Big Brother is starting again. But the show's success has spawned a monstrous army of mutated reality TV cousins. CHRIS TITLEY peeps in from behind the sofa...

I HAVE been on reality TV. It was a particularly humiliating show, too. Called Election Night 2001, it involved a cast of a thousand MP wannabes, desperate to be voted into the big mother of Parliaments. If you possessed hawk-like vision you would have spotted me at the notorious climax of the programme. I was one of the journalists shoved aside as contestant William Hague came to the microphone at his constituency count in Northallerton to concede a landslide defeat to Tony Blair.

Whatever happened to William, I wonder? It's always the same with reality TV: you quickly forget the losers.

And what a bunch of losers these guys are. Some of them are on Channel 5 tonight. In The Curse Of Big Brother (9pm), former residents of the famous house complain of their shock at having their privacy invaded after they had agreed to be filmed around the clock for the entertainment of the nation.

The following night Big Brother 4 begins. It is, fans will be delighted to hear, a bigger brother than ever, with even more screen hours devoted to the exhibitionists' prison camp.

Despite the fact that the tabloids mauled previous contestants - Jade Goody, last year's main target, was compared unflatteringly to a pig - Channel 4 received a record number of applications to take part this year: more than 10,000.

From these, maker Endemol has handpicked the batch of halfwits who will be the target of British derision for the rest of the summer. Who knows, we may even see a new cheat like Nasty Nick Bateman, the only one to have shown any spark in the first three series.

In a romantic twist, the Sun has offered £50,000 to the first couple to have sex live on Big Brother. But this offer is conditional that it is heterosexual sex. It is an intriguing moral stance: the paper is prepared to bankroll prostitution while simultaneously signalling its revulsion at same-gender relationships.

Critics may think this is the lowest depth to which humiliation TV has yet sunk. But they ain't seen nothing yet.

Another new programme on Channel 5 tonight is called Celebrity Detox Camp. In this comedian Richard Blackwood, former boy band member Keith Duffy, pop singer Kim Wilde and "It Girl" Tamara Beckwith are packed off to a Thailand health camp for seven days. There they are allowed only a morsel of food a day, and no booze.

For our viewing pleasure, the celebs are asked to undergo colonic irrigation and then sieve the proceeds on camera.

This could be considered to be the logical culmination of our obsession with celebrity lives: at last we can see the "stars" literally inside out.

Alternatively, you may just consider it to be a steaming pile of excrement.

If it's cruel, rather than merely offensive, TV you're after look out for Channel 4's The Pilot Show. Here members of the public are duped into auditioning for spoof pilot television shows. So you see men saying a tearful goodbye to their clearly distressed families as they abandon them to live on an island populated only by lap dancers.

I am not making this up.

Then there's My New Best Friend, where contestants have to carry out every whim of the "new friend" of the title. In one show, a man is coerced into telling his girlfriend he is gay. He's not. Ha ha.

Trinny and Susannah are back, this time ridiculing people's homes rather than their dress sense.

And a new show called The Dinner Party Inspectors will see the newest telly snobs, Victoria Mather and Meredith Etherington Smith, tearing into someone's attempt at entertaining.

Such car crash telly keeps millions hooked, but not everyone is an addict. John Godber's play Reunion, now being performed at the York Theatre Royal, is set on a reality TV show, but the playwright doesn't watch them.

"I'm fed up with 'Celebrity' anything to be honest, so there's a line where last week's Reunion winner gets to carry out an operation after four days' training as a brain surgeon in a job swap," he told Evening Press arts critic Charles Hutchinson.

"I think this show is where reality TV will be in 18 months, so it's a satire of a future that's even worse," he added. "But it's also a satire on how TV encourages bad behaviour, and the ironic thing about bad behaviour is that it makes good drama."

Does that explain our love of reality television: we are suckers for bad behaviour? "Arguably the basis of all good drama is some kind of conflict, some dialectic: putting people in situations where it's going to spark some disruption and distrust," says Dr Rob Edgar-Hunt, head of programme for Theatre, Film and TV at York St John College.

"Look at the people who go in these places, celebrities or otherwise. It's fairly clear that some personalities are going to clash."

He believes the programme makers use psychological profiling to ensure these clashes are inevitable.

So should we blame Big Brother for the dominance of reality TV in the schedules? Dr Edgar-Hunt doesn't think so. He dates the boom in "real" television from ten years ago. That was when programmes such as Changing Rooms first appeared.

"It doesn't usually get lumped into reality TV, but it relies on intrusion or involvement in people's lives," he says.

As for the so-called cruelty shows, he questions that reputation. "Is it victim TV, or humiliation TV? There's the question of people choosing to go on."

Are the shows getting meaner?

"It's more about trying to vary a very inflexible format. Something so formulaic inevitably becomes more and more extreme."

Look around: we like being nasty. Take British comedy. "Something like the hotel inspectors episode of Fawlty Towers: we take a certain type of pleasure in watching the humiliation of these characters. Just because it's fiction, does it make it any less humiliating?

"Is it really any different to Big Brother? My answer is no."

Updated: 10:26 Thursday, May 22, 2003