Celebrity Big Brother 7 (or, from now on, to save on pressing keys, CBB7) has been losing viewers hand-over-fist since the opening night. For many, the opening night of Big Brother is final enough. You get to sneer and yell for an hour and then, safe in the knowledge that everyone concerned will be boring, never tune in again. Unless you’re a TV critic that is…

Fact is, even though the Big Brother franchise is lamer than a sick duck in a minefield, there’s something that still compels me to watch it. I pass it off as something I’m paid to do, however, even if I wasn’t, I’d probably still watch the highlights show every night. Why, I’ve no idea.

This year doesn’t suggest we’re going to have a huge TV moment, like for example, the Shilpa Shetty Race Row or Nasty Nick Bateman Getting His Comeuppance. The 2010 crew seem to get on well enough and Big Brother is too chicken to push them over the edge.

Despite the ‘hell’ theme, Big Brother has seemingly found a sense of humour again.

Instead of rationing off food and plying the housemates with booze so they all fight like rabid cats in a cloth sack, Big Brother has instead decided to be playfully weird. The snow has probably ballsed up any chance of doing various tasks in the BB garden, so instead, the producers have installed a tree.

A tree that talks.

Yep, this is the Tree of Temptation and, basically, it’s the wooden equivalent of the kid at school trying to get you to smoke or play knock-a-door-run. In the past, Big Brother has recreated the conditions of concentration camps and the like… this time there’s a tree with a crap door on it saying “Go on… I dares you… Go on… pour sand in someone’s bed… it’ll be well funny… I’ll give you a Mars Bar if you fart in teacher’s face…”

This weird image made me laugh. That’s one more laugh than Russell Howard’s entire career to date. And that’s something that has been fundamentally missing from Big Brother – the sense of the absurd.

For too long it has ploughed on with faux-cruelty to get people to react while they near breaking point. ‘Dark’ Big Brother has been gruelling to watch like sitting in a room while a couple break-up. First, the arguments, then the slow agonising drifting apart, then, the tears.

Who wants to watch that?

Well, as the viewing figures have shown, less and less people have been prepared to put up with it. Now Big Brother is daft again, it’s much easier on the eye and brain. Of course, this won’t salvage the show in any way, shape or form… but at least those of us who are simple minded enough to keep returning, it’s less of a chore to do so.

Unless you’re watching Stephen Baldwin – the evangelical with a g-force test face.