Big Ginger John Loughton Wins Big Brother Celebrity Hijack

You might have forgotten that it even existed, but Big Brother Celebrity Hijack reached its dramatic conclusion last night. Well, its conclusion.

And, if you're into that sort of thing, the Big Brother Celebrity Hijack finale threw up all kinds of surprises - not least that John Loughton, the overweight oversensitive perennial outsider ginger politician, beat the odds voted as the show's winner. But last night's Big Brother Celebrity Hijack had an even bigger surprise in store.

Emilia came second. And she was rubbish.

Over the last couple of years Big Brother has just got ridiculous. The typical Big Brother housemate is now a wannabe pop singer with Tourette's, a boob job, a vaguely tragic past, ambition that fizzles out after the first Heat cover and the kind of chronic 'love me' emotional disability that makes Britney Spears look like an icy standoffish stepmother. And, crucially, it seems like most of the recent Big Brother housemates had been turned down in years gone by because they weren't good enough. That's barrel-scraping, and it was a barrel full of shit in the first place.

So Big Brother Celebrity Hijack was a kind of rebooting of the franchise. It had famous people in it, but ones unlikely to start pan-continental race riots. And it had housemates, but Big Brother had sought them out rather than the other way around. So what Big Brother Celebrity Hijack gave us was - gasp - normal people.

Well, OK, not normal in the traditional sense - there was a dimwitted beauty queen who was a gifted child, a girl who sung about bongos, the least famous R&B singer in the world and a brother/sister duo who swung each other around on rollerskates until blood squirted out of their eyes. But you get the picture. Nobody watched Big Brother Celebrity Hijack but - admit it - it was nice to have a Big Brother that didn't commandeer every single tabloid headline for its entire duration.

And just to prove what a crazy mixed-up series Big Brother Celebrity Hijack was, last night's Big Brother Celebrity Hijack final turned everything on its head. For instance, instead of interviewing the evicted housemates in front of a baying mob, Dermot O'Leary mooched into the house itself and split his time between talking to the housemates and doing links into a mirror. It made the whole thing seem terribly anti-climactic, but then it was Monday night and it was E4, so everyone was just thankful that it was something other than a million Friends repeats in a row.

But what about the housemates? R&B singer Nathan and racing driver Jeremy were disposed of early on, but everyone expected that. Then the two favourites since the very beginning, Anthony and Amy - a hyperactive mummy's boy boxer and a levelheaded gas mask-clad conceptual artist respectively - were also evicted in fourth and third place. And that left John Loughton and Emilia Arata.

It wasn't a surprise that John was there - after all, he gained a free pass to the final after running round on opening night with an earpiece in following Matt Lucas' orders - but Emilia? Everyone was expecting Emilia to be evicted first, at least judging by the Big Brother Celebrity Hijack eviction mob, who booed so hard every time they heard Emilia's name that we suspect some of them ended up coughing their lungs out.

Emilia was so transparently manipulative - either flirting or crying to get what she wanted - that we genuinely have no idea why she ended up coming second. Although, on reflection, it probably had something to do with her being able to put her arse on her own head.

But then Emilia got the boot too, and that just left John Loughton as the winner. Seaking just after he won, John said:

"I've grown so much as a person. I've realised how much I respect my family. The achievement was getting here, that's been my biggest achievement."

So will there be another Big Brother Celebrity Hijack next year? Probably not. And has Big Brother Celebrity Hijack killed off Big Brother for good, like the naysayers claim? Not a chance - the normal twat-filled three-month Big Brother will be here before you've even had chance to prepare yourselves.

And as for John Loughton? If Big Brother tradition hold firm, soon he'll get a fake tan, write an autobiography that nobody reads, marry one of Joe Lean And The Jing Jang Jong, divorce him, get a breast enlargement and end up starring in an internet sex tape. Bloody politicians, eh?

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