Hooray! Big Brother is back! Hooray! And because this is its final year, the launch show did its best to mimic the entire Big Brother decade.

It started out exciting. Then halfway through it threw in somebody who looked famous but wasn’t. And then it became so overwhelmingly tedious that we automatically wished pain on all of the housemates and briefly considered euthanising ourselves because we didn’t think it was ever going to end. The entire Big Brother experience, summed up in 90 minutes. Great work, Channel Four.

But who’s in the Big Brother house this year? Glad you asked – we’ve listed them after the jump. Honestly, the things we put ourselves through for you people…

So, the Big Brother launch show was different this year, because the 14 housemates were picked live on TV – it was definitely live, by the way, even the the sky somehow stayed visibly lighter than anywhere else in the rest of the UK for about 30 minutes – from a group of over 80 hopefuls.

Essentially what this meant was that – instead of seeing the Big Brother housemates quickly get out of a car, trot down a runway and enter the house – we had to sit through a dull, prolonged The Price Is Right-style selection process whenever a new housemate was named. It happened 14 times. FOURTEEN TIMES. Great way to keep things zippy, Big Brother.

But who were the 14 grasping attention-starved empty vessels picked to be this year’s Big Brother housemates? Let’s see, shall we?

Josie – Blonde, chicken-liking, petrol-drinking Carry On idiot.

Steve – Tattooed amputee. One black contact lens. Looks like he beats people up for a living.

Ben – Posh cock who wears a jumper around his shoulders, which everyone knows is the universal sign for ‘I’m a tremendous cock’.

Rachael – Beyonce lookalike. Might be a bitch, but we’re willing to overlook that purely because she looks like Beyonce and we’re incredibly shallow.

Nathan – Eyebrows. That is all.

Dave – A monk or an emo or something. Oh, God knows.

Caiomah – A sort of white Rihanna who pretends to be a lesbian sometimes because she hasn’t got a personality.

Govan – This year’s Normal One. Except he’s never been in a relationship because he’s probably some sort of bloody sociopath for all anyone bleeding knows.

Shabby – You knows those little porcelain dolls of sad-looking tramps dressed like Charlie Chaplin? That.

Ife – A singer, she says. A bit nothingy, really.

John James - An Australian labouring under the impression that no British people have ever seen an Australian before. Nobody take him out drinking in Shepherd’s Bush when he’s evicted, for crying out loud. It’ll break his heart. The nearest thing to boy-totty of the year.

Sunshine - She is called Sunshine and she wears a tiny hat. We’ve hated people for less.

Corin – A Jordan lookalike who appears to have been pieced together from hundreds of fossilised foreskins and most of Superdrug.

Mario – A wildcard housemate who has entered the house as a mole but – get this! – he’s… tee hee… dressed as an actual mole. That’s so random! Except that it’s actually the precise opposite of random!

And that’s it. We’ll be checking in with Big Brother intermittently throughout the series – or maybe more if it looks like Steve’s post-traumatic stress disorder will kick in and make him attack Ben – so it’s not all bad, is it? It is? Who are we kidding, of course it is.

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And so the planet mourns the death of Michael Jackson. Singer, dancer, owner of monkey.

Expect to spend the next few long months being force fed compilations of his greatest moments, most of which will feature Thriller, Billie Jean, Man in The Mirror. His so-called greatest hits. Only, really, they’re not. Not by a million miles. We know that because we’ve listened to every single Michael Jackson record, at least one and a half times each, so we have a fairly advanced knowledge of his work.

So, ignore these “experts”, here are his real most wonderful moments…

1. Farewell My Summer Love

In a well-observed ode to trying to get off with someone, Michael sings about a girl who visited her nan, and ended up getting casually chatted up by Jackson in a local shop. The song catches the precise moment that the girl hurriedly leaves the grocery store, repeatedly looking over her shoulder, wondering what the strange boy by the lolly counter was attempting to propose in that spooky childlike voice.

2. Stranger In Moscow

Anyone who has ever visited Russia will know exactly what Jacko is on about here. Standing alone in the middle of a square in Moscow, being watched by the KGB, two and a half empty bottles of strong vodka turning you a bit paranoid. “How does it feel?” asks Michael, knowing full well that the answer is obvious. It feels weird, Michael. Really weird. And quite cold.

3. What More Can I Give?

If we had to chose one genre of music to take to a desert island, it would be CHARITY music. There’s just so much of it. Do They Know It’s Christmas, the one by McFly, and then this – Michael Jackson’s third best ever record. It features the sexy Hanson sisters, and it features the classic Jackson whispered chorus. He’s urging us to give quids to tramps.

4. Gone Too Soon

“Like a comet blazing across the evening sky, gone too soon,” sings Michael, obviously not aware of the sheer terror caused by the sight of a blazing comet hurtling through the sky. A more accurate use of the metaphor would be to say “like a comet blazing across the evening sky, you completely terrify me.” He proceeds to similarly lament the disappearance of rainbows and the sun.

5. Ben

A love song written for a mouse. Jackson celebrates that he will never be alone again, and that he and Ben have finally found one another. Both of them were looking for someone, and it’s all worked out really well. Except that Ben’s a mouse. A mouse. A mouse that probably doesn’t really know what’s going on, and perhaps wasn’t looking for friendship with a person. And yet, there he sits at the family table, politely making small talk with the rest of the Jacksons. “How long have you guys been dating?” growls Joe. Ben start sweating.

If you want more of this actual genius, you should head over to Josh Burt’s excellent website Interestment. You won’t be let down.

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Alan Sugar, now affectionately known as Suralan – or, alternatively, a grimacing Wooly Willy toy with a haunted look in its eye stuck crudely onto a child’s wrinkled body in a mortician’s suit – sits in the high chair grumbling at moronic, vapid shills.

It almost sounds like the perfect job doesn’t it? Imagine being paid by the BBC to sit at a desk and break idiot’s hearts for the entertainment of the braying public. It’s one of the easiest jobs in the world.

However, the catch is, he has to continually meet these dunderheads without pulling out a carpet stapler and filling their faces full of excruciating tiny wounds.

For a moment on last night’s The Apprentice, it looked like Britain was going to view the most horrifying episode of any show ever aired. The show, from the off pretty much said “tonight is all about babies”. A grim vision passed in my mind – Sir Sugartits demanding that the challenge would be for the would-be richdicks to create a baby before the day was out.

The thought of Ben yelling “SHOUT SANDHURST! SHOUT SANDHURST, SLUT!” at McQuillan in the futile attempt to roughly and brutally make his arse pregnant, or dish-faced Noel Fielding lookalike Debra riding atop a weeping Howard, punching him in the face with huge cement-mixer hands, grunting like deaf pigs in throes of an ejaculation that can only be likened to the death rattle of a cockroach, spilling eggs from its guts.

Of course, that wasn’t the deal at all. Rather, the assembled vampires were being asked to shag the public in the quids. Weirdly, these sharked-eyed poindexters were dealing with products for children. A bunch of people with less life-skills than a lepton looking at a bunch of stuff and trying to decide what The Nation’s Parents would want to buy for their puking little offspring.

The natural thing to choose was a foam hat, especially designed to make your child look like it had Down’s Syndrome. As an aside, you don’t see *those* helmets these days do you? Unless you tune in to The Apprentice of course. One of the clunges on the show basically implied that they’d sell the dubious products via ‘guilt’. Presumably they hadn’t considered the secondary guilt of their child getting mercilessly bullied at playschool, which is ironic for a bunch of people who probably spent their time getting spat at in school corridors.

Our James needed to impart his unique take on the world too. Watching him squat and talk to women about their ‘lid’ being flipped open so the baby can ‘pop out’ was worth the entrance fee alone. As he mimicked the pressing of a pubic bone and a monkey stump to some clearly puzzled preggos, internet searches for Entire Skeleton Removal spiked.

Anyway, one team of morons beat another gaggle of goons and that treated us to the familiar spectacle of The End Of Programme Showdown. This of course, is television that could curdle milk. It captures that awkward bullshit that we all go through in every excruciating job-interview we’ve ever had. In effect, each person is asked to talk about their strengths. The appalling feeling of pre-sick water rising through the throat while you try to convince a twat in a suit that you’re a reliable so-and-so and good at taking one for the team.

However, this job-interview is dragged out over weeks while everyone laughs at you and hates you. Even Alan Sugar hates you. You talk and talk about how wonderful you are, hoping that no-one chips in… but the whole world offers abuse like it’s some gift. No. You keep that. You shallow, irritating git. It’s all yours. The reward is either further humiliation on national TV or you get a tiny, withered hand pointed your way – like a dried-out monkey paw on a stick – and that timeless line: “You’re fired.”

Sandhurt Snow Patrol Ben got the chop, which saw him near-blubbing on telly like a mardy-arse. Off in a black taxi he’s taken to a life of also-runnery. Regardless of what he acheives in life, there’ll be someone, somewhere, ready to lay into him and snort uproariously about the time he showed everyone what a prick he was on our idiot lanterns. The long trudge to the cab compounds the bleakest fears. The niggle becomes a load klaxon. “You’re not good enough. You’re not good enough.”

And how we all laugh. Laugh like the mean-spirited shitehawks that we are. We watch, we sneer, we predict a winner, we go to bed. We don’t care. These people are just moving meat factories, shunted on screen and shunted back off again. They’re as human to us as Nookie Bear. Possibly less so. And that’s what TV is. A writhing pie full of shit and sinew. Yet somehow, we gobble it up every night.

So who is the real fool?

This was a guest blog by Mof Gimmers out of that Electric Roulette. Go visit now!

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