It’s day three thousand six hundred and fifty in the Big Brother House and Mikey’s in the diary room, filing his 850 words for The Times. Ten years after Davina first welcomed the housemates into the goldfish bowl cum prison cell which is the Big Brother House, the series’s triumph is now complete.

I know viewing figures for the tenth Big Brother are in free fall, the red-tops can barely be bothered to scrutinise the sex lives of the inmates, even Heat has relegated its BB coverage to page seventy-something. But BB’s success is nothing to do with viewing figures or how many column inches it can still command in sleb magazines. No, Big Brother’s real victory is the total takeover of contemporary life by the trends pioneered on the show.

The goldfish bowl has become a mirror, in which we can now see the shape of modern Britain reflected. The endless scrutiny the show visits on its inmates is now the fate of us all.

Over the course of the weekend, the newspapers gave us precise, minute-by-minute, accounts of the movements of two, separate politicians and two, separate television presenters. We knew when they left home and when they took coffee. When they texted and where they rested. We were invited, all of us, into the domestic lives, down to the footwear choices, of these four.

And the phenomenon is spreading. A campaign group called 38 Degrees wants the movements of every MP on holiday this summer to be made public, and asks people to become video vigilantes, recording their moves on film. To be fair, 38 Degrees is only following the example of magazines like Heat, which invite readers to become their own paparazzi. And with every mobile phone a camera, there is no such thing as private space any more.

Not that most of us seem inclined to keep much private any more, anyway. Another Big Brother habit which we all seem to have picked up is the belief that the world will take an interest in all our mutterings, confessions and banter, however inane. Twitter, Facebook and YouTube have given us all the chance to become BB housemates — using technology to broadcast whatever wanders into our head, inviting the world to applaud our adventures in solipsism on the basis that we are communication radicals, “democratising” the media.

And when we do turn our attention from broadcasting our own doings to take an interest once more in others, we find that the classic Big Brother innovation — taking an individual with no talent for anything other than self-projection, making them a star, and then fashioning new and absurd narratives for them to hold our jaded attention — has become the way all our media now work. The way in which BB veterans Chanelle and Chantelle have “real-life” ups and downs, which cross over with other figures such as Jordan and Pete, all underline the success of Big Brother’s producers in scripting life not just for one household but directing the lives of all those who are now household names.

Truly, Peter Bazalgette, you are a king, and we are all your subjects now.

Comic genius

I’ve been thinking particularly deeply about Big Brother this weekend because I was invited on to Newsnight Review to discuss it. I didn’t actually display much depth of thought on the show, ranting in a typically curmudgeonly fashion about exploitation TV. The thinking came later, as I reflected on the brilliant, and nuanced, defence of the power of BB mounted on the show by the writer/comedians David Schneider and Natalie Haynes.

They also got me wondering about another phenomenon of our age.

Why are all the cleverest, the really verbally cleverest, people of our time — David, Natalie, David Baddiel, Armando Iannucci, Dara O’Briain, David Mitchell, Frankie Boyle — all comedians? They’re all superb writers. But they have all chosen, even those who are naturally reticent like Iannucci and Mitchell, the unsparing glare of public performance rather than the relative privacy of the written word.

Which is, in a way, another triumph for Big Brother. Even the best of us now work on the basis that unless you have an applauding audience you can’t aspire to lasting significance.

Georgia on my mind

I’m glad to see that Vladimir Putin reads this column. After I launched an attack last week on world leaders who strip off in order to show off, Vlad launched a retaliatory strike by immediately going bare-chested, on horseback, to demonstrate what real leadership looks like.

And it’s made me even more wary of Mr P. Because as a tiny standardbearer for gentle Western liberalism who has, unwittingly, provoked a suddenly display of Russian machismo while the rest of the world is on holiday, I now know just how Georgia feels.

Times Recommends

• Bank charges hit us for being human
• Sorry, Father, thou still shalt not steal
• The shed where Santa’s failures go to die