I’m looking forward to this summer. Oh me oh my, it’s going to be wonderful. Barbecues in the garden. Day-trips to Brighton. Long walks in the evening, when the air is powdery with roses; drinking gin disguised in a bottle of Fruit Shoots. This summer, I’m really going to live! Embrace the whole world for the joyous, thrill-filled fun-ball it really is!

Because this year, for the first year since its inception in 2000, I’m not going to be watching Big Brother. Not even the first week, “just to see”. Not even the launch night. It’s all over with me and that brightly lit house full of wannabe VJs and Babe Channel freaks. To me, in 2008, they are dead.

Of course, I haven’t taken this decision on my own. When people go through a dramatic life-change – such as birth, bereavement or giving up Big Brother – they have to make sure those closest and dearest to them are willing to change, too; or else relationships can just frizzle, and fade away.

And, indeed, all my friends in their, ahem, late twenties – we’re talking people aged twenty-twelve, twenty-fifteen, twenty-twenty-one, that kind of area – have already tired of the show.

“It’s such a bloody relief,” said my friend Mark, who gave up BB last year. “I felt as if I’d been released from a cellar. I felt less sordid. I felt like a Victorian adolescent would, if they’d finally been ‘cured’ from having shameful night emissions.”

“Even I’m bored with it,” said Polly – a woman who, in conjunction with my friend Charlie, had actually worked out a “ Big Brother Dance of Excitement”, which she did over the opening credits. “I used to almost look up to some of the people on the show – Anna the wise lesbian nun, for instance – and think that they might be my friends. Now they all just seem like kind of . . . numbskulls.”

As the end of May approaches, we older Big Brother viewers are like First World War veterans, observing the onrush of events towards the Second World War. While the youngsters chatter eagerly – even bullishly – of the glory of a new conflict, we are a more sober bunch. We know the terrible human cost involved. We know that even though technically Big Brotherwill be all over by Christmas, it certainly won’t feel like it.

It will feel like approximately five years are being devoted to hard-faced girls in bikinis, lying on the lawn, leaden with existential boredom, saying things like, “There’s a North America and a South America, yeah – but where is East America? Is that China?”

In my more innocent years, I believed that Big Brother was – like all-out global warfare – a positive experience for young people. At the beginning of May, a dozen or more psychologically flawed archetypes would enter the Big Brother household. Over the weeks, as they battled to “complete” themselves, on their “journeys”, the nation would debate their dilemmas, to the enlightenment and edification of all.

Is it possible for a woman to be born into the body of a man? (Nadia, series 5). Would all homophobes change their minds if they lived with a gay man? (Bubble and Brian Dowling, series 2). Can a man ever deliver an effective death-threat to a transsexual while dressed as a pantomime dame? (Jason “Jungle Cat” Cowan, series 5).

People left the Big Brother house noticeably better human beings than when they had entered it. The show was like a cross between cognitive be-havioural therapy, The Moral Maze and National Service. I thought it was wonderful.

These days, however – older, wiser, notably less excited by the prospect of watching two 19-year-olds dry-humping each other under a duvet on an infra-red camera – I’m stacking up the maths quite differently. Yes – 24 contestants could have their lives changed. But at the cost of THREE MONTHS OF PRIME-TIME TELLY. It’s just not a terribly time-effective model for the emotional rehabilitation of modern Britain. I would now far prefer it if potential housemates either read The Road Less Travelled, or were repeatedly punched in the face until they bucked their ideas up, and allowed Channel 4 to revert to its original, correct purpose, ie broadcasting a series of innovative dramas, edgy comedies and edifying documentaries on the search for the source of the Nile, instead.

This isn’t a matter of transformation, revelation and redemption any more. It’s more important than that. It’s about telly.

Big Brother Live Launch Show, Thursday June 5 2008, Channel 4, 9pm

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010