What a cheering thing it is that David Szalay has won the Booker Prize for Flesh which is a masterpiece of economy and is in a class that you do not expect to see winning the Booker because it is a work that discloses worlds. Imagine a contemporary novel that has the quality we associate with Sophocles: that – unlike Shakespeare (his peer) – no work of his could be longer or shorter. We don’t in any normal circumstances find ourselves comparing a contemporary English novel with the author of Oedipus Rex and Elektra but the greatest writing confounds all expectations. It’s also fascinating to see that the veteran Australian poet Geoffrey Lehmann is bringing out a volume of Rilke’s poems in strict form versions. Rilke is generally reckoned to be the greatest German language poet of the high modernist period and although works like the Duino Elegies have been translated with spellbinding splendour by Leishman and Spender, Lehmann seems to have captured the resonance of the most traditional poems of the great master who died in 1926 and who is arguably at least the equal of Yeats and Eliot. His Rilke book is being published by the New York Review of Books.

Recently, we have been reading the great Austrian playwright Arthur Schnitzler, who wrote Dream Story which Kubrick adapted as Eyes Wide Shut, and who is also the author of that extraordinary sexual merry-go-round of a play whose German title is Reigen and which is sometimes known as La Ronde because it was adapted by that very great filmmaker Max Ophüls and made into a French film – which has Anton Walbrook as a narrator (Ophüls invention) and a dazzling cast that includes Simone Signoret, Danielle Darrieux, Jean-Louis Barrault (the French mime who was also a great classical actor – remember him in Les Enfants du Paradis?) and Gérard Philipe – who hit the world of French theatre a bit like Richard Burton.

The logic of the play is that one half of the couple appears in the following scene, creating a constant contrapuntal variety. The British playwright David Hare adapted the Schnitzler as The Blue Room using two actors to create a whole theatre of figures. It was on at the Donmar Warehouse in Covent Garden in 1998 with Nicole Kidman and Iain Glen and was performed by the Melbourne Theatre Company with Sigrid Thornton and Marcus Graham in 2002.

So often when we talk about popular culture we’re talking about the cream of the TV streamers. Frankenstein with its vast budget underwritten by the Netflix partnership, Adolescence with dire prophetic power, The White Lotus or what have you.

Then there’s the real populist thing. Sigrid Thornton grappling with a pit full of snakes on I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. Cleopatra the great Shakespearean queen should occasion no fear for her after that one. And sometimes we forget the pure mass appeal of a big pop show. One new lush addition to this is Celebrity Traitors in which a group of celebs including Stephen Fry, Jonathan Ross and Alan Carr act as either good guys or traitors in the context of a grand Scottish Highlands castle. It’s very elaborate and a bit contrived but it’s good to see Gretel Killeen is to compere an Australian series. She was the masterly host of the best years of Big Brother and it’s good that Big Brother is being revised with all its captivating qualities intact.

The compere of the Channel 10 crowd-pleaser, Mel Tracina, is no Gretel Killeen but the basic features are still there and they’re captivating. Big Brother plays on the way if we start a new job the other people are as alienating as the faces at primary school. Then we end up marrying them.

So one of the house-mates, Colin, is dubbed the least bright member of the company and ends up in tears talking to Big Brother. The title is brilliant because it embraces George Orwell but with a benign tilt. Everything is subject to the authoritarian will of the domineering overlord but the emotions aroused within the game’s rules have a heightened reality. The household members are compelled to perform tasks (ranking each other from ‘most’ to ‘least’) and also – to their excruciation – voting to evict some of their fellow house-mates.

They’re a motley crew but vivid and compelling and likeable. There’s a chap called Conor who has Tourette’s and is super bright. There’s a woman who describes herself as a fat black lesbian, Abiola.

There’s Mia, of Sri Lankan background, who’s a bit of a moaner and there’s also an objectively beautiful girl, Holly, who is smart and savvy and gorgeous but also eats more than her fair share of the house’s supply of KitKats. There’s also a quiet urbane middle-aged man, Michael, who is the last person you would expect anyone would want to get rid of.

Part of what makes Big Brother such a compelling vice is that the situations are overtly contrived – they’re dire challenges in the form of games – but beyond that they play on observable human feeling in the face of the contrivance.

What seems like a lifetime ago Big Brother was a show to write about and it also sucked you in. There’s a real sense of recognition seeing the shots of Chrissie Swan who read books and Reggie Sorensen the fish and chip shop lady from Tasmania, David Graham the gay farmer who loved Belinda Carlisle’s ‘Summer Rain’.

The images came back like memories of your own life which says something about the way Big Brother played on the pull of human emotion in the face of very nifty artifice. It helped that Gretel Killeen was so self-possessed and adult. There was the glimpse of her with Merlyn his mouth taped shut with the words ‘Free the Refugees’. Big Brother always had danger because it played on unpredictable intensities of feeling.

Just at the moment there are young guys running around in Calvin Klein underpants and women including Holly, the streetwise beauty, in bikini swimmers.

Anyone who watches the show beyond its necessarily corny opening will feel the tug of it. In one way this is old-fashioned TV at its most commercial but it’s soothing to hear Mike Goldman’s voice narrating again. In another way this is vox populi, deny it if you dare.