It’d be rude not to check, wouldn’t it?

While leaving a bunch of inept, narcissistic-to-the-point-of-delusional cretins in a cardboard building for eternity would seem tempting in a post Brexit world, some of us still retain a shred of humanity.

Unfortunately, my timing is way off. I chose to catch up on the events in the Elstree portakabin in the week that the one hundredth anniversary of the start of the Battle of the Somme was commemorated and I can tell you now, Jackson’s wailing and gnashing of teeth upon the eviction of Satanic love interest Georgina is tough to sympathise with when you’ve just watched countless eighteen year old boys hurl themselves over a French hillock into a barrage of machine gun fire for god and country.

But we’ll leave those clumsy contrasts to the oblivious of nuance. Like Piers Morgan.

Things have calmed down in the house since The Others moved in and Nicky, the Z-List equivalent of football’s Craig Bellamy, moved out. The main focus of our attention has been the aforementioned Jackson Blyton’s bad romance with Georgina Leigh Cantwell; a woman whose range of facial expressions imply she’s never experienced real world problems like other people’s opinions and feelings. 
Admittedly accusing a contestant on Big Brother of narcissism is a little like accusing Donald Trump of having unusual hair, but Georgina persistent bafflement that no one wanted to hear her opinions was a source of great joy to me for a while.

And then I went and spoiled it all by contemplating it in the context of humanity at large.

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Part of the reason I watch Big Brother – a show that had outlived its function in society by 2004 – is that it’s one of the few reality TV shows that retains remnants of its value as a social experiment. Once the harrowing costumery, assertions to “tell it like it is” and “just be myself” of the first couple of days have passed and the housemates have settled into their Armani tracksuit bottoms, the traits they’ve been desperate to suppress burst forth for casual examination. In Chelsea Singh from Chelsea’s case, this begins and ends with laughing at his ‘Lego Man hair’ and claims to be a business guru, but we can’t all be complex.

You could accuse me of overthinking it, but if we assume that Big Brother contestants are, in any way whatsoever, a representative sample of humanity at large (they’re technically human, so they are, regardless of how awful a prospect that is), our species is in deep shit. 

The narcissism, hubris and ignorance striding confidently through the veins of some of the housemates is so entrenched, there’s an argument that anyone under the age of twenty five is effectively a lost generation.

Georgina’s ‘right’ to her opinion and manner of self-expression is one thing, but her behaviour towards Jackson is, at it’s very best, wildly manipulative. Her eviction from the house can be in no small part due to her flagrant disregard for his feelings, her appalling way of ordering him about and total lack of empathy. While watching her wake him from sleep so he could go and get her case from the storeroom (Ed – The lazy cow!), I found myself wondering whether this was a result of a wealthy upbringing or a disconnection with cause and effect exacerbated by social media.

Georgina was ousted before I could work it out (or suffer my biannual Big Brother aneurysm) but fortunately for you, Charlie is now doing it to Jason. I’ll report my anthropological findings in a few days.

Assuming that aneurysm doesn’t finish me off first.

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KW

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Big Brother is on Channel 5 at 10pm.

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