The final series of Big Brother is underway. You may have missed it. Gone is the blanket tabloid coverage of this silly season staple and gone is any sense that this is a media phenomenon that we should now know or care about.
Beyond a well-documented decline in audience figures, look at the steady decline in internet searches for "Big Brother" over the past six years (top blue line, below). The summertime spikes have become barely ripples in the interminable flatlining of the show.
Don't be fooled by the apparent increase in media coverage through late 2008 and 2009 (bottom blue line). Little of that coverage was about "Big Brother" per se, it was about Jade Goody, her battle with cancer and her subsequent death. Goody herself had long since become bigger than the show which didn't so much launch her career, but more belch her up into the popular consciousness.
Compare - for the purposes of arbitrary context - the online news coverage of vuvuzelas in the UK (red line below), versus that of Big Brother (blue line). Only one has been a summertime phenomenon that's got people talking at the bars, bus stops, hairdressers and watercoolers of Britain.
It's appropriate that the last series of Big Brother has a fairground theme, reminding me as it does that this once great heavyweight of the summer schedules is now reduced to the punchdrunk equivalent of plying its trade ingloriously on the sideshow circuit - like a washed up pugilist fighting kangaroos and allcomers for bed and board.
And how will the show be remembered; this disruptive format which fascinated media watchers, audiences and psychologists back in 2000 when it burst onto our screens?
Will it be remembered for its broadcast innovations, being the first genuinely multi-platform piece of UK programming, bridging as it did web and analogue TV.
No. Naturally it will be remembered for its most shocking moments, top among which - according to 5,000 readers of entertainment website DigitalSpy - was a female contestant in BB6, called Kinga Karolczak, masturbating with a wine bottle. That lowlight was apparently picked by 41.5 per cent of respondents. That compares to just 16 per cent who picked the racism row which erupted around Jade Goody and Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty and seemed a far more significant cultural milestone at the time than some desperate wannabe giving 'screw top bottles' a whole new meaning. Clearly not.
And that is the ultimate epitaph for Big Brother. Even the bits which seemed in some way significant ultimately weren't.
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