Despair! Woe! Wailing and gnashing of teeth! Weltschmerz! Ennui! Wear black crêpe, tear out your hair - the end has finally come. Big Brother is over, and what on earth are we to do now? It's a good thing, then, that someone at Channel 4 must believe in either a) the afterlife or b) zombies, and decided to pump voodoo magic and black rooster blood into BB's corpse, so that the show's ghastly legions of undead followers can continue to draw sustenance from its uncanny vampyre power. In other words, you can follow the depths to which Ant-knee (a most ungracious winner, if you ask us) and co. will sink as they chase the fickle chimaera of slebdom by whoring themselves out to anyone who'll have them - starting with Big Brother 6: What The Housemates Did Next (Thur 4pm E4; Thur 9.30am C4).
What's a trash culture junkie to do without a regular Davina fix? It's a good thing X Factor (Sat 6.55pm ITV1) is starting up again - and Londonist will be watching closely. This series could never live up to last year's, as Rowetta won't be taking part (she was robbed!) but it ought to provide some empty calories and televisual monosodium glutamate goodness nonetheless.
Now, children, did you watch Lost (Wed 10pm C4) like Londonist told you to? Excellent, so you'll be just as excited as we are to see where this mental show takes us next. Is Walt dreaming it all? Is Locke actually God? Did the 'survivors' actually die in the crash, and wake up unknowingly stuck in purgatory? Are they really on some kind of Island Of Doctor Moreau with invisible dinosaurs with a taste for evisceration? Can we have more shots of Jack looking hunky, grim and heroic, please? Oh ... yeah ... that's better. Mmm.
It's as if TV this week has done the audiovisual equivalent of going furtively to the local greasy spoon with £50 in used fivers clutched in its moist paw, on a quest to serve up to us, the lucky viewers, a feast of undeniably tasty but nutritionally, ah dubious junk food. "Dr" Gillian McKeith would certainly not approve, but then, what does she know? Not only is there the full-English fry-up that is Michael Carroll: King Of Chavs (that really ought to be Chav's, we feel - Mon 9pm C4), which is a portrait of the tattooed, ASBO'd Lottery winner famous for staging demolition derbies in the grounds of his manor, we also have car-crash viewing of a different kind, as Britney And Kevin: Chaotic (Thur 10.30pm E4) hits our screens. And you thought the Ashlee Simpson Show was ill-advised. To understand Britney's joyful nosedive from virginal, jailbait, faithfully Republican icon to, well, Chaotic, watch Britney's Redneck Roots (Tue 10pm C4). Includes an interview with her ex-husband - no, sadly she's still with Kevin, we mean the other one, Jason Alexander, who is also from the one-truck town of Kentwood, Louisiana. Kentwood sounds like the kind of place where there are 5 churches for every inhabitant, and, judging from the trailers, mullets galore. Yee-haw!
More - yes, more! Joy! - delicious trash comes courtesy of toff-with-a-heart-of-twat James Hewitt in Posh Swap (Tue 8pm Five). Watch the oinking ass (there's an animal undergoing an identity crisis for you) as he goes on a noble quest in search of his inner chav. For some reason, we strongly suspect he'd get on marvellously with the aforementioned Michael Carroll.
To crown this binge of bilge, like a deep-fried Mars bar, Channel 4 are showing Striptease (Thur 11.05pm C4), a so-bad-it's-fab classic. Watch in awe.
After such a blowout of Roman proportions, a trip to the vomitorium is needed, and Londonist feels that if anyone can watch Shake Hands With The Devil (Wed 10pm BBC4) and not feel sick to the stomach, then they have no soul. An account of Lt Gen Romeo Dallaire's experiences as leader of the UN "peacekeepers" (a sadly ironic name for a force which failed utterly to keep any kind of peace at all) in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide, it shows how, with his hands tied, Lt Gen Dallaire was forced to stand by as anywhere up to 800,000 people (mostly Tutsis, along with moderate Hutus) were hacked to death in the appalling genocide. This is reality TV to make the "reality" which mostly fills the schedules look like a cheap empty charade. Watch, and feel as utterly helpless and frustrated as Lt Gen Dallaire did.
After the puke and purge, time for a hangover cure: Gilbert & Sullivan At The BBC Proms: HMS Pinafore (Thur 10.35pm BBC1). Altogether now: "For he is an Englishman ..." New series worth a mention: Without A Trace (Mon 10pm C4) returns for another run of more intriguing missing-persons mysteries featuring the wonderful Marianne Jean-Baptiste, and Meet The Magoons (Fri 9pm C4), a new Glasgow-based comedy series about a family who run a curry-house, begins. Might be worth sticking with the Magoons - it could be a grower.
Finally, now BB is over, does this mean Channel 4 will stop arsing around with Nip/Tuck (Wed 10.40pm C4) and give it its own regular post-Lost slot? Let's all hold hands and pray that it is so, although Londonist has missed so much through shoddy scheduling and lack of a VCR that we're not entirely sure what's even going on any more. A shameful way to treat a quality show. Does someone at C4 have a personal vendetta against plastic surgeons? The truth will out! Happy viewing, all ...
