Mark Daniels: No swearing, this is reality TV

When I was an eight year old boy, The Empire Strikes Back had just been released in the cinema and Saturday night television was full of wonderful and exciting kitsch American adventure series and tacky game shows where contestants could win things like cuddly toys.

As the 1980s wore on, talking cars and military men wrongly convicted of crimes they didn't commit brought adventure and excitement to my life - and it all happened in the safe and comfortable cocoon of my father's arms as we watched the shows together.

While fond memories of the eighties might be leading to Hollywood blockbusting directors coming up with remakes of those wonderful television series in silver-screen format, the same cannot be said for modern-day television making.

Tonight sees the start of series nine of the king of reality television shows: Big Brother. Please all feel free to groan along with me at the thought of watching another thirteen weeks of cheaply made television, sitting in front of the box in the wee hours of the night eating cold pizza and watching a grey-screen version of all the contenders as they sleep in the hopes that we'll actually get to see a couple of them cop off with each other.

Of course, whilst the viewing public are really only hoping that some of the housemates will actually have sex with each other, Endemol has to make the contenders that little bit more interesting to take our mind off the fact that they're not actually doing anything useful at all, and so this year's entrants include somebody who's been in a film with Hugh Grant, another who wears a watch worth £13'000, a Buddhist, a Muslim and somebody who has been deported from the US.

How exciting.

That's why I'm starting a new advertising campaign: Escape Big Brother. The principles are simple: if your wife, girlfriend, husband, boyfriend, life-partner, son, daughter, mother-in-law or nosey-neighbour insist that your television license fee and Sky+ subscription should all be wasted on spending every waking hour watching somebody scratch their crotch whilst waiting to be let in to the Diary Room, get yourself down to the pub and enjoy the company of real people with real lives and really interesting stories to tell whilst drinking real ale.

I'm declaring my pub a Big Brother Free Zone and am encouraging all my customers to join me, where we can reminisce about the good ol' days of television. We'll cover such wondrous topics like why Murdoch was the greatest member of the A-Team, why KITT's Molecular Bonded Shell wouldn't really work, just how did that guy in Street Hawk manage to hang on to the handlebars of his motorbike at 300mph, and whatever happened to Manimal?

Of course, the same can't be said for my eight-year-old boy. Somehow, I can't see him sitting in a pub in twenty-eight years time with his mates, talking about how some character from Big Brother 2008 went on to win the series.

The best that I can hope for is that he'll be able to sit there and talk lasciviously about Davina McCall's legs. Or that he'll be able to sit in a pub at all.