Brian Reade Column: Trivia's deep, mounting nigh.

Byline: BRIAN READE 

SOME say our fascination with Big Brother dates back to cavemen, who so enjoyed watching their mates being trampled by bison they drew pictures on the wall to remind them of the spectacle.

Some believe our lives are so banal that, when we see others devoting theirs to sleeping, staring in the mirror, dropping a towel, farting, screaming "oh my God", and describing their greatest achievement as running a hospital radio show, we suddenly see ourselves as Jack Nicholson.

I love it because it confirms how over-rated youth is.

Listening to a dozen humourless attention-deficit cases swap banal views and cliched aspirations, whose most passionate belief is that they possess the firmest arse ever to grace a pair of combat trousers, makes this mid-life-crisis sufferer want to burn his leather jacket and petrol bomb the nearest Harley-Davidson shop.

If the shower currently on show are 12 of the most Happening Young Dudes around, then I would rather be an execution waiting to happen on Death Row, Dallas, than 25 again. It is the chasm between the way they see themselves and how we actually see them that makes it so riveting.

Take Cameron, the Orkney Baptist, who is there to find a wife, yet whose face crumbles with shock whenever he sees a naked female stomach. Probably because there is no magazine staple in it.

He wonders what his parents would say if he took a woman home without realising it. I think it would be: "Did ye really have tae club her unconscious tae drag her here, son?"

Critics fail to grasp that you don't have to like the individuals to like the show. In fact hating them is a bonus. What draws you in is their slow but sure change from self-conscious, image-savvy bores to evil, duplicitious animals who would eat their stranded rivals to survive if they had to. It is the inner journey to cannibalism that is the addictive hook.

Fifty years ago the nation was in awe of a different journey. The one made by Edmund Hillary to the top of Everest.

Today nobody gives a flying Fiennes who climbs it. Or how many Old Harrovians like Pen Hadow pull a sleigh to the North Pole to promote his Polar Travel Company. It's all been done, lads. All we care about is how many poor sods you rope in to rescue you when your self-promoting stunt goes wrong.

Our idea of endurance and achievement has changed. The unknown world has been conquered. We don't care about the lengths professional explorers will go to make the record books. We care about the depths ordinary people will stoop to to make fame and cash.

We are more amazed at why minor celebrities would take a fortnight out of their lives to stick insects down their knickers and how young adults would spend 10 weeks incarcerated with vile back-stabbers, all so their "personality" might win them a presenter's job on children's TV.

There is no more telling example of how the Queen's subjects have moved on during her 50-year reign than this. When she took to the throne, news that Hillary had finally ascended Mount Everest gripped the nation.

As she celebrates her golden anniversary next week, news that Federico has finally mounted Tania will grip the nation just as hard.

Actually more so, now we all have video recorders with freeze-frame buttons.

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