Big Brother is Nineteen Eighty-Four rewritten by Aldous Huxley. The detail that George Orwell got wrong is that far from being terrified and brainwashed into submission by Big Brother, the populace would embrace the all-seeing eye as their route to fame, prosperity and freedom.

Some of the populace, at any rate. We met 16 of them – there were 30,000 applicants, allegedly – on ITV on Sunday night, mugging and pratting around and enjoying their newfound semi-celebrity en route to entering the new-look Big Brother house, vying to win a £100,000 prize and, presumably, a career in minor-league showbiz by abasing and humiliating themselves in public.

I watched so that you didn’t have to and you should be grateful that I did because I suspect I may have saved one or two of you from a new and terrible addiction. This is not, let me stress, because Big Brother has got any better. On the contrary, this new series – the first since 2018 when even Channel 5 decided it was too awful – is more cringeworthy than ever. As well as being the most diverse, sustainable and inclusive yet, it has an eco-garden, a hidden smokers’ room, no Geordie voiceover and no Davina McCall. But it’s amazing and a bit scary how, despite all that, the formula still manages to draw you in.

It’s a formula probably unchanged since the Romans hit on the genius idea of pitching a man from Nubia with a trident and net against a man from Gaul with a fish on his helmet. Despise yourself though you might, you cannot help rooting for one or the other, often for the silliest of reasons: you’ve always been a Neptune fan; a man with a Gaulish accent once stole your bird and so on. It’s just the same with the Big Brother hopefuls, a freakshow of weird attributes to cater to every imaginable taste.

Strict Muslim? Then Farida, 50, from Wolverhampton is your woman, promising from the beginning that she’ll be praying five times a day and will always keep her hair covered. Fan of that ‘Only Gay in the Village’ sketch on Little Britain? Step forward Jenkin from Wales. Into monopede DJs with disco lights on their false leg? That’ll be Dylan from Coventry. ‘Ah,’ you’ll say, ‘but what if the only bag I’m into is hirsute, medically qualified New Age weirdos, who like old people, literally bark at the moon, live on the Isle of Man and dress like a Duran Duran groupie at the Rum Runner club circa 1980?’ Sorry. They’ve got that one covered too. His name’s Matty.

The one category you won’t find, of course, is anyone remotely resembling a real person. Probably the closest are my two current favourites, Tom, who works in a butcher in a part of Somerset where it seems – joyously – that time has stood still for 50 years. And Jordan, a ‘lawyer’ from Scunthorpe who is totally fake – he learned his posh accent from watching Downton Abbey and dresses like a Jarvis Cocker manqué – but feels oddly authentic because he’s so openly weary with the artifice, stupidity and dishonesty of the Big Brother concept and clearly wants to be evicted as soon as possible.

Continuing this week’s theme of grotesque cultural phenomena you’d happily never hear of again, the BBC has finally brought out The Reckoning, its four-part dramatised version of the life of Jimmy Savile, starring Steve Coogan. As you might expect, Coogan’s impersonation of Savile’s vocal mannerisms is note-perfect; so, too, is that aura of but-barely-concealed thuggishness that once led Savile to quip that if St Peter didn’t let him in through the Pearly Gates, he’d break his fingers. But the physical appearance is slightly off, especially those black, soulless eyes, which I’m sure Savile used to mesmerise his victims like Kaa the snake in The Jungle Book.

Why, though, are we going here at all? As I get older and more squeamish, I find myself thinking this way about a lot of true-crime docudramas, especially ones involving serial killers or sordid sex crimes. All they do, it seems to me, is titillate the prurient, pick at old scabs and needlessly ramp up the general climate of paranoia and fear. Why spend licence payers’ money – this is a BBC production, after all – disinterring this monster yet again?

Writer Neil McKay’s script rings true. I particularly like the lines voiced by Savile’s mother, ‘The Duchess’, with whom he had a relationship not dissimilar to the one Norman Bates had with his mum in Psycho. ‘All you do is prance around and speak in a silly voice,’ she tells him. And to someone who speaks complimentarily of her son: ‘I’d divide everything he says by two, if I were you.’

But despite the period authenticity and grisly detail – it even dares broach the issue of Savile interfering with corpses in the morgue – it’s hard not to indulge the suspicion that this, ultimately, is part of the BBC’s whitewashing exercise. The Savile depicted here is a vile piece of work. But the one who walked among us – and who the BBC and the Establishment indulged for so many years – was in all likelihood a lot worse.