Everyone left the house smiling (but a lobotomy can do that to a person)

Yesterday evening, as the last four "celebrity" inmates of the Big Brother house slow-danced in awkward couples to the song "Winter Wonderland", somebody – I think it was Mark Owen – quipped "This is like the fishing trip in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest". He had put his finger on something: Celebrity Big Brother, even more than the version with regular people, has an air of Bedlam about it. In the 18th century, people would pay to get into Bethlehem Hospital, the original Bedlam, to ogle and jeer at the crazies confined there; these days, we get much the same amusement from watching Les Dennis writhing with insecurity on our television screens.

The psychiatric element was made more explicit during last night's final programme, when a pair of shrinks were invited on to offer their professional assessment of the last three "celebrities": Dennis, Mark Owen – formerly with the boy band Take That, and twice winner of a Smash Hits Most Fanciable Bloke award – and the glamour model Melinda Messenger. Sadly, the widely shared hope that the seemingly unemotional Messenger would be diagnosed as a controlling psychopath and possible latent serial killer came to nothing. Instead, it was concluded that Dennis was desperately in need of approval, with a strong tendency to direct attention away from others' emotional needs towards his own, and Owen was "a beta male".

The three departed inmates were asked for their views. Goldie, Anne Diamond and Sue Perkins all said that they wanted Owen to win; and in the end, the public agreed with them, choosing his introverted, slightly otherworldly charm over Messenger's too-perfect composure and Dennis's neurosis.

None of the inmates emerged with their reputations too badly smirched – Messenger proved to be far from a bimbo; Dennis nothing like the bland family entertainer you might have assumed. The people who did come out of it badly were the press (and why, you may ask, are we still going on about this dreadful programme as if it mattered?); and the public, who watched and phoned in in depressingly large numbers. At the end of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, the Jack Nicholson character got lobotomised; looking around now, it seems the same thing has happened to the rest of us.