Last Friday Craig Phillips became the nation's number one working class hero in a moment so emotionally charged as to put The Full Monty or Brassed Off to shame.

With Big Brother Channel 4 finally shook its Eccentric Uncle image and established itself as a forward-thinking channel with a reputation for dynamic programming.

And, on top of this, the Big Brother website (www.channel4.com/bigbrother) became the 26th most-viewed web site in Europe, a real coup in itself.

The one thing, above all else, that was responsible for this was four separate feeds directly from the Big Brother house, which allowed viewers to watch events in the house 24 hours a day.

This enabled Big Brother to capitalise on what the American's refer to as "Water Cooler Television" - in other words, TV that you talk about at work the next day.

Direct feeds like those used on the Big Brother site are frustratingly slow to use on your bog-standard home PC. But at work, with a souped up network-connection, and no bills to worry about, you could watch the dull antics of dull people all day long - as long as the boss didn't catch you.

It was calculated that Big Brother cost the nation £1.4 million a week in lost work.

Add to this a real slice of drama and you've got Internet history.

The day that Nasty Nick was unveiled as a Machiavellian master of lies (or is that more misguided) the Big Brother website quadrupled its unique users (the number of different people who logged on to the site). That's more than six million hits in one day.

This was despite a rather wimpish producer who pulled the plug when things started to hot up. Fearing violence was rife, the feeds were cut to the website and, in the panic, were not restored for half-an-hour. Needless to say, no violence ensued. Navel gazing recommenced.

But, if the daily nothings of what proved a rather bland bunch of characters (note the British disposition to throw out the more interesting personalities) has been so appealing, what next for the schedulers? Just as newspapers ponder their future in the light of the Digital revolution, so should television. If Prime Minister Tony Blair achieves his rather idealised dream of broadband Internet access for all by 2005, then everybody in the country will be able to receive direct feeds into their own home. In the long run, this could mean the redundancy of TV scheduling as we know it, as users log on to watch whatever they want when they want. Only premieres of shows could have any real dictat over the time they were shown, as programmers pander to the needs of an ever changing audience.

Add to this the voyeuristic nature of television at the moment, where Big Brother has the honour of being the most blatantly honest about its intentions. Docu-soaps still hold peak time positions. Add to this a few cheap web-cams and you've got real people watching real people ad infinitum.

Which would prove either the emancipation of a nation, or the final irony of life imitating art.