tvmince

I’m going to sound like a wrinkly old curmudgeon by asking this, but I’m going to ask it anyway: why is Big Brother always full of young people? Every year it seems to be exactly the same 18-30 crowd, and if you take Sylvester LeBlanc and Lisa out of this year’s mob then it’s the same thing again. The show’s producers seem to make a genuine effort to find a cross-section of races, sexualities, classes and backgrounds, so why not ages?

Sure, there’s been the occasional instance of an oldie slipping through the net. Sandy, the kilt-wearing bin-pisser, is the most obvious example to spring to mind. But even he wasn’t a proper oldster. I don’t want the sort of oldie who thinks they’re still “young at heart”, and wears combat pants and daft fashionable glasses to prove it. Nah, what I want to see in the BB house is some genuine, wrinkly old gimmers, clad in brown from head to toe and ready to moan, disapprove and walk incredibly slowly around the kitchen at every given opportunity.

Throwing a couple of short-tempered coffin-dodgers into the mix would add a completely new dimension to the show, and would surely also create plenty of conflict (which is, let’s face it, what we’re all looking for). To me, the wider range of ages normally found in Celebrity Big Brother has a lot to do with why that version often works so much better. John McCririck and Jackie Stallone, to name but two, were involved in the sort of vintage BB moments that the current lot can, so far, only dream of.

Of course, getting the wrinklies to take part could turn out to be the difficult bit of my plan – which is why I’m saying it’s high time Big Brother participation was compulsory. The Government should stop wasting their time yabbering on about education and housing, and pass a worthwhile law for a change: one that says if the BB producers want you to go into the house, then you have to go in, and that’s that. Let’s get rid of the audition process, because all it essentially does is attract spiky-haired cretins who start every sentence with “do you know what”. Instead, the producers should be allowed to go out onto the streets with a big net, and catch themselves some genuinely interesting people. And first into the net is you, Grandad.