This is Big Brother. Corey Delany, will you please stop inviting friends to crash over at the house with you – 500 people in one bed may increase our ratings, but the Police Tactical Response Squad keeps bringing those attack dogs, and it makes the chooks nervous. Also, the new BB host Kyle Sandilands will be dropping by for a live feed in the next few minutes, so housemates pretend you can all stand the sight of him or we’ll turn the oxygen off again. Oh, and please ignore any scratching at the doors at 3am – that’s just Gretel Killeen trying to claw her way back into the limelight of BIG BROTHER 2008 (Weekdays and Sundays, Ten-7pm).

Just when you thought it was safe to get in the communal shower, the bio-dome for bogans is back. The omnipresent overlord with the bored-sounding baritone has once again trapped a bunch of strangers together in a house wired to record their every movement. Now, Big Brother and the rest of Australia watch and wait for the fighting and fornicating to start. This year, BB has wrought a few changes, the biggest being the replacement of former host Gretel Killeen with manufactured pop-princess Jackie O and the despicable DJ-somehow-turned-celebrity Kyle Sandilands. The number of housemates has increased to 14, quadrupling the chances of a housemate having a psychotic break, thinking that Big Brother is God talking to them, and writing messages on the bathroom mirror with their own faeces. BB has also done away with the separate bedrooms, and 13 out of the 14 housemates sleep together in one huge bed. Each night, a lucky, rotating 14th housemate gets to sleep in a broken down VW Kombi Van. If I was Big Brother, I would start talking to lucky 14 in the beepy, mechanical voice of Herbie, the Love Bug.

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While BB has gotten progressively sleazier and less playful since the lambishly innocent first season, it still has watchable bits – mostly the bits in the unedited adult episodes. Some of the meat on display this year includes:
Travis: A geekily cute, self-confessed ‘funster’, who loves horses, sparkles and the Spice Girls. He contends that he is straight, and if you believe that, there’s a bridge in Sydney I’d like to sell you. Guest housemate Carson Kressley: ‘You’re Gayer than I am!’

• Nobuyuki (“Nobbi”): An Asian guy who managed to get past the usual White-washing the BB house undergoes. Nobbi is ‘addicted to moisturizer’ and has an ‘alter ego who will appear sometime’ – either a drag persona or Multiple Personality Disorder, I reckon.
• Terri: A 52-year old Grandma and officially the oldest person in the (Australian) BB House to date. She became my favourite when, at the prospect of an in-house romance, she said: ‘I can be extremely sexy. Although since I had my hysterectomy there is not much of that going on.’
• Bianca: Lists her greatest fear as ‘Spiders.’ I’m sure that BB is filling up the Volksie with Funnel-Webs and Red-Backs as we speak…
• David: Ex-cultist who escaped from a weird religious cult that had him constantly under surveillance. Umm, sweetie…?
• Alice: The first doctor to ever become a housemate. She is clearly just in this to get 13 new patients.
• Corey Delany: The cocky 16-year old kid from Melbourne who threw a party for 500 people and most of Victoria’s SWAT teams. Chances he’ll be shivved in the showers – extreme.
• Rory: Break out hunk of the series so far, who lost a large portion of his Gay fanbase after a nasty, homophobic trashing of Travis: ‘Those sunglasses make you look f***ing gay, mate; why would you want to look f***ing gay?’
• Barney: Dreamy lifeguard who showered nude and was my ideal physical type… Naturally, the first person evicted.

Lock yourself in with a bunch of friends and watch it!