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Britain is once again graced by three months of watching self obsessed people making themselves look stupid merely by their very existence, with little hope of achieving anything other than profit for the production and broadcast companies involved. Why is Big Brother such a terribly wasted opportunity?

On Friday night thirteen people, selected from tens of thousands of applicants, gave up their freedom and entered the Big Brother house, submitting to 24 hour surveillance and a variety of pointless weekly and daily tasks that they must complete in order to earn food credits.

Big Brother shows just how awful people really are: how self-centred and inconsiderate it’s possible to be. It’s not just the contestants on screen that are found wanting; the production company and the voting public come off badly too.

On a one-to-one basis the housemates all manage to function, but as members of society they all seem poorly educated. For example, This morning we were treated to watching a housemate attempt to wash up, he’d awoken before everybody else and proceeded to lament upon their poor sanitation as he “nobly” cleaned up after them. This supposedly well educated man who’s written speeches for senior Conservative Party members, struggled for several minutes, unable to make the sink plug work. This in itself is no bad thing, however, the fact that he left the taps on full bore whilst puzzling with the sink for five minutes, is reprehensible, given the current (almost critically low) reservoir levels following what has been the second driest winter in the last 100 years. Several bonus marks for cleanliness but minus several million for ecological ignorance.

The production company don’t seem to realize any social responsibility, and why should they? They’re making a lot of money out of the current format so without external pressure they have no cause to inject a collective conscience. Big Brother is a potential channel for worthwhile educational content in the weekly tasks, but historically these have had no social merit and have enlightened neither the housemates nor the observing public, they’re merely designed to titillate & embarrass, usually through physical & mental ineptitude. The result is that the conversations largely stagnate after a few weeks and the program becomes a shallow popularity contest.

So the housemates are largely left to their own devices, and their eventual success or vilification is decided by the same people that have made a success of the Crazy Frog ringtone, and music single; people with fickle taste, and just enough expendable cash to waste on text voting.

The saving grace of Big Brother is the Psychology Show, where psychologists, psychiatrists, criminologists, anthropologists, counsellors and medical doctors offer insight into the housemates behaviour and tactics, explaining how and why their actions and reactions are as much predicted by their unconscious animal responses as their own free will.

Personally I’d love to see the psychologists publicly analyse the producers and the voters in as much detail, it might give a fascinating alternative view on the program, and provoke a rethink of it’s content and direction.

The Psychology Show is broadcast Sundays at 9pm, catch it if you can. Big Brother is broadcast most other times, catch it if you must.