Channel 4 is cleaning house. Actually, it’s razing the house to the ground - an apposite image given the only returning series keeping its place in the 9pm slot next year will be Grand Designs, Kevin McCloud’s extreme property porn series, in which people undertake to renovate a crumbling edifice.

Channel 4 bosses clearly feel the same way about the image of their own station in the wake of the Shilpa Shetty race debacle which has haunted Big Brother since occurring earlier this year. In the show, the Bollywood actress was on the receiving end of racial slurs from Jade Goody. Channel 4 bosses were accused of acting irresponsibly.

Big Brother’s many critics claim the show is the cancerous heart of a station that has long jettisoned its public service remit. It is bracketed alongside the (now-cancelled) likes of You Are What You Eat.

But it is also immensely popular - with a cast of characters that runs the gamut from cute to annoying to barmy.

Celebrity Big Brother is (welcomingly) shorter, and features a surreally cast band of ex-celebrities trying to revive a career. It has provided the unique pleasure of watching Germaine Greer grizzle at John McCririck; of Vanessa Feltz going loopy and scrawling lunacy on a blackboard.

What Jade Goody and her cohorts did was awful, but - as a viewer - what rankled was the other housemates’ failure to come to Shetty’s aid. The show’s bosses mishandled the situation, but Big Brother is a fascinating, funny and exasperating exercise in group dynamics. Most fans regard “the race row” wearily: it has overshadowed BB’s many charms: the nervous, usually ill-fated romances, the boozy arguments, the conflagrations over food.

This isn’t about “creative renewal”:! axing next year’s Celebrity Big Brother is another chapter of Channel 4 bosses’s absurd and overplayed mea culpa around Shetty. The intriguing question is whether Big Brother itself will survive beyond the contractual endpoint of 2010. The ratings are down but still healthy, it brings in a lot of cash to Channel 4’s coffers. If the station kills its golden goose, how does Channel 4 intend to pay for its new, high-minded output?

We can live without Gillian McKeith inspecting our poo, but don’t take away our Diary Room.

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