Big Bother With the Law

I 'm still slightly dubious about whether or not the police really did go into the Big Brother house. On the one hand, everyone says they did. On the other, everything about this series (and the previous one, and probably the other two - which, like childbirth, the memory erases as a kindness) is a stunt, and to my certain knowledge the police don't get tangled up in those unless you count standing underneath the Red Arrows with a hose.

Let's say the police definitely did. I'm still surprised. In the back of my mind, I thought telly was some kind of autonomous mini state, wherein the laws of the land were irrelevant. And talking of laws, there's the ticklish business of which ones, precisely, the participants have broken. They broke the law against overturning tables, sure, but this is allowed (one hopes) in your own house; and if the contestants can't, for legal purposes, claim this to be their residence, then they could all be done for trespass and that really would liven things up a bit.

They had a food fight, but this, again, is technically permissible (I refer you to the St Trinian's Act of 1936), although city-centre thugs should be mindful that food housed in glass casing still falls under "glassing someone in the face". Various contestants have threatened to kill other members of the household, but I believe the law makes at least a tacit distinction between drunken hyperbole and a death threat. We're left with a humble drunk and disorderly, undermined again by the fact that even if the whole country wanted to watch (and incidentally, it doesn't), they're still technically at home.

For the producers, things look a bit more serious; you could conceivably make a case for offences of incitement to racial hatred as defined by the Public Order Act (1986). It's a close call, but the inclusion of a homophobic refugee who couldn't get on with anyone would seem to be a needless shoring up of racial division when the producers could just as easily have found a refugee who got on with everyone and swung both ways.

The mainstream media never get done under this act; in times of particularly feverish anti-immigrant tabloid rhetoric, the police have been known to flex their muscles, but it never goes anywhere. I'm guessing here, but I think the logic goes: "We can't arrest the editor of the Daily Mail. He's ... the editor of the Daily Mail!" What's weird is that the media are the only real agents of this kind of incitement, unless you count loonies with megaphones or BNP leaflets - if tabloid telly and print can get off because they're part of the establishment, then the act is pretty much void, though it has some other useful stuff in it about affray (of which most of the housemates would be guilty were it not for the stipulation that the offence must be judged only by a "person of reasonable firmness", and, God knows, there isn't one of those).

Otherwise, what is there? Incitement to hatred of people who've had a sex change, even though you don't know it yet - all you know is, they sit a bit funny for a girl. Incitement to hatred of frogs, of brightly coloured interiors, of silly girls and boys who talk nonsense? There is no illegality in this household. There is coarseness and tedium and the great crushing question of what on earth anyone's doing making this programme, but there is no lawlessness.

And that's a problem, for both the producers and the critics. Since the dawn of reality TV, people have been fantasising about its extremes. In the film Series 7, contestants have to shoot one another dead, and the winner is the one still alive. In Ben Elton's Dead Famous, a contestant is killed by the producers to boost ratings. (Yup. I've spoilt the ending. Take it back to the shop, swap it for wrapping paper.)

The tandem impulse is for sex to occur - last time around, the Sun offered 50 grand to the first couple who did full nooky. This time, Big Brother seeks to intensify the lust with a hell of a lot of booze and not enough beds (in normal life, a flawless combination). This is all a variation on the line that all you need for a film is a girl and a gun; that all stories are either Romeo and Juliet or The Pardoner's Tale. Narratives have sex, or they have crime. So what we're seeing here is a format that, with its much cheaper, easier pursuit of "reality", pretty much declared the death of drama, twisting itself into hopelessly coarse, messy knots trying to recreate the twin components of drama. It's like watching someone try to milk a pig. Fine, you've got a pig, you need milk, give it your best shot; but wouldn't it be better to just buy a cow?