After nine series it seems the public has finally been granted the Big Brother moment it has wanted all along. Last night's episode provided viewers with the kind of titillating moment they have been expecting since the show's inception in the summer of 2000, as the will-they-won't-they saga came to a dizzying climax with a heated philosophical debate.
Bookmakers over the UK were paying out this morning to punters who correctly staked their money on this series being 'the one' - where a set of housemates finally broached the subject of Sartrean ideas of freewill and Kantian ethics. After much flirting around the topic, timid Alex was the first to make a move, telling fellow housemate Rex that she found Kant's categorical imperative "very sexy". But Rex seemingly played hard-to-get by claiming that he is in fact a moral relativist, causing Alex to flutter her eyelashes and saucily claim that "moral relativism collapses in on itself when faced with the argument that its position is, in itself, relative", before licking her lips slowly in his direction.
Cameras and microphones in the BB house picked up the rest of the discussion later that evening in the bedrooms when lights went out, and eventually Mario and Rebecca were drawn in to the debate, stating that they both happened to be of the consequentialist stance. The intense four-way logical reasoning contest got steamy when Mario's grunts of disapproval, at being accused by Alex that his position treated people as a means to an end, were picked up on the bedroom microphones.
A source from production company Endemol said "We haven't had this kind of girl-on-boy brainpower action since the deontological argument fiasco in series seven. We couldn't take our eyes off it, and I'm sure it was the same for our viewers, who are known to like a vigorous intellectual tussle."
But the bookmakers' wallets may be hit even harder soon - Rachel was later heard to plant the seeds of a thrilling debate as to the nature and function of art, after Dale claimed that "art must speak like a poem to the soul, and is not to be diverted into mirroring the aesthetic nature of the universe". Watch this space...
