The same voices who have dismissed Big Brother for a decade as simply a celebration of the banal, the crass and the buxom will no doubt be popping the champagne at the show’s demise.
Most will probably still have never watched an episode.
But what many miss is that Big Brother is a major player in not only a fundamental change in our TV landscape - but of our attitude to entertainment in general.
It was part of a wider phenomenon where young people stopped being consumers of media and became producers.
Big Brother and its reality TV cousins taught kids they could aspire to enter the rarefied world of showbiz. That their views and talents were important. That they should be able to influence the storylines of their favourite shows by voting - and they should be able to discuss it together on voluminous online forums.
The show – along with other fundamental changes in entertainment - fed this trend. Young people began to produce culture through blogs, Myspace pages, YouTube videos and FaceBook profiles.
Not just mindlessly consume the broadcast media, but to narrowcast their own.
They broke through the metaphoric ‘fourth wall’ and reversed a trend that began 100 years ago when media and celebrity were centralised and de-democratised.
Before that everyone sang their piece or recited their poetry around the piano on a Sunday. People performed for their local communities in theatre groups and the like and enjoyed ‘celebrity’ status, albeit on a smaller scale.
But mass communication through radio and TV changed all that – we suddenly became passive and, like other aspects of our lives in modern capitalism, simply became consumers.
Reality TV, internet technology and the natural cynicism and media expertise of today’s young usurped all that. They knew that fame had become a Fordist production line anyway – from the Monkeys to the Spice Girls – culture was being faked.
But even apart from these seismic - albeit esoteric - changes that Big Brother represents, the show has an incredible impact.
The TV juggernaut was more like a football code than a show, airing six days a week in primetime – for three of those nights for hours on end. For almost four months. There simply is nothing else like it.
A show that employs hundreds.
A show which feeds the biggest website in the country and numerous other forums and fan-sites.
Indeed many breakfast show hosts and gossip columns, who spend a quarter of their time either praising or trashing its contestants, may be in a positive flap.
Who knows where they’re going to source extra stories on more worthy ‘celebrities’ like Paris Hilton and Megan Gale to cover the shortfall?
And the show’s axing, much to the chagrin of those who are way too good for it, will also mean an end to its occasional leading of public debate.
A debate that for once included not just Kerry O’Brien and broadsheet columnists – but a young demographic more pre-occupied with picking up than politics.
Who can forget Merlin’s powerful ‘free the refugees’ protest? That had children asking their parents what on earth he was on about?
Or BB’s forays into issues like homosexuality, bullying, citizenship, racism and sexual assault.
In fact my own motivation for appearing on the show was to use it as a soapbox to discuss the achievements of unions and the counter-productivity of the war in Iraq - to a group of people who probably had hardly ever considered it.
And perhaps on a less academic but certainly as important a level – the show discusses a swathe of interpersonal topics as viewers watch people deal with difficult personalities and situations - When is it OK to lie? is it bad to be pashing two people at once? Is it more important to fit in or be yourself? Is it wrong to string someone along if you know they like you?
And then when they left the show you got to watch the protagonists explain or even say they'd change their behaviour based on what they had experienced, and the public's reaction to it.
But the show’s over now. So it’ll be back to watching overwritten American cop dramas from the US.
Australia can go back to consuming again.
The death of narrative indeed.
