Big Bother

Just as 1979 became known in Rome as The Year of the Three Popes, the last 12 months are likely to be remembered in television as The Year of Two Audiences. Although the button on a TV set was always designed to turn both ways, several events have divided viewers and reviewers to an unusual extent.

The division during the World Cup coverage between those who couldn't get enough and those who didn't want any at all might have been predicted, but Footballers' Wives reversed the calculations of its producers by charming the middle classes but alienating the larger audience.

Now the third series of Big Brother, which reaches its Live Final (Friday, 10pm, Channel 4) this week, has had the opposite effect: selling lots of beer, if you like, while the Sauvignon Blanc stays on the shelf.

Broadsheet readers considered Footballers' Wives a success and were amazed to find it classed a ratings failure. In the same way, the liberal dinner-party consensus that "no one's watching Big Brother this time" was soon disproved by figures showing record audiences.

Such misunderstandings show the extent to which we live in closed circuits divided into People Like Them/People Like Us. This creates the risk that those who recant their previous praise for the series now are regarded as snobs. It's a risk I'll happily take because the third series of Big Brother has made me so angry and despairing of television as to fear a haunting by the ghost of Lord Reith.

Against all my expectations, the first series of Big Brother turned out to be pitched perfectly somewhere between Sigmund Freud and Matthew Freud: admittedly a show-ground for self-publicists, but one which also revealed genuine psychological insights. Celebrity Big Brother remains the classic work on what fame does to the brain.

But, with Big Bruv 3, a flirtation already apparent in last year's second series has been gruesomely consummated. A format always vulnerable to the accusation of being a research laboratory abandoned all analytical ambitions and simply became a zoo.

Participants who seemed to have been chosen to be disliked were then edited to be detested while taking part in stunts which, for the first time in the format, appeared calculated only to humiliate. The national demonisation of Jade Goody - which made what happened to Stephen Byers look like a little light joshing - made me fear for the first time that a reality game-show will one day provoke a suicide. The tabloid papers carried out the assassination, but they were aiming at a characterization established by the producers.

In its British versions, Big Brother has previously been an unusually progressive show. Gay participants, for example, have consistently done well in the popular vote and black players have fared better than in America. A victory next week for Jade - declaring her a rare survivor of a character assassination - would make British television and tabloids seem a much less ugly place than this regrettable series has made them feel.

The makers of Big Brother 3 have inevitably been accused of cynical ratings-chasing in their recalibration of the format. It's almost certainly more complicated than that: such an approach might, in fact, easily have alienated the core Channel 4 audience. The problem is that each series needs a talking-point. At first, the format itself was a novelty, and the Nick Bateman and Vanessa Feltz moments of drama occurred naturally. This time, the drama had to be manufactured and Jade became the victim.

Artistically, the show has also clearly reached its end - unless Jeffrey Archer, Peter Mandelson, Paul Gascoigne and Ann Widdecombe can be signed up for a Celebrity Big Brother 2 - but ratings and advertising revenue seem certain to dictate that it will continue.

It's common for comedy actors to appear in shows they've written - Jennifer Saunders in Absolutely Fabulous, Ricky Gervais in The Office - but this follows from the tradition of writer-performers taking the mike in comedy clubs.

In drama, this dual presence is unusual. Colin Dexter had Hitchcock-style walk-ons in episodes of Inspector Morse, and Dennis Potter turned up as narrator of Blackeyes, which he also produced and directed, but the writer generally turns up on set only to have a bacon butty and complain that the actors have mangled the lines.

This gives an extra kick to A Good Thief (Tonight, 9pm, Channel 4), in which Kay Mellor, having given up acting to write Bad Girls, Playing the Field and other series, picks up a dressing-room key again to deliver her own script as Rita, who is forced to go on the run after witnessing a gangland killing.

When stage dramatists such as Harold Pinter, Noel Coward and Billy Roche appeared in their own plays, they offered useful clues to how they felt the text should be delivered. Pinter, for example, delivers his dialog faster than most actors do. There's no such revelation from Mellor, whose style and inflections would feel influenced by the casts of Bad Girls and Playing The Field if you didn't know she'd started it.

So, with the casting little more than a novelty, the main effect of A Good Thief is to increase admiration for Mellor as a writer, confirming the grip that Northern women writers (see also Debbie Horsfield and Lucy Gannon) now have on TV drama. Her ability to switch between tragedy - the shooting during a karaoke evening in a bar - and comedy - a car-chase featuring a driver who learned on an automatic and can't change gear - again impresses and, competent though she is as an actress, you feel resentfully that the time could only be better spent at her desk.