ALL right, I confess I've been reading The Guardian again. This is the newspaper, above all newspapers, which puts the highest value on its own intelligence. So what's this I read, then? "Now that Big Brother has finished, what will office workers talk about as they gather around the water-cooler?" Such a remark makes you despair for a once great newspaper. No doubt, the editor would say he is being "ironical" - but let that pass.

I once watched a quarter of an hour of Big Brother. The occupants of the house were all in bed asleep. Later they got up, but watching what they did when awake was no more interesting than watching them asleep. Their conversation - if grunts and idle chat about shopping - can be dignified with the word "conversation", was merely coarse and empty-headed. No one talked about (or, for heaven's sake, actually played) a piece of decent music, or mentioned a book or a painting. Is this the sort of thing The Guardian's office workers like to talk when they gather around the water-cooler.

I asked a chap on the checkout in Tesco's why Big Brother is so popular and he said: "Well, people like to see who's going to the loo and who might be going to have sex". Really? What does it say about the mind - let alone the soul - of the nation when more people voted in the Big Brother series than voted in the General Election? At least when the mob used to gather to watch public hangings, there was a moral element in the ghastly procedure: justice, it might be supposed, was being seen to be done. But there is no moral element in Big Brother; only voyeurism for morons. And I'm afraid a moron is a moron, even if he is a moron of the type that gathers around The Guardian's water-cooler.

There was a report in another newspaper about a baker who put up a notice which said: "English breadsticks - none of that French rubbish!". The baker was popular with his customers and they all - including the French greengrocer next door - understood that it was a joke. Moreover, the sign had been there for two years and no one objected to it. Then, somebody complained that the sign was racist and two policemen came to investigate as, under the terms of the Macpherson Report, they are legally bound to do when anyone alleges "a racist incident" . It says in that report: "A racist incident is any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person".

What I find interesting is the fact that, because a complaint had been made, the police were obliged to investigate. But it has given me an idea: maybe when Big Brother starts again I could phone the police, get them to go round to the studio and compel the producer to take the offensive programme off the air? It wouldn't work. In the increasingly dictatorial state which Britain is becoming under Our Leader, only he and his gang of politically-correct obsessives are allowed to decide what is offensive and what is not. Make a joke about French bread and you will end up in trouble; but make a reasoned complaint about the vilest TV programme yet made and no one will take a scrap of notice.

* Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.

Published: Tuesday, August 7, 2001