Julie Burchill

I’ve always been a Big Brother fan; I was hooked from the very first series way back in the year 2000, which featured Nasty Nick, Anna the lesbian nun and the winner, charming Scouse builder Craig Phillips who took the prize of £70,000 and promptly gave it all to his friend Joanne Harris for a heart and lung transplant. That first season – shown on Channel 4, as were the next ten – seems so wholesome now; the weekly shopping challenges included making mugs using a potter's wheel, and learning semaphore, as though the housemates were overgrown guides and scouts excitedly vying for badges.

I like the Art Deco apartment block where I live; the building is beautiful and the neighbours are nice. Just one thing; they keep having their old kitchens torn out and new ones installed – two of the three nearest flats to me have done this in the space of six months.  I don’t complain about the noise as I’ve been a very noisy neighbour in my time, but this architectural fetish has made me realise how out of step I am with the national psyche. For I would no sooner have a new kitchen installed than have a minaret erected atop of my building. My flat has its original tiny galley kitchen; like many of the swanky 1930s apartment buildings in Brighton & Hove, it once had a restaurant in the basement – Marine Gate along the seafront even had its own off-licence.

Each year in the charity shop where I volunteer, the Christmas cards arrive in August; by September, they must be on the shelves. We’re a small shop and space is precious; shoes and bags which would make us a healthy profit are swept aside for half-hearted etchings of mardy robins. But at least it’s in aid of charity, and thus in keeping with the spirit of the season – even if Christmas is still almost a third of a year away.

Undressing. Getting one’s kit off, whether for the lads or the ladies, depending on one’s bent. Disrobing, divesting, denuding. Slipping into something more comfortable. Giving one an eyeful. Getting ‘em off. Once we put away childish things and cease frolicking as nature intended, stripping off becomes a whole new ballgame. In our newly found state of youthful beauty, we may discover that flashing a bit of what one’s momma gave one can evoke a level of interest in others which one’s callow utterances cannot quite manage. If big-bodied nobodies are stripping off for strangers, how could we expect entertainers to keep their kit on? But equally, it’s important to know when one has reached an age – or a weight – when one should put it away. Cover it up.

Before the accusations of being a Bad Feminist start, can I say that I am inclined to believe the women who claim to have been sexually assaulted and raped by Russell Brand. Nevertheless, I found another of the complaints about him featured in the Dispatches documentary – that sexual partners would telephone Brand's employees ‘in tears’ after being ‘treated poorly’ – somewhat trivialising of a serious situation. Insult is never the same as injury, especially in the arena of sex. The problem with shagging culture is that young women in particular find that casual sex is rarely casual and that catching feelings is common Look at Brand. He’s vile. You can tell he smells.

In case you were under the apprehension that ‘Karen’ is simply an attractive name popularly given to girl babies in the early 1960s (my best friend as a child was called Karen, and there were three more in our year at my sink-school comprehensive) I’ve got news for you. To quote dictionary.com: Karen is a pejorative slang term for an obnoxious, angry, entitled, and often racist middle-aged white woman who uses her privilege to get her way or police other people’s behaviours. As featured in memes, Karen is generally stereotyped as having a blonde bob haircut, asking to speak to retail and restaurant managers to voice complaints or make demands.

I was a teenage shoplifter. I had a good run at it, from 12 to 14, and found it as addictive as any drug: the anticipation, the antsiness, the sharp stab of joy on completion. But all it took was getting caught, spending an hour in a police cell before being grimly collected and yelled at by my dad, to make sure I never went looking for a five-finger discount again. Shoplifting used to be something which, with the help of stern parents and the police, people grew out of. No longer. Now we are in a world of, as the Gail’s Bakery boss Luke Johnson has put it, ‘widespread, really widespread aggression, abuse and shoplifting’. Asda chairman Stuart Rose says that shoplifting has effectively been decriminalised due to lack of police action.

I hoped that we would soon see the back of Jamie Oliver, once a ubiquitous presence on television, as his youthful Golden Labrador-ish appeal waned and his mouth increasingly looked like something you’d find on the end of a fishing rod. But regrettably, like many of the cor blimey pretend meritocrats of his era – from David Beckham to Jonathan Ross – he has proved as determined to hold on to his place on the dung heap of fortune as any old landed toff. It seems the ceaselessly acquisitive Oliver clan want some more of whatever pie is being divided. Is the world ready for Buddy, his 12-year-old son, who has just been awarded his own BBC cooking show?

When I was a young woman in the 1980s, videotape was the new-fangled entertainment form; on evenings in, my second husband and I liked nothing better than to whack in a VHS and record something off the the telly. We felt like we were in The Jetsons – though seen with a modern eye, we must have looked more like The Flintstones. We were particularly fond of Duran Duran videos – and of a philosophical debate which was first aired in 1986 on the then-sophisticated Channel 4, now most famous for showcasing a transvestite playing the piano with their penis. The debate was part of the Modernity And Its Discontents series, this particular episode being called ‘The Tough And The Tender’ in which Michael Ignatieff interviewed the philosophers Ernest Gellner and Charles Taylor.