For all its screeching abuse and blow jobs under the blanket, Big Brother really represents a return to early Christianity. In the early days of the church, confession was a public affair. Rather than whisper sheepishly through a grille to a priest who was probably asleep, or engaged in some secret sinful practice himself, people used to proclaim their sins in public. There was a period in the 1960s when this practice was briefly revived. I remember attending a trendy mass at the time, in the course of which people rose from their pews and accused themselves of various offences, most of them disappointingly vague. Then a young woman stood up and declared loudly, ‘I have committed adultery’. The rest of us were still recovering from the shock when she pointed dramatically across the church and announced, ‘With that man over there’. She was indicating a young father with a baby on his knee, who was turning a slow purple. Then she added, ‘in thought,’ and sat down again. It struck me later that this might have been an unusually ingenious sort of come-on.

The diary room of Big Brother is a kind of equivalent of the confessional, with Big Brother himself acting as a cross between confessor, therapist, superego and troubleshooter, but it is a confessional open to public view. This simply pushes to a logical conclusion the fact that everything on television is public anyway. Privacy on TV is a pretence. We know that the amorous young couple are not actually rolling in a remote haystack, because the haystack is being photographed. Voyeurism, of which the Big Brother audience has been accused, usually means spying on a private scene; but the ocular pleasures of the programme involve snooping on public events as though they were private. And if the public are cast in the role of voyeurs, there is a good case that the occupants of the house are professional exhibitionists. Yet in a society in which the private is being taken into public ownership, who isn’t?