Columns

The other night I managed to sit through about half an hour of the ninth series of Big Brother; the first bit, where Davina shows us the new house with its two-way mirrors, warren-like camera runs and unashamedly inviting swimming pool.

I always get drawn in to this, and develop a grudging admiration for the designers, who I imagine sitting around a gigantic whiteboard, with the words 'nudity' and 'tears' scrawled above a question mark, shouting out 'hot tub' and 'excessive dust mites', and toasting their genius with a mini-keg of Frappuccino. This technical tour of the Big Brother set is genuinely fascinating. Perhaps highbrow Freeview channel More4 should take a break from its never-ending Grand Designs-fest and run a behind-the-scenes show, where we follow Big Brother's technical wizards around the clock as they design, build and run an interactive, unstaffed idiot prison to be watched around the clock by impressionable teenagers and outraged tabloid journalists.

Of course, as interested as I was in the psychology and logistics of designing a house to function within the constraints of the show, I was compelled to switch off the minute the squealing contestants were introduced, and I haven't tuned in since.

Big Brother has suffered falling viewing figures in recent years, and it's not hard to see why. The first series, if you caught it, was by far one of the weirdest things we'd ever encountered on TV. Ordinary people; a brickie, a florist and a farmer to name but a few; on telly, killing time. They sang, they knitted, and they completed pointless tasks

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with good humour and grace. It was the first time we'd been able to see, outside of our own flatshares and marriages, the domestic routines and inanely hilarious conversations that shore up everyday life.

But that was then, before broadband, before LiveJournal, before Heat magazine spawned a lurid avalanche of inky copycats and the general populace had unwittingly committed every one of Amy Winehouse's tattoos to memory.

Blogging has made everyday musings and mundane routines the stuff of daily entertainment. There are several blogs I read everyday, just out of habit, but I still find solace and amusement in the trials of ordinary people. Odd conversations and bizarre tangential thoughts are recorded for posterity. Photographs and snippets of other peoples' lives are freely and abundantly available. Interior decor choices, tales of employment woe and amusingly punctuated love letters. It's not that these things have become boring; far from it. It's that we don't need to tune in to E4 at a certain time to watch them. Of course, if you're still one of those stuffed shirts moaning 'What's the point of a blog? I don't want to read about your child-rearing/self-loathing/Doctor Who obsession!' I can only assume you either a) never started a blog and thus missed out on the addictive qualities of online journaling, or b) never got any comments and bahleeted like a mofo.

If popular blogs such as dooce.com prove anything - anything, that is, apart from the innate cruelty, blinkered obsessiveness and sheer, unadulterated well-just-don't-read-it-then-ness of the sort of people who make it their business to comment on blog posts - it's that the original model of Big Brother applies to every one of us. And that we don't need Endemol to make it happen. Sign up for a Google account - and support censorship in China, boo, hiss - or get a space on Blogger for nowt.

I used to read Heat, but back in the day when it was about 'real' celebrities. These days, even when such a finger-on-the-pulse media gadfly as myself picks it, or any one of its four dozen minutely different variants, off the shelf, it's filled with tales of people I just don't recognise.