I want to start with two admissions. First, I wanted Anthony to win Big Brother, which ended last night; and second, despite having resigned from last year's programme, I have watched enough of this year's show to realise that it plumbed new depths. Kinga's masturbation with a wine bottle, Saskia's racism towards Makosi, and Craig's fondling of Anthony were genuine low points in the reality TV genre.
The programme makers seem to be casting people who are exaggerated versions of normal: more verbal, physical and dominant. When you put them together and then give them alcohol it is inevitable there will be conflict. It left me wondering what counselling they received beforehand, and what support they will get on coming out.
My resignation as a consultant from last year's series, when Big Brother became "evil", was prompted by the refusal of its creators, Endemol, to listen to any advice I gave them about what would happen if they put back into the main house two contestants who had been separated from the remainder, but allowed to hear and watch everything that was being said about them. Anyone with the slightest knowledge of human behaviour - never mind a background in psychology and criminology - would know that this was a recipe for disaster. But stupid me, I understood too late that disaster was what the programme makers wanted.
As a prison governor, I've worked with some of the most dangerous offenders. My work has been about reducing tension and violence: I'd used design to give a sense of space and reduce noise pollution; now here I was involved in a programme designed to do the opposite.
As an academic, the basis of any work that I do with people is based on informed consent, and is guided by ethical considerations that run through the research programme. An ethics committee at my university vets every research proposal to ensure that, at the most basic level, those who volunteer to take part in the research don't come to any harm.
Do the same ethical standards exist for reality TV programme makers? I doubt it, and in examples of the genre I have seen people - "volunteers" as the makers point out, as if this absolves them of responsibility - who seem to be suffering from depression, post-traumatic stress disorder or an identifiable clinical illness.
Do Kim and Aggie, of How Clean Is Your House?, believe that offering people a washing-up rota and some sound advice about vacuuming will resolve the underlying issues that created the piles of filth, newspaper mountains and unmade beds? Does Gillian McKeith think that berating the obese and showing us the content of their "bad" diets can overcome the billions spent by the food industry to get us to eat junk?
Are people suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder (therapy has become the new vehicle for reality TV) really suitable subjects for entertainment?
Each programme maker will insist that the welfare of their contestants is uppermost, and that they have a whole bank of psychologists waiting in the wings to offer support and counselling. Well, where were they when Kinga was drunk and tipped over into onanism? Why didn't they intervene to prevent Craig from continuing to grope Anthony when the latter was drunk and when he wanted Craig to stop? Might it be that - despite what it says in the British Psychological Society's code of conduct - the need to satisfy the programme makers outweighs the service they should be offering to their clients?
Big Brother has reinvented itself as soft porn, presenting behaviour we'd condemn as antisocial if we saw it in Faliraki or in the high street on a Saturday night as entertainment. The issue here is to think through where all of this will end. What are the unacceptable limits of reality TV? Would we not draw the line at watching someone being tortured, or even executed. I hope so, but then again when footage of Timothy McVeigh's execution was available online, or when it was possible to log on to sites showing the beheading of hostages, there seemed to be an unending number of people willing to watch.
All of this suggests that if we can't rely on the makers, counsellors or psychologists, or even the good taste of the public, to restrain the excesses of the reality genre, then we have to find another way. And for me that means that Ofcom should demand that each reality show should work hand in glove with an ethics committee to vet what happens, and to insist on changes if contestants are in danger or distress. Of course, an ethics committee has been used before - on the BBC2 series The Experiment, which recreated the Zimbardo experiment of the 60s. Unfortunately, The Experiment was far from popular with the public.
· David Wilson is professor of criminology at UCE in Birmingham and a former prison governor. His most recent book is Death at the Hands of the State