It was when I saw those four hairy knees.
Sarah, the less-than-five-foot 19-year-old powerhouse from Big Brother, was locked inside a giant gingerbread house with her deepest fear: human knees.
Producers had tasked her with massaging moisturiser into all four of them, which mysteriously popped out of a wall.
Mesmerised, I learnt that night that the fear of knees is a genuine phobia called genuphobia – because watching Big Brother is nothing if not educational. (And that’s a sentence I never thought I’d write.)
But, you see, it was at this moment of observing Sarah’s horror at the sight of human knees that I realised, this show is not like the rest of low-brow reality television.
It is so much better.
No other hour of television will show you a former professional AFL player squeal and sweat as he’s locked inside a room of flying pigeons, or see producers demand a group of people catch balls that fall from the sky at 3 am when they are CLEARLY ASLEEP.