Back in the seventies (yet another golden age) there was a ground-breaking PBS documentary called An American Family. Over a number of episodes we watched in fascinated horror as this nice, upper-middle-class family - the Louds - disintegrated before our eyes. The son took up cross-dressing, the marriage broke up, and it all ended in disaster. Great fun, needless to say, and a masterpiece of voyeurism. (PBS still likes to air it on long, hot summer nights - preferably all fifteen or so episodes back to back.)

Television has taken up this snooping-over-our-neighbors-back-fence format with a slew of "reality" shows: The Real World, Road Rules, Survivor, and now Big Brother. But, given the nature of TV, reality has been given a looking-glass twist. Are we watching them or are they watching us?

We were able to witness the spectacular disintegration of the Loud family because they became so used to the presence of the cameras that they let it all hang out. The so-called "house guests" on Big Brother are only too aware of the millions of people watching them and as a consequence their behavior, far from being the real thing, is self-conscious, self-serving and above all self-referential.

On the face of it Big Brother seems to be The Truman Show or Ed TV come creepily to life, but these movies were, of course, clever fictions contrived by obscenely well-paid writers, directors and stars. The so-called real thing turns out to be considerably less fascinating. The idea behind Big Brother (based on a Dutch original) is that if you confine ten people on a compound for three months and film them 24 hours a day you are sure to create some truly thrilling psycho-dramas that will provide irresistible nightly entertainment. Don't count on it. (And, as if being on five nights a week isn't enough for the average viewer, you can see the entire unedited lives of these alleged-average-Americans 24/7 from four different cameras at BigBrother2000.com in herky-jerky web-cam form.)

Here are selected descriptions of the cast members from BigBrotherBlows.com: "Broad-Bellied-Self-Berating-Pinhead [George]; Snaggletooth-Raving-Bitch-Hypocritical Idiot [Karen]; Rainbow-Crested-Virginal-CuddleSlut [Brittany]; Fame-Seeking-Ever-Primping Media Whore [Jamie]; Hapless-Unsuspecting-Smart-Guy-Laughing Idiot [Curtis]; One-Legged-Foul-Mouth Neanderthal [Eddie]." By the way, these descriptions make the cast members sound far more interesting than they actually are. (For more insanity from the "people who love to hate" these shows, just go to planetsucks.com - a website consisting of survivorsucks.com, realworldblows.com, and bigbrotherblows.com.)

Unfortunately, on Big Brother the conversations mainly cover issues such as "How many times a day do you brush your teeth?" And discussions centering on Brittany's wig or what color she's dyed her hair take on monumental significance. Activities (or "challenges") consist of making the Big Brother logo out of dominoes (talk about self-referential) or teaching a dog to jump through a hoop (oh, that wacky dog!).

Then there are those late-night-by-the-pool-get-down attempted conversations about relationships between the Exhibitionistic-Self-Absorbed-Depth-Seeking Idiot and the Nipple-Rubbing-Chuckle-Headed Virgin Chaser:

"If I, y'know, kinda decide to be involved in a relationship or whatever in here, it'd be totally, y'know...."

"Hey, like I'm like into depth."

"Oh, I was into depth for five years."

There's a little sexual faux trial in which a posse of girls confront a sleeping Josh about his nasty stud ways - he's been trying to "bag" Brittany and Jordan at the same time. I'm shocked! Little do they know that Josh is secretly interested in Jamie. (Oh, have I mentioned that almost everyone in the house is around twenty years old and acts it?) Much is made of Brittany's virginity, referred to as "breaking the seal" as if it were some Trobriand Island ritual.

The solipsism! The tortuous, tautological blather! You hear Brittany with her blood-red (or green or black) twin pony tails, her nose ring and other Mall-rat punk accessories in a moment of mind-numbing freeze-dried introspection: "I want to believe you, so do I believe you because I want to believe you, or do I believe you because I believe you?" You want to give the girl shock treatment. Anything to stop the yappy, whiny narcissistic little ding-brain from boring a hole in your head.

This wouldn't be television if there weren't, that's right, a prize. The last person standing will receive $500,000, the first runner up $100,000, and the second runner up $50,000. Every two weeks the houseguests "nominate" (a nice Orwellian touch, that) two people to get the boot. Then the TV audience dials a 900 number to vote on who will go. The result of this process is that anybody interesting, anybody with any attitude or intelligence, gets booted out early on - "Mega Man" William, Jordan (the stripper), Karen (the lovable psycho-mommy), and just last week, our beloved Brittany - leaving us with a survival of the blandest.

What you end up with is a group of mindless people engrossed in themselves as media personalities, sitting around a fake world constructed on a studio lot. By removing any real-life contexts (including newspapers, TV, and, oh yes, other people) these not-that-interesting "survivors" - of an elaborate auditioning process - wind up in the thrall of their own galloping self-absorption. They play to the camera and preen endlessly in preparation for their close-ups. When Jamie - the current Miss Washington! - is given the choice of having a heart-to-heart chat with her mum or spending a couple of minutes with a Hollywood producer, she predictably chooses the slick talent agent.

On Survivor, the participants were at least somewhat controversial as people, and the living conditions atrocious (which is always fun). Big Brother contestants, on the other hand, are incredibly boring and the living conditions, um, California (presumably reflecting the other side of American life). Think of these as the people who watched Survivor. It's so mind-numbing as to make one's own domestic life seem thrilling by comparison. You reason that these must have been "real" people with real lives before the show, and, sure enough, when we are allowed to view the houseguests' homemade audition tapes, they turn out to be more revealing than anything we've seen in their sixty days of confinement.

Is this show a mirror of our lives or is it a mirror of life as seen on TV? Theoretically the length of the confinement - three months - should lead to the participants dropping their guard and behaving more naturally, but just the opposite happens. The longer they stay, the more mannered and corny their hastily composed personalities become. We are in some sort of feedback hell, watching real people imitate bad dialogue from TV sitcoms.

Far from generating genuine interactions between the participants, the houseguests behave as if they were characters in a soap opera scripted by an amnesiac writer who keeps drifting off to sleep. Even their heart-felt expressions have the tinny ring of soap-opera clichés and seem directed to the audience: "Sometimes I think we make it more stressful for ourselves than it has to be." "There's no quiet place you can go to and say, 'Okay, it's just me.'" They are given to self-indulgent melodramatic outbursts, crying jags, and stagy nervous breakdowns. At one point Josh, the dim dreamboat, cries out, "I hope there's a better life beyond this life" as if he were some suffocating victim from the Black Hole of Calcutta instead of a bored, uh, contestant, sprawling on the set's eerily kitsch re-hab style living room.

This is real life as perceived by a TV producer - reality with a schmaltzy soundtrack, and complete with ham-fisted editing (cute intercutting between dialogues in different parts of the compound that only serves to undercut any documentary moment). The casting is equally pathetic. With three exceptions they are all vain, pin-headed twenty-something yuppies. So desperate are the producers that they add a hyperactive dog to the house several weeks into the show. Two nights ago, in a moment of desperation, they offered the guests a suitcase with fifty thousand dollars in cash (equal to the third-place prize) if they would just please leave the show. But no one would leave! Apparently, the air time is worth more than the money and, hey, $50,000 ain't that much these days. According to some of the contestants, even $500,000 ain't that much. Not to worry, though. Apparently, the producers still hadn't learned their lesson; they were planning to replace the fallen houseguest with yet another 22-year-old knockout of a woman. A homeless person would have been better, for god's sake. In fact, any ten people picked at random off the street would have provided more spark than the houseguests picked by these half-a-million-dollar-a-year TV honchos.

The few odd, jarring notes characteristically occur outside the show. The menacing, self-righteous "William" turns out to be the black militant Hiram Ashantee, a member of the new Black Panther party and a follower of Jew-baiting Khalid Abdul Muhaamed. Jolly George "the chicken man" turns out to have killed a friend during a hunting accident. "Everyday I have to see that son of a bitch who killed my father on TV," the man's son tells us in last week's supermarket tabloids. (The houseguests, of course, know nothing about the secret lives of William and the chicken man.)

Poor George Orwell! The idea that the thought-police image from 1984, his terrifying novel of totalitarian mind control, should become the title of this dopey peep show. It's somewhat gratifying to know that Big Brother is being sued for infringing on the copyright of 1984. Naming your production company Orwell Productions probably seemed like a cute idea at the time, but it won't exactly help their case.

The suit will not, of course, be over the theft of any ideas from the book - that's an impossibility - there are no ideas in Big Brother. Putting a camera in a room is not an idea either, especially since its use here trivializes the sinister presence of 1984 into a banal, voyeuristic, mindlessly long game show. Actually, the principal concern of these self-obsessed yuppies is that nobody will be watching them. When they hear that some information is being withheld from them, they immediately think it's about their ratings. They're constantly wondering about how the show is doing (and speculating that they must be bigger than Survivor because they have their own website on AOL).

If this stuff is reality, gimme a dose of dementia praecox or roiling paranoid schizophrenia anytime. Hey, wait a minute...maybe that's next - live feeds from the nuthouse. Or how about the White House?