Ehh . . . what is the stars?

TVReview'Day 89. 11.46am. Ziggy has been in the bathroom for the last 17 minutes." I want his job, the Big Brothervoiceover, the bloke who enunciates innocuous tripe ex-treme-lee slow-lee in his solid northern English accent, an accent of the pits, of relentless labour and steely grit, a voice that, despite its stolid origin, failed to lend any weight whatsoever to the stale and chronically dull pageant that was BB8.

To the echo of the dying thud of the mangy tail of this beast of a series (the flatulent old hound should have been put out of its misery by the time you read this) and the fading squeals of the last remaining fleas on its scabby back (now ejected from their plasticised prison and sent out to view the world from the crowded pages of glossy magazines), let's take a moment to reflect on the sourest yawn in TV history.

Three months ago a houseful of babes (two identical), a bespectacled quasi-intellectual, a maternal bisexual and a pink-haired farmer's daughter discovered they were living in an all- female household with communal beds and a bath in the living room.

Stuff happened: a boy-band bloke called Ziggy came, girlies let the side down by having predictable hissy fits, more blokes came, girlie got thrown into the pool in her Gucci boots.

More stuff happened: the housemates made dinner, cried for their mothers, straightened their hair with hot tongs. Viewing figures plummeted. "Halfway housemates" were introduced to liven up the lifers: a woman with more flesh than clothing, a bloke from a museum, and a couple of bog-standard egomaniacs. Viewing figures plummeted.

The weeks turned into months, and by now you had to blow the cobwebs off the contestants when you tuned in. Ninety days later, as I write, there are seven babbling housemates awaiting selection as the "winner", including the squeaky twins, the bisexual, the boy-bandolier and the museum man.

On Thursday, one of the platinum twins lay under a duvet with Brian, who is sweet but possibly not the sharpest knife in the drawer. They were looking at the moon, and once again it was a case of the blonde leading the bland. Sean O'Casey would have loved the dialogue:

Twin: "What is the universe, Brian?"

Brian: "Ehh . . . I'm not sure either."

Last week in Edinburgh, Channel 4 announced that Celebrity Big Brother, due to go on air early in the New Year, is to be "rested". Might we be spared the Big Brotherexperience entirely next year? God, Joxer, we can only pray.

FORMER PUBLIC SCHOOLBOY and royal marine Bruce Parry illuminated an entirely different type of endurance test this week, crossing the Siberian tundra in temperatures of -50 degrees. Wearing a dress made of reindeer skin, with snow flaking his eyelashes like a Christmas card fairy, he joined the nomadic Nenets' annual reindeer migration. As grimly edifying prospects go, give me a cup of warm and salted lumpy reindeer blood with Bruce any day, over a shared duvet with Big Brother's squawk-'n'-talk twins Sam 'n' Amanda (although I accept I may be in the minority on this one).

For each Tribeprogramme, the gritty Parry and his production team of three spend around a month living with indigenous tribes around the globe, and it is extremely anthropologically entertaining. Parry embraces native life with unassailable, if somewhat alarming, gusto, allowing himself only the luxury of malaria tablets to soften the conditions. His quest to understand remote communities by living among their people (rather than standing back at a gentlemanly distance beneath the shade of a Panama hat) has, variously, led to Parry imbibing hallucinogenics, eating fried rats' tails and sticking poisoned darts into himself. The vast whiteness of the Siberian Arctic was, however, a challenge.

"I don't like the cold," he said, as his helicopter circled the herd of 7,000 reindeer that the Nenets, emboldened below by fur and tradition, were to accompany south across a vast desert of snow and frozen lakes. Later, Parry, fingers blue after disentangling fish nets from an icy catch, stood awed in a "white-out", the blizzard obscuring the horizon. His cheeks bruised and nipped by freezing winds, his earlier words rang as thinly as the echo of the squall.

Visually alluring, Tribeshowed the Nenet women riding their sleighs across the milky tundra, their Russian headscarves whipping across the blank snow like pink and green paint swirling on an empty canvas, their tiny children (stark against the backdrop of their vast icy playground) waddling like stuffed penguins in their long "malitsa" dresses, and thousands of reindeer antlers locked together like ornate branches. These same reindeer were particularly partial to the salt content of urine - splendid television moments come in all shapes and sizes, not least Parry relieving himself in the snow as the herd gathered.

Despite the tough conditions, this vast plain of undulating white offers the Nenets a spiritually satisfying life. Unexpectedly, Parry discovered at the end of their trip that many of the tribe owned apartments in Siberian towns, neat dwellings adorned with television sets and cookers and plump sofas to which they returned, grudgingly, between migrations.

"To live here would be a prison sentence," said one Nenet, looking around at the trappings of suburban Siberia. "It costs you your freedom."

'YESTERDAY'S PAPER WAS the worst in the history of newspapers, but tomorrow's will be the best!" Such, according to writer Maeve Binchy, was the credo at the 1960s editorial conferences of The Irish Times, under editor Douglas Gageby and his legendary news editor, Dónal Foley. A native Irish-speaker and a man of insatiable curiosity, it was Foley who was credited by many of the writers whose careers he fostered with opening up this newspaper (which had long been seen as the voice of a remote elite) to the concerns of the majority.

Foley's nieces, sisters Catherine (herself an Irish Timesjournalist) and RoseAnn Foley, respectively presented and directed a nostalgic film, Céad Seans: Dónal Foley, about their uncle's short but packed life, from his birth in his beloved Ring, Co Waterford, to the years in London that preceded his return to Dublin and the revival of the Old Lady of D'Olier Street. Among his achievements was his brilliant and well-remembered column, Man Bites Dog, which seemed to spring from the same slightly surreal source as the stories and songs he listened to so attentively in the "fairyland" of his Waterford childhood.

The film, like its subject, was born in Ring, the product of the Irish-language film course that is behind this interesting strand. Worth checking out.

ANN WIDDECOMBE IS a rare creature: a formerly fusty Conservative minister with a pudding-bowl haircut and a brisk, charmless manner, best-known for her much-vaunted virginity, she has, since leaving office, dyed her hair blonde and blossomed in the halogen light of the TV studio. Recently she has been presenting Ann Widdecombe Versus. . . (this week it was truants), in which she drives her little bubble car around Britain in order to give out to people about their messy lives. And yes, that is a change actually - one feels that, formerly, Widdecombe would simply have had these miscreants soundly whipped and sent to bed without their supper. Not now; now schoolmarm Annie is hands on (her hips usually).

This week saw her in a dour Liverpool estate attempting to drag a teenage girl out of her shoddy bunk-bed to go to school. The child, who was called Abi (that's the shortest way there is to spell Abby), wanted to train to be a hairdresser, but things aren't that simple - as a parent in Britain, if you don't send your under-achieving, resistant children to school, you can go to prison. One woman Widdecombe interviewed had spent two weeks at her majesty's pleasure, six months pregnant and quaking behind her cell door, because, try as she might, her teenage son wouldn't go to school, and when she tried to force him he assaulted her. Terrific, recipe for success, I'd say - lock up his mother and ensure there's no one left to hassle him out of the pit every morning.

Anyway, back to Widdecombe, trundling around Merseyside in her humpbacked car like a defiant Wilma Flintstone in a twinset. She found one school where the headmaster rewarded high-achieving students with vouchers they could exchange for cash at the end of the school year. Widdecombe huffed and puffed and blew his idea down, although the school was a shining example of good attendance and happy pupils and, as she had already pointed out, between locking up parents and paying for the anti-social behaviour of recidivist truants, the British state could expect to part with about £45,000 per child - so it didn't seem like such a bad idea to me.

Widdecombe then crammed herself back into her bubble and headed back to Abi to see if the invasion of her bedroom by a couple of TV cameras had made her get up and dressed for school - and nope, it hadn't. The child was crouching under her duvet and the body language wasn't looking good. I paraphrase, but Ms W seemed to get a little upset and, having counted to five in a very cross voice, stormed in and told young Abi that the only solution was a slap on the bottom. See, you can take the girl out of the corset of conservatism but you can't take the corset of conservatism out of the girl.

Abi, however, wasn't bothered by Widdecombe's tantrum and went back to her bed. And I went to mine. The Widdecombe style of social justice can wait; there are sheep to count.