146 housemates, 8 seasons and countless amounts of phone calls and SMS votes later, Big Brother is finally over. And it took two people to euthanaise it. Two people effectively killed off a tried and tested, albeit increasingly tiresome formula: Kyle Sandilands and Jackie O.

Any retrospective of Big Brother will show clearly where the show's demise began: while the first four seasons successfully combined unique personalities with a den-mother like host (Gretel Killeen) and less focus on gimmickry, the subsequent seasons changed in tone and mood. Post-Season 4, the downhill slide began, precipitated by a stable of housemates chosen for their looks, youth and willingness to stoop to any level to garner attention. Personality went out the door, replaced with the overwhelming feeling that each housemate spent most of their time preening and posing in self-conscious preparation for a Ralph or Zoo magazine cover. The prizes became the main incentive to participate; that and the potential for ongoing fame of the Paris Hilton variety: famous for being famous.

The content of the show changed too: tasks and challenges were less focused on cooperation and more on financial gain. The voting system aptly summed up the cynical tone: instead of voting for your favourite housemate, why you could vote against your least favoured housemate too. Twice the number of votes; twice the amount of revenue.

Of course, commercial television is all about the revenue, but what started as a fairly interesting exercise in pop-sociology quickly deteriorated into something tepid and yawn-inducing. Stories abound of the housemate selection process where potential competitors were encouraged to simulate masturbation and the like. While the first four seasons of Big Brother housemates weren't the purest or smartest folks in the world, they offered something more than crass jokes and a torrent of swearing and sexual innuendo.

Gretel Killeen, herself a respected comedienne and author, became less of a den-mother figure and more of a disinterested observer. The only time she genuinely engaged was to take to task one of the more unsavoury characters; the liars and braggerts who seemed to infiltrate the show. You only need to watch the final evictions to see the change in mood of the show: where the first four winners and their respective runners up are genuinely surprised and moved by their success, the later winners punch the air aggressively. Gretel's voice quavers with emotion in the first four evictions: in the later ones she moves aside as the winners strut and posture.

Eventually Gretel's clear disdain for the kind of dross she had to deal with became far too apparent; the audience picked up on it and it became like a stadium-sized Weakest Link, where housemates were evicted from the house and then subject to a tirade of personal questions attacking their questionable personalities. It wasn't fun to watch, and the wrong people kept winning the show: the twins who were separated by eviction in the last week, allowing the evicted twin to use his winnings to vote for and secure a win for his brother; the simpleton surfie bogan who won at the behest of thousands of teenage girls who deemed a spunk a better winner than a strong-willed female contestant. She went on to host a radio show: he spent his winnings within 18 months and has little to nothing to show for the experience.

Big Brother was a goldfish bowl broadcast almost live on TV; there were discernible characters amongst the fake reeds and they provided some interesting fodder for 30 minute spurts. Without ads, a 30 minute TV show is about 22 minutes long. Much like goldfish, viewers could tune in, observe some fellow humans and then pretty much forget about them until the next episode. Where once the show had at its core the focus on relationships and communication while in an enclosed environment, eventually the number of garish fish outnumbered the more interesting but less flashy goldfish and the show suffered as a result.

Enter Kyle and Jackie, two less than enthusiastic hosts and what results is a landslide in ratings, with audiences abandoning the show in a phenomenon described as audience erosion; not even an appearance by Carson Kressley and Pamela Anderson could save it*. The demise of Big Brother is long overdue, and is not entirely unexpected. This is evidenced by the stony-faced appearance of all previous winners - bar the first Ben Williams who refused to be associated - in the finale. The interviews with them are brief and lack any kind of emotional response. Even the audience is subdued, as opposed to previous finales which were large scale media events where much of the dialogue between host and housemate was drowned out by a supportive excited crowd. 

The glint in the eyes of Gretel Killeen in a crossover to a theatre somewhere where she's relishing her new role as Narrator in Rocky Horror Picture Show tells us much about glad she is to have evicted herself well before the Titanic sank. Nothing if not an astute media operator, Gretel knows she well rid of the show, which proved an excellent fit for her in the early years, and more an uncomfortably large monkey on her back in recent times.

It's time to go Big Brother, and not before time. Don't let the door hit you on the arse on your way out.


*Irony! For lamb's steak, you must realise this.