Davina gives Charley a hand, unlike the crowd. Photograph: Joel Ryan/PA
Apart from death, the next best great leveller is the act of walking through the brightly coloured doors of a large portacabin in Elstree. That's right, you can be the sweetest person in the world or a miserly miserabilist, but if you're leaving the Big Brother house, you'll do so to a deafening chorus of mocking boos. The only difference, week on week, year on year, is quite how loud the booing becomes.
On Friday night, when a slight 22-year-old stepped out of the house, the baying crowd booed loud enough to make you believe she'd spent the entire time murdering kittens and working out ways of speeding up global warming. Instead of, perhaps, being an ambitious if somewhat volatile young woman.
Charley Uchea, it cannot be denied, didn't look much fun to live with. She had a tenuous grip on her temper. When she invariably let it slip through her fingers - if the nightly catch-up shows are to be believed, she mislaid it around three dozen times a day - the small rooms of the pop-TV-prison were filled with shrieking, wailing, screaming, vicious, hate-filled and sweary recriminations.
Luckily for the producers, it made great material for their show, and night after night was filled with footage of the latest spats and divisions in the house, many of which revolved entirely around Uchea.
I'm sure those same producers would have us believe that Charley stayed in the house so long by pure coincidence; that rather than manipulating nominations and introducing twists that would keep their fan-fodder in, she stayed because people in the house really did like her after all. But the relieved sighs and laughter when they heard the door close behind her for the last time suggest otherwise.
Just after she left on Friday, five "half-way housemates" entered the house and, today, two of them will be elected to become full housemates by the existing inmates.
Now, Endemol can claim all they want that this was the intended twist all along, and not a knee-jerk reaction to losing their fieriest contestant just as the remaining nine settle into a mid-season ennui. Sadly, that's not how it comes across. If viewers have the impression that this has been "The Charley Uchea Show", it's probably because that's what the scenes on their screen have been suggesting.
There are some blisteringly big personalities among the new clutch of show-offs, the kind that could provide good entertainment for the watching public, but would never run the risk of winning. But on past experience the housemates will vote with their loins rather than any tactical brain cells they may have, and the pretty-but-essentially-forgettable will join the council of dullards that remain.
And what will happen to Charley, the South London it-girl with glorious physical attributes and the personality of a ferret that's run out of fags? After all the booing, will the public shun her? No.
She'll appear in girls magazines with her clothes mostly on, boys magazines with them mostly off, in newspaper gossip columns toppling out of bars and doubtless in her own self-aggrandising reality series, coming to a screen near you before being widely ignored and cancelled mid-season. Then, of course, it will be time for the autobiography she was promising last week, which she knows will go well, because her life has been "really, really interesting", and she's got "nice handwriting" too.
Charley isn't a bad person - never was. She was good television. But she was portrayed as a thinly fleshed out pantomime baddie, and foisted upon a public who were never really encouraged to like her, but will now be expected to put up with her - in print, on screen and (yes, yes, I get the irony) in blog posts for far too long to come.
