Celebrity Big Brother - why bother?

Since when have the child-lover of a decrepit rock star, an ex-brothel keeper and the dumb and dumber boyfriends of a glamour model been deemed as celebs?

I know we live in fickle times, where all you have to do is appear on telly for a nano-second and you’re instant Heat magazine fodder, and very likely to be the subject of a Piers Morgan exclusive, but this is really stretching things.

Okay, Vinnie Jones, Stephanie Beacham, Stephen Baldwin and even, to some extent, Nicola T if you’re a page three devotee, are well-known for various – if sometimes baffling – reasons, but Basshunter? Lady Sovereign? Sisqo? I know who they are, I have to, but do most of the people watching?

Sisqo’s celebrity status comes courtesy of a one-hit-wonder song about a G-string (not the classical music variety, the cheese-wire-up-your-bum variety) that is basically the unforgettable line “let me see dat thong” on an endless loop.

Basshunter is classed as a celeb merely for being a DJ and Lady Sovereign is one because she’s one of the UK’s only female grime artists, as opposed to being a real lady, which she ain’t. Fierce.

Dane and Alex are now regarded as famous for being the aforementioned beaus of the walking publicity monster that is Jordan.

Am I the only one bored of that giant-eyelashed bint dominating all the reality shows on the planet, even when she isn’t even in the damn things?

So relentless is her quest for easy money/attention, that we shouldn’t be surprised if the whole reason her two fellas are in the house is so that she can pop in as a surprise guest.

Come back Jackie Stallone, all is forgiven.

There’s uber-groupie Katia, an attractive and, let’s just say, entrepreneurial twenty-something who expects us to believe that her idea of the perfect boyfriend is a bloke in his 60s with a face like a bowl of worms.

It certainly couldn’t have had anything to do with him being a multi-squillionaire Rolling Stone, could it?

Then we have Heidi; she’s a celebrity because she was once a madam, who specialised in procuring prostitutes for Hollywood’s A-listers.

Not morally low enough with that one, she decided to keep a little black book on all her wealthy – and, unlike this lot, famous – clients, possibly with a view to a bit of future extortion?

She went to jail where one has to wonder if she was punched in the gob by a miffed lady of the night – how else do you explain those lips?

Unless she’s friends with Pete Burns’ plastic surgeon.

Which leaves the real showbiz royalty.

Stephen Baldwin, who seems to have taken a career nosedive after The Usual Suspects (via Barney Rubble and lots of drugs) to being a mad-eyed telly evangelist with a very unnerving smile.

Vinnie probably just said to his agent: “’Ow much? For free weeks’ work? I’m all over it like a rash mate!” Kerching!

That’s Christmas in Mulholland Drive paid for.

Beacham is doing her best to be Joan Collins but is actually more like Hyacinth Bucket in an Anna Wintour wig.

But at least she was in US super-soap Dynasty.

And finally, possible inspiration for Sisqo’s Thong Song, it’s Nicola T, who has single-handedly managed to dispel the myth that not all models are thick.

Still, it’s the last one and we might even miss it when it’s gone, so we may as well run with it, if only to savour the thought that it means Davina McCall will soon be out of a job.

Which, one assumes, will shortly be the fate of poor old Paddy McGuinness if the first episode of the gold-medal-winningly terrible Take Me Out (ITV1, Saturday 7.30pm), the 21st century’s reincarnation of Blind Date, is anything to go by.

A nasty, lazy excuse of show, it comprised a panel of women, all dressed in what looked like clothes off the final clearance rail of the worst stall in Albert Square market and looking like those lasses who don’t make it past the nightclub doormen even on the quietest of Saturday nights.

They were there to judge whether various hapless blokes were “hot” enough to go out with and made Simon Cowell seem easy to please.

At least Blind Date was an equal playing field, where both sexes got to choose a date.

Here it was like a nightmare version of Loose Women where the guy had to resemble, at the least, a poor man’s pop star before they’d even look at him – despite all of them being, as the saying goes, no oil paintings themselves.

Meanwhile Paddy, a lovely man, but patently only brilliant when alongside his mate Peter Kay, had no idea it was a bigger flop than the new Doctor’s fringe and grinned like a big kid throughout.

Take Me Out? I wish somebody would.