
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.
This is Sarah. She has a phobia of knees. Image: Channel Seven. 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.
Big Brother this year was highly-anticipated. Once a cornerstone for the golden era of reality television in Australia, the return of the beloved format, now broadcast by Channel Seven, was highly publicised for the months that preceded the premiere.
The first episode, which saw almost a million viewers tune in, was met with a loud chorus of dissatisfaction.