Celebrity Big Brother Channel 4, all week
The Big Breakfast Channel 4, Wednesday
True Lives: The Seminary RTE1, Monday
Celebrity Big Brother. For Comic Relief. It should have been the TV title to send me leaping for the remote control. I'm able to pick up a fuzzy Channel 5 on my set, but I've never watched it. This, then, seemed to be the week finally to catch up with the joys of Touch The Truck, the game show in which Dale Winton gives cash to the contestant who can keep one hand on the wheel of a truck for longest (check the listings, it's there). Instead, after the shenanigans of last summer, it became another week of my life spent dragging people to the office water-cooler so I could ask them what they thought of Vanessa Feltz and her breakdown. Is Jack Dee just playing a game, or does he really want to escape? Is Keith Duffy the new Craig? Did you see Anthea Turner's face when she got nominated? I could have done a lot of things with my life in the five hours given over to the show this week. I didn't. And I make no apologies.
By Thursday, and the voting out of Anthea Turner, the most interesting of the six - Anthea, Vanessa, thwaggering boxther Chrith Eubank - were gone. But it didn't matter, because by then we had had Vanessa's "moment". If you don't know her, she is a topical talk-show host turned public display. She speaks so fast that, by the time the sound has caught up with her lips, she has left the studio and is already on another channel. Over the past year, Vanessa has dropped her previous career as television presenter and has become a professional wronged wife, turning up anywhere there is a microphone and a chance to plug her fitness video. Since the moment she first appeared to tell the world how she had been through a dark tunnel of betrayal, but come out the other side happier and several stone lighter, it became obvious to everybody watching with gawping horror that she is in fact still stuck in the tunnel. Without a torch.
It was Anthea who first hinted at the fragility of the egos in there. In recent years, she has developed a decent career turning herself from ubiquitous, charming telly presenter into the most disliked woman in Britain. As far as I can remember, it has something to do with adultery and a Cadbury's Flake, although not quite in the way that that might seem. She has been pilloried in the press and reviled by the public for her tackiness and shameless self-publicity. And she is desperate to be loved again. Which is why, when nominated on the very first night, she took the news with all the grace of a child who wakes up on Christmas morning to find that the house has been burgled.
Anthea survived until Thursday, which was enough time to console herself with the fact that she is more popular than fellow nominee Chrith Eubank; but Vanessa didn't, and the results were enough to make your eyes open so wide that they were in danger of plopping out and rolling under the sofa.
The morning after her nomination, the group had been given some chalk to complete a task. Instead, she began to cover the table in words. FRUSTRATED. INCARCARATED. RULED. RE STRICTED. Those kind of words. The kind that had psychologists all over the country nodding in a common diagnosis, and which had everybody else screaming, "She's cracked!" at the telly. It was like that scene in The Shining, when Jack Nicholson's wife comes to see how he is, only to find that he has daubed half a hotel with the phrase, "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy". Keith Duffy is a big fella, but I swear he was edging nervously towards the exit.
In the diary room, Vanessa swivelled in her chair. Around and around like those poor, bored polar bears you see in footage of bad zoos. She blabbed about the humiliation, the inevitability of the public turning against her, this "infamous chat show host", how she couldn't face going back out into the real world knowing that people didn't love her. Oddly, then she was voted out. If they really wanted to be cruel, the public would have kept her in there.
This is the paradox of fame. Leave me alone, but don't leave me alone. Celebrity Big Brother was like television from a parallel universe. There is a late night BBC2 comedy called Stella Street, in which Mick Jagger, Michael Caine, Jimmy Hill and Dustin Hoffmann, among others, all live side by side in a fantasy village. And here it was, real, only without caricatured Hollywood stars and with actual Blist celebrities instead. Only B-list celebrities could have done this, and only they could have held our attention in this way. This was an acceleration of the tabloid culture.
People who have complained long and hard about privacy and prurient lenses and just wanting to be normal had placed themselves in front of 22 cameras and a nightly viewing audience of millions, and then asked for the public to vote for their least favourite. Only B-list celebs, perpetually walking a tightrope between being the nation's favourite or the next Paul Daniels, can need to be loved this much. So, this was the week in which celebrity finally cannibalised itself, and threw us the morsels. The first time around, the house turned a group of everyday nobodies into B-list celebrities famous for having lived in the house. This time, it has turned B-list celebrities first into everyday nobodies, then into people famous for having lived in the Big Brother house.
Vanessa turned up on The Big Breakfast less than 12 hours after we had seen her walking from the house. She talked about the emotional intensity and the passion of the show, and how she wrote on the table because she is a writer and she needed to write. Funnily enough, that was the plea of Jack Nicholson in The Shining before he took an axe to his family. "I wasn't going off my head, I was only writing on the table." Vanessa was given a chalk and a chalkboard and asked to write something. I AM HAVING A LOVELY TIME, she scribbled. If only we could believe that.
No booze, an early curfew, keeping control of the urges, True Lives: The Semi- nary could have been titled "Celibacy Big Brother" instead. Actually, it started off as a kind of Pop-stars with priests. Three young lads in St Patrick's, Maynooth. Do they have it in them to make it all the way to the altar? The parallels didn't end there. Final-year student Jason Murphy was being coached on the technique of saying Mass, going through the motions in front of a video camera, as Maynooth's very own Father Nasty Nigel kept yanking his arms into a proper offering pose. "You want all that Mikado stuff," he criticised, mimicking the prissiness of Jason's stance. "This is prayer!"
Poor Jason was causing fuss in the college play as well, improvising instead of doing what he's been told to do. "I am the director!" stamped a priest in disgust. Elsewhere, we knew that Eamonn - a bull of a man with a neck wider than the altar itself - was in trouble the moment he hung a poster of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in a slip of a dress on the wall. There's a lot of hope involved, he said of celibacy. By February, Eamonn had a girlfriend. By May he was gone.
The True Lives series, if uneven, has continually thrown up some fascinating films. The only real complaint about the excellent The Seminary was the difficulty in condensing one year into an hour, especially with a story as complex as that of Mick Delaney. Mick started out as the bit of a rogue, with a new tattoo of Christ on his shoulder and questions about everything. "We should still just feckin' question," he argued. "Instead of just taking everything Holy Mother Church says as gospel." He ran through the old seven steps to the priesthood, and complained about the changes. "I don't get to be an exorcist."
But as things developed, he told of how he had almost stabbed a man to death, how he had tried to kill himself, and how his fun-loving ways turned out to be alcoholism. This was his chance to be rescued. "I can't do it on my own. I've tried that already. I just can't." It was only after the making of the film that he decided to leave, the credits telling us that he is now a hotel manager. Lives, I suppose, still have to be led, with or without cameras around.
