Charlie Brooker's screen burn

'For the first time in Screen Burn history the accompanying photo will be a full body shot'

Having failed to destroy the world, Celebrity Big Brother (9pm, daily, C4) returns with a surprisingly high-profile lineup: considering the nuclear fallout generated last time, you could be forgiven for expecting a cast list comprising the bloke from the Admiral Insurance ads, John Noakes's PA, three random Guatemalans and a photograph of Cheryl Baker glued to a broom. Instead, there are at least three or four people you've at least heard of, even if the last time you heard about them was six or seven years ago. I've even met one of them, albeit briefly. I'm talking, of course, about Coolio.

OK, so I didn't so much "meet" Coolio as serve him in a shop, but it still counts. It was some time in the early-90s when I was working in a video game emporium just off Oxford Street. We prided ourselves on being a counter-cultural sort of place. Staff chain-smoked behind the desk while the stereo blasted Aphex Twin into customers' faces. We stocked obscure Japanese grey imports on holier-than-thou formats, Jamma boards and secondhand British titles. Kids hung around playing beat-'em-ups and swearing. One day Coolio bounded in, bellowing at the top of his voice without even trying. I think he bought a copy of Samurai Shodown II on the Neo-Geo. He knew his games, did Coolio.

Anyway, apart from MY VERY CLOSE FRIEND COOLIO, there are a few other recognisable faces - and Ulrika Jonsson, whose face isn't as recognisable as it used to be. It's changed, yet stayed roughly the same, as though it's made from different material. Material from space. It makes her look like someone else wearing special effects makeup to make them look like Ulrika Jonsson. Maybe that's the twist. Maybe it's actually Bob Mortimer underneath all that. The truth will out.

Then there's Verne Troyer, AKA Mini-Me. He's simply too small; the size of a baby. Watching him walk up the red carpet on launch night made me feel giddy and feverish, like I was teetering on the verge of an uncontrollable psychotic episode, one where the dam in my head finally bursts and vision itself ceases to make sense and the walls start shouting and demons and witches and melting Nazi elephants crawl from the carpet to drag me away to Mad Land. He takes up four pixels on the average LCD television. For the first time in Screen Burn history, the photo accompanying this column will be a) A full-body shot, and b) Actual size.

LaToya Jackson: there's another recognisable one, although it's Michael and Janet you're recognising when you look at her. She's essentially Betty from Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em with a US accent. Terry Christian, for his part, is transmogrifying into Jack Palance and coming across quite well in the process.

Of the rest, Mutya, Michelle and Ben are flavourless sandwich filling, so until Tommy Sheridan reveals himself to be a massive preening bighead - a moment I keep anticipating but which, irritatingly, hasn't yet arrived - the ones annoying me most are Tina Malone and Lucy Pinder. Malone because she's got a habit of dragging the conversation round to herself: even when LaToya Jackson was describing some harrowing domestic abuse, Malone managed to deftly convert it into an appraisal of her own uncompromising no-nonsense scouse attitude. Pinder, meanwhile, went from "sexy" to "plain" in a nanosecond: as soon as she mentioned her Tory outlook in her introductory VT, you could hear intelligent penises shrivelling across the nation. I've got nothing against curvy, booby glamour girls, but the moment they start banging on about the Conservative party they turn into ugly, soulless dolls. As a result, she could don lingerie and spend the rest of the week doing rude aerobics, and it still wouldn't help. Now you know what's in her head, the exterior's been rendered so unattractive she might as well be excreting dog food from her presumably shaved and talcum-powdered orifices. Seriously, only a psychopath could find that attractive. And when you're supposed to be sexy for a living, that's a major problem.

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