Big Brother: It's worth the watch for the nostalgia alone

Spik aboot ower the moon a few weeks ago when my quine telt me Big Brother was coming back.

I’m one of a tiny minority of my generation who was an addict of the cult reality show.

A’ my pals scoffed at my idiocy, reckoning I was aff my chump watching hours of such guff.

I countered they shouldna knock something they hidnae seen. Not that I started off as a fan – far from it.

The kids pleaded with me to watch that first one back in the summer of 2000, but I declared I’d better things to do than watch a bunch of nobodies moochin’ aroon a hoosie.

However, come the second series a year later, a quine from Aberdeen was one of the housemates. The reporter in me twanged into a story. The show was already big news, so I started watching to see how she’d do.

Sadly, she was the first ootski and I did end up interviewing her, but by then I was well and truly hooked.

In those days you could watch hours of the stuff not televised on the main programme.

I’d loll in front of the telly mesmerised by them cooking their tea – when I should be cooking mine. Or even gawping at them asleep – when I should have been zonked oot in my scratcher. Feel gype.

But how will I ever forget series four? It was won by that lovely loon fae Orkney, Cameron Stout – such a treat to some of the later, oddball contestants.

A bachelor, at one point he confessed to some of his housemates that he’d fallen for one of his fellow students at university in Edinburgh, but she’d broken off their relationship.

He still missed her. Well, Mo was fascinated. Oh to track doon the quine and bring them back together, but the national newspapers had already failed to find her.

After he won, I was looking forward to meeting him when he opened a reservoir up Deeside.

Big Brother winner Cameron Stout became the Evening Express’s Mr Roses on successive Valentine’s Days.

Out with my best pal just before, I was again banging on about his lost love.

Her a stranger to BB, I near tiddled masellie when she came oot wi’ the following: “I couldn’t tell you before, in case you tried to do a story. But that girlfriend was actually … my daughter.”

So that mystery girl was in plain sight; I’d known since she was a baby. Spik aboot shock … as indeed the laddo was when I broke the news .. at the reservoir.

And no, I didn’t manage to bring them together again because she was already engaged.

Cameron went on to become the darling of EE readers, handing out red roses to wifies from Peterhead to Stoney during our annual Valentine’s Day competition and today he’s a stalwart of BBC Radio Scotland.

Meanwhile, fit div I think of the new BB? The presenters are rubbish compared to the matchless Davina and Emma. Housemates are a bunch of weirdos, no more the ordinary quine or loon on the street. One was actually on Blankety Blank two weeks ago.

But I’ll keep watching …

How do we fix a problem like Northefield Academy?

Was I a parent of a pupil at Aberdeen’s Northfield Academy, I’d be deeply disappointed and worried about the resignation of headteacher Douglas Watt.

Drafted in three years ago and tasked with tackling a tranche of problems, he leaves as if very little has changed. School inspectors issued a damning report in January and teachers have protested about classroom violence and abuse.

It’s the pupils I’m sorry for. Our education system has let them down badly. For decades there have been problems at Northfield, which serves one of the most needy catchment areas.

All in together in one school with more family problems than probably any other in the city – it’s a recipe for disaster.

One of my friends – a Tory voter – taught in posho Surrey in both private and public sectors.

She saw the many fee-paying schools lavishing their already privileged charges with the best teachers and facilities, whereas council ones suffered under-qualified teachers, poor supplies and conditions. A heart-breaking inequality.

Education is so vital in every young life, there should be positive discrimination; the top-class teachers and facilities should go to those who need the most help – from the most deprived areas.

Northfield Academy. Image: Paul Glendell / DC Thomson

I’d even scrap private schools. How about mixing-and-matching Gordon’s, St Megs’s and the Albyn with pupils from Northfield?

Swap the equivalent kids back from the comprehensive and the others into the private schools. Bet it wouldn’t take long to get Northfield transformed. That’s my Utopia, probably dystopia to many others.

Yet there must be some way of breaking the vicious circle of schools which are failing their students so badly and the inequality of others which carry on – at a cost – of producing la creme de la creme.