Hermione Eyre: 'Big Brother': Chekhov for the age of the chav

We had ample demonstration of the way success messes people up

So... Celebrity Big Brother has ended. Cue fizzes and whizzbangs. But should we look back at the past three weeks and regretfully wonder why we wasted our time watching it? I'd say no. Far from it. For, in my opinion, Celebrity Big Brother was Chekhovian in its brilliance.

Whoa! What's that sound - the screeching of mental brakes? You are uncomfortable, perhaps, with my comparison between high culture and low? Well, get over it. Roland Barthes applied cultural theory to washing powder, oh, 50 years ago, so it's about time we got over the silly social ritual of prefacing every conversation about Big Brother with "Sorry to lower the tone, but..."

In fact, this series of Celebrity Big Brother had the complexity and irony of the most elevated dramatic form. An academic I know was hooked on the programme from the start, and suggested some parallels with his plays. (By the bye, he is over 40, which thus nixes the theory aired by TV critics this week that only the yoof of today is into reality TV.)

We discuss the CBB compound as if it were a remote Russian country dacha confining a group of characters of disparate ages and intellects. There's nothing for them to do all day but play silly games, bicker, flirt and form inappropriate liaisons. All Chekhov's characters are there.

George Galloway is Professor Serebriakov, who thinks of himself as a superior Moscow intellectual. At first, the other characters look up to him, but by the end he has showed himself up as a shallow bully and lost their esteem. Pete Burns is, of course, the grand Madame Ranevskaya (Rula Lenska believed she'd got that part, but realises on-screen that she has lost her allure and is now one of those nurses played by Dame Sibyl Thorndike in her dotage).

Maggot is the dependable family retainer Firs; Michael Barrymore is the troubled geriatric Gaev, vulnerable and living in a fantasy world. He might lose his mind or his orchard at any time. Preston is the young gallant who forms an unsuitable summer attachment to the servant girl Chantelle, who for her part manages to shake off her lowly status and triumph over them all, as Natasha does by virtue of her advantageous marriage in The Three Sisters. But Natasha's change in status brings out a cold streak in her; let us hope that winning Celebrity Big Brother does not turn Chantelle's head.

Success is after all what the other celebrities in the house have had - and over the past three weeks we have had ample demonstration of the ways it messes people up. Likewise, the public's lack of support for Pete Burns (he came fifth) showed that while being bitchy and famous gets you cheap laughs, it doesn't mean much when you are put to the general vote. We preferred the nobody from Essex in the end, because she was sweet-natured and guileless. There - you see? Like all great drama, Celebrity Big Brother is subtly morally improving.

I am all for judicious cultural snobbery. Watching wooden, derivative soap operas is a waste of time and leaches the brain. But Big Brother itself shows how people actually behave when they are in pressurised, unreal situations. It contains dialogue that naturalistic writers would kill to be able to make up: Russell T Davies, Stephen Frears and Richard Curtis are all fans.

So why do we suffer bourgeois social agonies before admitting to liking it? We can't quite get over the idea that high culture is Improving, while low culture is enticing but fundamentally embarrassing, like picking your nose. It needn't be like this.

So this Sunday, let's drop the obligatory "Ugh, I can't believe I'm being so trashy, but..."