For all its screeching abuse and sexual antics under the blanket, Big Brother really represents a return to early Christianity. In the early days of the church, confession was a public affair. Rather than whisper sheepishly through a grille to a priest who was probably asleep, or engaged in some secret sinful practice himself, people used to proclaim their sins in public.

There was a period in the 1960s when this practice was briefly revived. I remember attending a trendy mass at the time, in the course of which people rose from their pews and accused themselves of various offences, most of them disappointingly vague. Then a young woman stood up and declared loudly: “I have committed adultery.”

The rest of us were still recovering from the shock when she pointed dramatically across the church and announced: “With that man over there.” She was indicating a young father with a baby on his knee, who was turning a slow purple. Then she added, “In thought,” and sat down again. It struck me later that this might have been an unusually ingenious sort of come-on.

The diary room of Big Brother is a kind of equivalent of the confessional, with Big Brother himself acting as a cross between confessor, therapist, superego and troubleshooter, but it is a confessional open to public view.

Privacy on television is a pretence. We know that the amorous young couple are not actually rolling in a remote haystack, because the haystack is being photographed. Voyeur-ism, of which the Big Brother audience has been accused, usually means spying on a private scene; but the ocular pleasures of the programme involve snooping on public events as though they were private.

And if the public are cast in the role of voyeurs, there is a good case that the occupants of the house are professional exhibitionists. Yet in a society in which the private is being taken into public ownership, who isn’t?

What is most striking, however, is that the scenes into which we are prying aren’t for the most part steamy at all, or even mildly sensational. Nothing is as fascinating as banality, as Samuel Beckett discovered long before Jade Goody was invented.

In one sense, this is appalling news for television producers. They have been wasting their time on all those artfully wrought narratives, gorgeous costumes, scintillating snatches of dialogue and ruinously expensive outdoor shots. In a postmodern age, plot, storyline, action and language have all become redundant. Only one thing remains of the whole traditional literary ragbag, and that is character. Character is eternally compelling.

Not character, to be sure, in the sense of rich, complex, in-depth, fully rounded personalities. In another devastating blow to creatively minded TV types, Big Brother - like The Archers - reveals the dreadful secret that people do not have to be interesting to be fascinating.

Once upon a time, people were fascinating for their actions and qualities. Macbeth, for example, or Eric Morecambe. But Shakespeare, it now appears, was wasting his time as well. What is truly irresistible is not seeing people parleying with witches or killing their king, but simply watching them being themselves. Whether those selves are elegant, meditative and subtly ironic or thick, prejudiced and pig-ignorant is beside the point.

What nobody else can replicate is the fact that I am me. I may be boorish, domineering and mildly repulsive, but the mind-warping fact that only I am me gives me a clear edge over everyone else. This, at least, can compensate for the fact that I cannot speak Slovenian or play the flute.

The ultimate democracy is to be supremely important simply for being yourself. Not even Thomas Jefferson could have foreseen that.

It is true that even the apparently raw reality of Big Brother has to be subjected to editing, along with a voice-over by an adenoidal Geordie. (More precisely, a Geordie playing a Geordie.) But the programme has nevertheless proved the point that people will cancel holidays to Portugal in order to watch someone watching someone lying on a sofa watching the ceiling.

It is an instance of what the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard once described as our “pornographic appetite for the real”. The bad news for the creative imagination is that nothing succeeds like good old-fashioned humdrum reality. Just by being real, reality, however dilapidated, has the edge over the most elaborately persuasive of fictions.

Milton’s Satan may be magnificent, but Shilpa Shetty actually exists and in doing so beats him hands down every time. Realist art narrowed the gap between fiction and reality. Reality TV takes that process a logical step further and closes it until one cannot even spot the join.

Just as a pile of bricks becomes art when it is placed in the Tate, so a bunch of not overwhelmingly fascinating young people become fascinating by being framed by a TV screen. It is not that they are thereby transformed into magical figures. On the contrary, the point of the show is that they continue to be themselves. It is that TV is magical in itself, just as power and money are. There is no need for tinsel, stardust and standard English. Everyone is equal in the diary room, just as in the polling booth.

There is likely to be a rough sort of equality between the members of the house in any case, since only the kind of person that is interested in ending up on the programme will do so and that excludes whole swathes of the population.

In the end, then, we are not really looking at “real people”. We are looking at people who like to share their lives with millions of others, which, along with basket-weaving and coprophilia, is still a minority taste. It may not be so soon.

The commonplace is infinitely seductive. It confirms what we secretly yearn to know – that other people’s lives are just as dingy, makeshift and eventless as our own. The audience of Big Brother is a narcissist peering in a mirror, delighting in the consolation of seeing its own features reflected there.

It’s a familiar point about realist art that we tend to enjoy it, however unsavoury – or even repulsive – the things that it represents. There is something about the act of representing reality itself that grips us, however tedious or offensive the material we are shown.

We are creatures who for some doubtless evolutionary reason take

Terry Eagleton is John Edward Taylor professor of English literature at Manchester University This essay is taken from 25x4: Channel 4 at 25, edited by Rosie Boycott and Meredith Etherington-Smith, published by Cultureshock Media at £25

pleasure in doubling, mimesis, reflection, simulacrum; and although some Big Brother contestants might not have been able to pronounce some of those words – and a few of them might jump on any contestant rash enough to use them – this, in effect, is what endows these ordinary men and women with their transient moment of glory. The glory is then reflected onto the audience, not least because they have an active role in deciding who stays and who goes.

To this extent, Big Brother is a skewed version of the weekend house parties organised by MI6 for Oxbridge graduates where, under the ever-watchful eye of senior spooks, a few fortunate souls end up learning how to kill Muslims with a matchbox while the rest will become stockbrokers.

In the end it is the puritanism of the programme that is most eye-catching. For the puritan tradition, nothing can be real unless it is externalised. The original Big Brother society in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four drew the grim political conclusions of this belief. Everyone is publicly at stake all the time. Privacy is a crime. Subjectivity, since it seems to involve an interior world closed off from others, is a kind of treason.

There is, however, a stage beyond even this totalitarian nightmare. It is when there is nothing important enough to keep secret in the first place. The ultimate collapse of privacy does not come about when everything must be compulsively publicised. It comes about when there is nothing of much value to be publicised in the first place, because everything is already on the surface.

It’s okay to parade your private life in public when everyone can predict its contents already. At this point the terms “private” and “public” lose their meaning. When everything is public the idea of privacy withers away. But so does the idea of the public, since there is now nothing to contrast it with.

Seventeenth-century puritans endured spiritual torment in getting their chequered souls out in the open. For their postmodern progeny, there is less and less “in here” to be externalised in the first place. Or rather, what’s in here is often enough just a reflection of what’s out there: money, power, celebrity, status.

Is what we are witnessing with Big Brother the death of the subject? And, if so, does the death presage some wondrous new creation or some monstrous birth?

The new housemates: specially selected to lust, irritate and say foolish things

by Roland White

If Big Brother is a confessional, this year’s housemates will have plenty of sins to occupy the priest. Lust and pride, for a start - and if sheer crass vulgarity were a sin, most of them would be doing penance from matins to vespers.

For a flavour of what’s in store, listen to Dale Howard, a PE student: “If there’s any fanny in there, I’m gonna nail it.” Charmed, I’m sure.

Still, that must have been music to Big Brother’s ears. It’s in his interests to encourage sin, and the show got off to a cracking start on Thursday night. A couple called Mario Marconi, 42, and Lisa Appleton, 40, were the first to enter the house. Mario looks like a tubbier version of Sylvester Stallone and says he has slept with more than 200 women. Lisa says the most significant event of her life was when Mario pawned his Rolex to get her a boob job.

Yup, that’s love all right. But they’d been in the house barely five minutes when Big Brother ordered them to split up and pretend they’d never met.

Mario was then awarded a new trophy girlfriend - Stephanie McMichael, 19, a blonde who looks as if she ought to be a fixture at a Cheshire nightclub. “What they [Mario and Stephanie] don’t know,” revealed Davina McCall, who presides over the show, “is that on Sunday they’ll be getting married - for real.”

And there you have the secret of Big Brother. These are by no means normal people. The 16 housemates have been selected to lust after one another, to irritate, to form rivalries, to say foolish things under pressure. The last thing Big Brother wants is normal. How his heart must have skipped on receiving Rachel Rice’s application form: the trainee teacher, 24, had covered it with 98 smiley faces.

Even the quiet ones are odd. Luke, 20, is a politics student from Wigan. He wears a suit and supports the Tories (in the world of television it’s still considered eccentric to be openly Conservative). He says he doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke. “I once referred to the missionary position as the military position,” he said. “That says a lot.” Enough to get him into the house.

There is certainly a Christian analogy to be made about Big Brother, but it’s the one about being tossed to the lions. The housemates are there to suffer for our entertainment. On some reality shows the contestants are starved to ensure they’re short-tempered. Here the producers just throw the housemates together and let them stew, stirring occasionally.

Not for nothing is Channel 4 heralding this as the hardest series yet. “We want it to be funny but evil,” says Angela Jain, the editor in charge. “It will be tougher on the contestants than it has been before.”

If anybody breaks the rules they will be held in a small prison cell. Offences can include failing to sit in the correct manner while using the small smoking area. Perhaps the religious analogy does work after all - denial, confession, sackcloth and ashes and a strict adherence to the commandments.

Big Brother is best known for the outrageous exhibitionism or sheer dim-wittedness of its housemates. Jade Goody made her name with such remarks as: “People from Newcastle: they’re called Liverpudlians, aren’t they?” Last year she was at the centre of an international dispute caused when she and other housemates on Celebrity Big Brother directed racist abuse at Shilpa Shetty. The Bollywood actress wept in the diary room afterwards: “It’s just a game - a mean, nasty game.”

Odd, then, that it’s often the more conventional housemates who come out on top. The first winner was Craig Phillips, a builder from Liverpool, who gave his £70,000 prize to a friend who needed medical treatment. Three years later it was Cameron Stout, a quiet fish trader from Orkney.

That’s good news for friendly Michael Hughes, 33, a blind radio producer and stand-up comedian. But not so good for Rebecca Shiner, 21, a busty nursery nurse who spent much of the first programme shrieking hysterically: “Oh my God! Oh my God!”

There are 90 days of this to go. What else is there to say but: “Oh my God! Oh my God!”

- Terry Eagleton is John Edward Taylor professor of English literature at Manchester University

This essay is taken from 25x4: Channel 4 at 25, edited by Rosie Boycott and Meredith Etherington-Smith, published by Cultureshock Media at £25

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