Grant Woodward: How about Celebrity Big Cull? I'd tune in for that

IN a sane world, Celebrity Big Brother would have been killed off aeons ago. Along, I might add, with the Z-list residents of the Big Brother house. But then we live in a world where people take selfies with dead whales on beaches, so that will never happen. Instead it limps on – tedious, lowest common denominator telly for paid-up members of the cult of vacuous celebrity and the clinically brain dead. I’m old enough to remember the first series of Big Brother, when a group of pretty interesting, intelligent and complex people – plus Scouse winner Craig Phillips – sat around wondering if or why anyone would bother watching. The biggest controversy back then was contestant ‘Nasty’ Nick Bateman trying to rig the vote by spreading rumours about fellow housemates behind their backs. God, those seem like such innocent times. Now we’re left with a pile of pointless reality stars scrapping it out to see who can be the most vile, self-obsessed cretin to ever disgrace our TV screens. To be fair to the current occupants of this purpose-built zoo, they’re putting on quite the contest. The series all kicked off when former Ukip politician Winston McKenzie came out with the claim that adoption by gay couples is “child abuse”. Gemma Collins, from that cultural treasure The Only Way is Essex, led the outrage which eventually saw him become the first to leave. Then the lovely Gemma announced that she believed she was “100 per cent pregnant” (as opposed to being just a tiny bit pregnant) but continued to swig brandy and chain smoke regardless. Thankfully for everyone involved, most of all the “baby”, she wasn’t. Then there’s ex-Hollyoaks “actress” Stephanie Davis who wasted no time in pairing up with fellow housemate Jeremy McConnell (nope, no idea either) in front of the watching millions at home. Including her boyfriend, who up to then had been supporting her on Twitter. And let’s not forget the fragrant Danniella Westbrook, who has set a new world best for the longest recorded car crash – starting when she was a teenage starlet on EastEnders snorting so much cocaine she rotted half her nose away and continuing to the present day, where she gets paid to shout foul profanities at people in a house in Hertfordshire. Are these really the kind of specimens we want the nation’s children to be watching on a nightly basis? What makes me laugh is when the producers – who no doubt spend the time between series perfecting a yet more toxic mix of desperate and delusional contestants – attempt to take the moral high ground. These are the people who last series hired a former drug addict and alcoholic who’s been investigated by cops over claims he attempted to murder his wife. They then expressed moral outrage and kicked him off the show when a former Page 3 girl claimed he tried to look at her breasts. Who saw that coming, eh? Same when the dinosaur of an ex-soap star they’d hauled into the madhouse started bandying round the word “negro”. Isn’t it great to have such an arbiter of good taste as Celebrity Big Brother setting society’s moral compass, eh? The big news in the last couple of days was that self-anointed “lifestyle guru” Gillian McKeith had entered the house and asked the contestants for a poo sample. It shouldn’t be too difficult – the lot of them spout it out at regular intervals between 9 and 10 every night on Channel 5. Still, there is a way that the CBB producers can redeem themselves. Arm each contestant with a handgun and the last one standing wins. Call it Celebrity Big Cull. God knows, they’d be performing a valuable public service. Josie’s Savile claim could backfire OK, so I realise that Leeds mum-of-three Josie Cunningham isn’t exactly flavour of this or any other month. You may remember that she became a household name when she admitted undergoing £4,800 worth of breast enhancement surgery funded by the NHS to increase her bust to 36DD. She claimed she needed the surgery because she’d been bullied since the age of 14 for being flat chested. Later it also emerged that she received Botox treatment on the NHS over a “sweat problem”. She also boasted that she got free taxi rides courtesy of the city council to take her kids to school. Her most controversial moment came when she publicly considered having an abortion because the pregnancy prevented her from appearing on, yep, you’ve guessed it, Big Brother. Now she has told the national tabloids that she was assaulted by Jimmy Savile after bumping into him on her way home from school – Temple Moor – which the papers make out was a stone’s throw away from Savile’s Roundhay flat. Er, try five miles actually. But I just worry that some will think this sounds like a desperate bid to extend her 15 minutes of fame. Savile was a sexual predator who preyed on an untold number of women, many of them of school age. It would be awful if Josie’s claims – which she insists are true – make some doubt his victims’ ordeals and whether any of it really happened. Beeb’s boob over Brit tennis stars BRITISH tennis is on an all-time high with us holding the Davis Cup and having both Andy Murray and Johanna Konta in the semi-finals of the Australian Open. In the case of Konta, she’s the first British woman to reach this stage in a Grand Slam for nearly 35 years. So it’s a bit of a pity that some genius at the BBC decided to axe live coverage of this year’s tournament in order to save cash. The Corporation handed over the tennis rights after signing a deal to show live coverage of the NFL Super Bowl. So instead of getting to see our national sporting heroes on one of the world’s biggest stages we’re treated to the sight of dozens of anonymous giants grunting their way round a field in a game few in this country understand or care about. I can understand the need to save money but whoever thought this was a good deal for licence fee-payers needs their head examined.