George - the greatest housemate that never was.

For my feelings on the end of BB, please see my sister column - 'Lucky Blue Suit' - whose author puts it better than I ever could. In fact, I didn't even watch the finale. Why mock up a sense of faux-anticipation when it was clear that the slightly tawdry Brighton crustie was bound to walk away with the title? What an interesting BB though. All the way from Shahbaz to shambles. Jesus. I can hardly recall all the twists and the turns, the deceptions and the disappointments, which have suffused my life for the past three months. I have a feeling that this is a BB from which there is no going back. Another landmark series in which another layer of innocence was peeled away, in much the same way as Jade Goody got her kebab out three years ago. Weirdly, the only person who I cared to see again during the reunion barbaeque on Sunday was old Harry's chum, George. I spied him twitching and ticcing away behind Dermot, desperate in equal measures to avoid the cameras whilst fulfilling the terms of the contract he had signed in order to receive payment. 'How different would this year have been', I thought, 'if George HAD wanted to be famous?' What effect would his outrageous poshness have had on that idiot Glyn - whose mindless patriotism and hatred of anyone who doesn't speak in a regional accent would have been thrown into relief if George had remained. What about Grace? Would we have had another version of the love story if George had stayed to stimulate her inner gold-digger? What about Nikki? If she had hooked up with the aristo, would Pete have ever bought her story about learning to love people from the inside rather than the outside? Who knows? But still a George-shaped ghost haunts BB7. I feel he may have been the catalyst that made the housemates reveal themselves, and that because he wasn't there, we got played as an audience by the likes of Nikki. Pete and Glyn. Maybe, in another dimension, George stayed in BB, and Nikki is already signed up to the Fantasy Channel. But I suppose we'll never really know.