Fergus Cassidy

Transit story

I WOKE up on Tuesday morning with sun light on my mind. The Sky at Night was on the television a couple of nights earlier and stirred by Patrick Moore's infectious enthusiasm, I startled the dawn chorus and stood facing east. Alas.

Instead of the Transit of Venus all I got was the passing of some very large and grey clouds and an army of crows, rooks and pigeons.

The morning's early hours are a foreign country to me and a place that I only visit when I have to. It's cold and unforgiving and I don't speak the language so well. So after overcoming stout local resistance, I pulled myself free of my bed's gravitational pull and had nothing to show for it but bleary eyes. I felt cheated and so hard done by that I would have jumpted on a Transit of Ford if one has passed by.

But as the kettle steamed into action, I stumbled across a silver lining to my cloud-filled dawn. Hoping to find celestial coverage on television, the channel-hopping ceased at Channel 4. Transit of Venus it wasn't but I couldn't let Big Brother pass by without looking at these forming stars.

I always felt that it was safe to watch Big Brother as long as I didn't look directly at it. But it was early in the morning and sense hadn't arrived yet to release me from the cathode rays. I ended up transiting the morning knee-deep in Big Brother and tea. It eased the Venus no-show. What matter the planets when there's a new universe to discover?

Big Brother is in a world of its own. It defies all the modern media rules supposedly set in stone. Andy Warhol once predicted that everyone would be famous for five minutes but Big Brother can add five weeks, months or years to that.

I can't get over how old fashioned the show really is. If reality programmes point to the future of television then Big Brother is going in the other direction.

The 12 apostles of television who worship in the church of Andy Warhol, have agreed to put themselves in a house filled to bursting with cameras and microphones and allow anyone who wants to observe every word and moment.

If the world they inhabit is reality, then it's a Victorian one. Everything is provided from outside and the 'contestants' need not worry themselves over shelter, food, water or money. The latter can even be pursued later. This is a house where every night is bin night and no bills come in the morning post.

Even with these absences of reality there is something else which makes Big Brother a window on the past. The place may be bursting with state of the art camera and sound technology, but the non-existence of computers and mobile phones in the house allows the observation of a world which is slowly-disappearing.

What are the chances these days of getting 12 young people together in one place without mobiles going off? Or stolen glances at texts or missed calls?

With every year's Big Brother it's becoming ever more visible what life was like before mobile phones and the internet. If Big Brother is still around in five years time, it will be like looking at The Beverley Hillbillies.

Mobile phone technology has found a loving home in young adults and who could blame them? They can live their lives out of the reach of the parental switchboards which haunted previous generations.

Every generation is prone to cast a yearning glance back at rosy-coloured, better or less complicated times. If they want to do that now just take a look at Big Brother.

Here is the old world of near complete isolation from the outside world. Where people have time and conversation is alive and well. Where entertainment is self-generated and everyone joins in. They sit around and tell stories to each other. One to one human interaction without the distraction or interruption of ringtones, and - irony of ironies - television.

It's almost unbelievable that a show which is supposed to be at the cutting edge of popular entertainment is unwittingly becoming a homage to yesterday's world.

It's worth looking at that world to see what life is like and how people cope without communications devices. Even if it is a forced situation, the absence of mobile phones (or laptops and PDAs) on Big Brother has an unexpected and welcome reassurance.

Turning everything off sometimes is okay.