon about a yellow-skinned family somewhere in middle America.

In the year 2000, The Simpsons is on telly at all hours of the day and night, and it is recognised by most of us as a suitable babysitter for our children and younger siblings. Nowadays the purveyors of panic and prophets of doom have moved on: the latest root-of-all-evil in TV entertainment is called Big Brother.

And that's the way the producers like it. In 1990, the controversy around Bart Simpson's influence on kids ("Underachiever and Proud of It") helped attract viewers and put two new Rupert Murdoch-controlled broadcasters, Fox in the US and Sky in Britain, on the media map. Now the latest form of reality-TV sets out to create controversy, attract a buzz and then clean up on the advertising revenue when sponsors compete for their 30-second piece of the action.

How did they do it? The first stroke of genius by the Dutch creators of Big Brother was the name itself. In George Orwell's science-fiction novel 1984 (published in 1948), Big Brother was the benevolent-sounding name given to the dictator, whose power reached into people's homes via giant two-way screens on their walls. "Big Brother is watching you" became the most sinister of 20th-century catchphrases, suggesting there was no privacy or freedom from an all-seeing state.

Then comes the pseudo-science. Big Brother is dressed up as a sophisticated social experiment about what happens when you put 10 people in isolation for weeks on end. The British version also parodies this element, by featuring a parallel "Little Brother" house, populated by guinea pigs and observed by children in white coats. Nonetheless, psychologists are also regularly hauled into the studio to tell us all sorts of guff: that, for example, in week one there were 6.5 flirtations per person per week (this number then fell dramatically) and that there is a constant struggle in the house either to be or to ally with the "dominant male" or "dominant female" - as if we were watching gorillas in the rain forest.

Meanwhile, as the contestants like to sing: "It's only a game show." The irony is that, while a £70,000 prize awaits the winner, there is probably bigger money to be made by characters such as Nasty Nick, Irish Tom and Flirty Mel, who have been kicked out of the house in time to cash in on the media attention that surrounds the programme.

One day last week, the housemates - cut off from all media - were asked by Big Brother to create a make-believe newspaper full of stories they imagine might have been making news on the outside during their two months inside. "Contestant cheats on Big Brother," Darren suggested, setting off some laughter from the others that anyone would take a game show so seriously. Little did they know: that cheater, Nick, was using his daily column in the Sun to stir up the hostility to Melanie that saw her voted out by viewers last Friday. So when a winner emerges this Friday, will the tabloid's headline repeat the famous page-one after the 1992 British election: "It was the Sun wot won it"?

It's not the Sun wot makes us watch, however. Big Brother has a few attractions - notably attractive young bodies in various states of undress - but at its most basic it's about the thing that TV does best: relationships. When Nasty Nick sent ratings sky-high and the media into a frenzy - photographers tried to knock tennis-balls marked "NICK LIES" into the Big Brother compound in east London - it was because of his masterful use of friendship, confidences and rivalries to advance his own agenda. Relationships are the stuff of drama.

Big Brother promises us something more "real", credible and recognisable in its portrayal of relationships than, say, Glenroe. It's a tempting promise, even if it's false: the house spawns fake, manipulated relationships compared to "real-life", with mutuals needs that are too sharp and clearly defined (the unspoken "please don't nominate me for eviction"), and predetermined beginning and end points (though we can all wonder about what might happen now between Tom and Mel). The housemates' "real" relationships are outside.

But these are relationships nonetheless, and the editing of the TV programme focuses on them rather than the generic tooth-brushing, what'll-we-eat rubbish of everyday life and conversation.

A TV series, unfolding over months, is the perfect place for this sort of thing. We've all enjoyed the will-they-won't-they relationships of our favourite TV characters. When the great Swedish film director, Ingmar Bergman, decided to make a TV series nearly 30 years ago, he created Scenes from a Marriage, which used a documentary style to trace the changing relationship between a man and a woman.

The trouble with Big Brother is that, by and large, the housemates won't play along. Sure, there have been some interesting things to observe: the corrupt cynicism of stockbroker Nick; the way Irish lesbian Anna "bonded" best with her black housemates rather than white English people when it came to the crunch. But the absence of romance and rarity of open confrontation makes it, well, a bit boring. (The US Big Brother saw its ratings fall and actually tried to buy a contestant out of the house in order to insert a spicier character.)

What did we expect? One day recently a Big Brother housemate paused in the middle of a rambling kitchen conversation and explained that she couldn't mention her mother's age: "I don't want to say it on TV." Another time Anna commented sarcastically about another day spent under the covers, reading, smoking cigarettes and staring into space: "This is great television." But it's better than doing something completely humiliating and/or self-revealing, obviously.

It was Anna, in fact, who probably captured best the ironic impossibility of intimacy in this privacy-free "reality". As she sat on the sofa, strumming her guitar and trying to write a song about finally meeting a loved one after Big Brother is finished, the Dublin woman sweetly sang:

When I put my arms around you, you will know: I hate being on TV.