Somewhere in Somalia, a newborn baby may live past the age of five because of Celebrity Big Brother. Such is at least the conceit behind the awful catchphrase, Say Pants to Poverty, and the awful prospect of watching third-division "celebrities" alternately weep and wind each other up while locked for a week in a house near London. Awful, but massively compelling.
Television spent years creating the divide between "ordinary people" and the sometimes strange creatures who populate its screens. Mystique was everything. Now, television is in reverse gear, which is to say, what it wants to do is show us how ordinary those creatures are.
The vast concerns of world hunger and global inequality shrink into perspective when compared with the challenge TV presenter-on-the-slide Vanessa Feltz identified on the matter of how to manage her (blonde) hair extensions without professional help. The human dilemmas facing parents of disabled children could seem small compared to the tragedy of how Boyzone-singer-in-need-of-a-record-deal Keith Duffy was obliged to miss his daughter's first birthday.
When it came time for one of the celebrities to be voted out, we faced the extraordinary sight of both Anthea Turner (left husband for friend's husband, then married another, but blew the publicity when a brand chocolate featured heavily in the Hello! wedding photos, so now cleans nooks and crannies as obsessively as Lady Macbeth) and the aforementioned Feltz (husband left her, she went on a diet and told everyone who'd listen) crying their eyes out and needing succour from their new mates.
The dilemma for viewers who could be bothered is resolving the questions of why any sane person would do this and, second, why any sane person would watch it. Either voyeurism is becoming respectable or increasing numbers of us enjoy being increasingly insane.
The appeal of such shows is like that of picking up the phone and realising the lines are crossed. You hear a voice confessing adultery/betrayal/attempted seduction and wonder if you'll put down the phone. You're afraid to breathe, but the scenario which may unfold is just too tempting to refuse. For as long as you don't breathe, your anonymity is assured.
The more you listen, the better you may know yourself. The mask slips, but yours remains in place. Such was the pivot of last summer's original Big Brother featuring "ordinary" punters, the tight study in how people sort themselves into hierarchies and roles, then politick to win a heap of money and not a little fame. It fed off harsh but authentic notions of exclusion and made short-lived celebrities out of ordinary people, who soon faded back into real life.
It lastingly showed how endlessly fascinating the media find themselves. This smart test of media's power to win friends and influence people meant that Channel 4 won reams of unsolicited publicity because every media outlet under and including the Sun grabbed the chance to measure the effects, before rushing off to tell the advertising people how powerful was its reach.
Celebrity Big Brother's seductiveness was the possibility of puncturing the personas of people whom viewers are assumed to know quite well already - justified by being done in the name of Comic Relief and its annual Red Nose Appeal, climaxing today. The celebs here though are protected from the command of television which insisted every moment of the first series was transmitted by webcams running in real time.
THIS deceit is most curious of all. The least you'd expect is that the celebrities would have a reasonable grasp of the difference between image and substance and a reasonable hold on the kind of person their "fans" believed them to be. Enough to manage their own masks, anyway.
They don't - mostly. The streetwise comic Jack Dee and Brookside actor Claire Sweeney knew why they were there and took full advantage of the situation, with Dee manipulating so effectively that a tabloid mounted a massive campaign, complete with helicopter airdrop, to vote the others out so as to keep him in.
But poor Chris Eubank, the former boxer, looked so socially illiterate you simultaneously felt irritated, sorry and wanted him to go into counselling straight away. His real self was so squashed that what was left of this Anglo-Jamaican hero was a parody of old-style British manners performed with no irony and not a shred of self-insight. His was the first eviction.
The bottom line of Celebrity Big Brother is that the children of Somalia are an excuse for making the kind of television any smart celebrity would otherwise refuse. The chosen few can fool themselves they are doing it for charity, as most did, but deep down they know that Channel 4 and BBC are pulling in more viewers and more advertisers than they could otherwise usefully do and that those ratings can only help them in trying to pick up their own game.
As the barriers between real-life and televised life break down irretrievably, as fame starts to mean the same as real achievement, what can the honest viewer do? Reach out to the dying child in Somalia and feel slightly guilty for doing so because their tragedy is mediated by the way you've been entertained?
The horror, the horror, but meanwhile, for today, the paradox of the fun?
mruane@irish-times.ie