Reality TV

So, Big Brother started again last night, which rather confuses things.

For example: "The House this year will be a place for wholly unsurprising twists." Is that the Big Brother House or the House of Commons? "The General Public will lose interest in activities within The House unless they see arguments and intrigue." BB or HoC? "Voters will be throwing people out of The House until mid-Summer, when there will only be a handful of fame-hungry eccentrics left." BB or HoC?

It's so difficult to tell.

This year, the only way to stay in The House is evidently to shave off one's eyebrows and draw spectacles and a funny moustache on your face in permanent black marker. (No, I've stopped playing that game now.) Those who have watched the series in previous years will shrug and yawn at the tedium of watching an assortment of page 3 girls and homosexuals go into a studio very quickly and come out again very, very slowly.

Meanwhile, in the other House, the entertainment value is noticably higher but impossible to keep up with even in so evanescent a medium as a blog. Last night, as the polls closed, we discovered that the Minister for Eating Biscuits had resigned, or so it appeared on Breakfast Time today where the only video the BBC had managed to scrape together of James Purnell was of his conspicuously filling his face while Gordon Brown held forth of a topic of national importance to his left.

It wasn't so much the biscuits that were important to the video, I suppose, but his positioning as Brown's literal "right-hand man". Nevertheless, it was the biscuits that formed the crucial semiotic element of the picture, and I only infer that it was biscuits on which the future rebel was feasting based on the unlikelihood that cabinet meetings are supplied with anything else. It may have been custard creams that he was hitting with the urgency of a man who missed breakfast and last night's supper, but he may have been tucking in to a full thali with complementary popadum for all I know. Whichever, the BBC was keen to show that in that moment of contemplative mastication the future savour of treachery was developing.

Either that, or they couldn't find a better clip of him.

Newsnight, which begins so precisely after the end of Big Brother that a segue is implicit, covered the Purnell story in an extended programme, which would be laudable had the programme been extended to cover the Purnell story. Instead, it was extended to give viewers a preview of Newsnight's forthcoming coverage of the General Election.

That's right: Newsnight is beginning a year-long schedule of activities including: commentary from an American pollster and - wait for it! - three people sitting around a table talking about politics.

Watching someone shave of their eyebrows and draw spectacles and a funny moustache on their face suddenly doesn't sound so bad, does it?

To be fair, Newsnight does have one actual new idea, which is a Dragon's Den style series in which members of the public pitch political ideas to a panel of so-called experts, but that does go merely another step further to adding to our confusion. All we need is Surralan to step into the picture and ... oh ... this just in ...

Perhaps if the editors of Newsnight want to increase their viewing figures by speculating about the future occupants of The House a year out, they picked the wrong House to cover.