Brother, My Cup Is Empty

Sometimes, in life, we have cause to stop, look around and take stock. Where are we? How did we get here? Is this where we want to be? I've been doing a lot of that this past year or so, stepping back, taking in the carnage that surrounds me. Is this where I want to be?

I suppose it's not where I want to stay, but I have no doubt that I am where I'm suppose to be, now, at this point in my life. It's another step on the path that I've chosen to walk down, and however bleak my existence - however harrowing the screams that cut through the midnight air from the depths of the forest behind the Ukrainian farmhouse that's been my home for the last 18 months - I remain philosophical about my situation.

Still, I sometimes wonder if I wasn't, perhaps, fully ready yet for this particular chapter of my life. If so, I blame nobody but myself: I chose this new career as surely as it chose me, and I'm determined to see it through. After Big Brother I suddenly found myself, for the first time in over a decade, without a steady source of income. Snuff seemed like a logical progression.

It still feels strange to recall the life that I led, and the person that I was in the early days of Big Brother, more than a decade ago. I was chosen to present the show for my qualities as a mid-ranking Duchess of late-night television: I was cheeky, irreverent, one of the girls; but I was also warm, sisterly and ultimately unthreatening. And this was the role I played on Big Brother for many years. I was the kindly figure that greeted housemates on their ejection from the house, picking over their experiences unflinchingly but non-judgmentally. I was almost de-briefing the contestants, helping them to make sense of their experiences in the preceding weeks, gently acclimatising them to life post-Big Brother, like a lubricant, easing their passage back into the world - a world they recognised, apparently the same as they left it, but by now oddly unfamiliar, a world that now recognised them too, a world that now hated them, hated them because our producers wanted it to.

But time marched on, the format got tired and we all - all of us, you included - became a little jaded. None of us believed in anything anymore, did we? Britain by the end of the noughties was a place where just about everything was permissible, particularly if it was in the name of entertainment. We were all sleepwalking, humping husks, eating, fucking and crawling over each other's corpses, desperate for gratification that could never again be achieved.

Which is why I started to treat the housemates a little less like humans than I had before. I'd always been slightly apart from the excesses of the Big Brother format; obviously associated with it, but not directly involved in the torment of the housemates. I was the one you could trust. You were safe with me. Not so much by series 10. I was one of the bastards by that point, dragging the housemates over hot coals when they came out, mercilessly ripping the shit out of them on Big Brother's Big Mouth. I was, by now, very much the personification of the malevolence at the heart of the show.

I didn't mean for it to happen. I'd been tainted, infected by the evil of the brand - unavoidably, after so many years in its presence. And so when I was approached after series 11 by Tantalus Films, the world's leading producers of extreme reality entertainment, I naturally jumped at the chance without a moment's reflection.

I used to dream of one day returning to civilised society, of turning my back on this world of horror, and reconnecting with my humanity. But I realise now that's impossible.

One morning last week, as my victim's almost unnatural howls of agony bounced off the walls of the killing floor, blood splattering my overalls, his gurgling disbelief, death rattle, pathetic final spasms failing to effect any greater assault on my senses than would the sight of an old man eating ham sandwiches on a park bench, I finally understood my place in the world. My dirty cleaver fell to the floor in a shiny pool of crimson, my head drooped, eyes closed, shoulders sagged. I dropped to my knees and for a little while I moaned quietly, wordlessly, a brief act of mourning for things passed.

And that was when I came to terms with my fate. Like it or not, this is where I belong now. There is no going back. I am lost.

Extract from McCall on McCall, published 2012 by HarperCollins