In today's Guardian Review, Big Brother is elevated to the lofty status of high-end art as Gordon Burn sees the ghost of modern painter Francis Bacon in your favourite reality TV show.
It is hard to watch Big Brother and "not be reminded of the grotesques in a typical Bacon painting, their faces bloated with laughter or twisted into a scream," writes Burn.
Arguing that Bacon's main occupation was with what he liked to call "the brutality of fact", Burn draws fascinating parallels between Bacon's paintings and individual Big Brother contestants.
"Devil woman" Grace flinging a glass of water in the face of "golden girl" Susie as she was evicted was an almost literal transcription of Bacon's 1965 painting After Muybridge - Woman emptying bowl of water and paralytic child on all fours: the ribbon of glittering water in each carries the same sting of surprise. Lea in extremis - teeth bared, nostrils flared, war-paint smeared - bears a strong resemblance to one of Bacon's (and Lucian Freud's) favourite models, Henrietta Moraes ... Just as the Big Brother contestants' tearful, disfiguring reactions are usually out of all proportion to what has caused them - Richard has eaten all the cornflakes, Lea has been bitching about Nikki behind her back - so the passages of existential angst in Bacon's painting too often can seem excessive and embarrassingly worked up...
For those who find Big Brother a nightmarish exercise in voyeurism, such comparisons might seem apt or, at least, a little bit revealing. Drawing these parallels is "less facetious than it might at first appear", writes Burn - although I'm sure many an Organ Grinder reader will disagree with that.
"I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them, like a snail," Bacon once said. So is Big Brother the snail through our TV schedules, reflecting the reality of 21st-century humanity, warts and all?
