The Celebrity Big Brother line-up is the usual shambles of has-beens, nearly-weres and never-will-bes. Bring it on

One way to measure your handle on “the zeitgeist” is to watch the latest Celebrity Big Brother, which returned once again last night, exactly like oral herpes. CBB never dies. It simply lies dormant, waiting for one’s defences to weaken, then lures viewers back with a promise of L’il Kim. In my dreams Kim would perform her hit song “Lighters Up” with Christopher Biggins on backing vocals at the house talent night, shortly before Biggins performed assorted soliloquys from Porridge, Rentaghost and I, Claudius.

But, alas, there was no L’il Kim – only Biggins.

This year’s biggest coups are the very loveable Ricky Norwood, formerly Fat Boy from EastEnders, plus Grant Bovey, a man once married to Anthea Turner. Bovey’s love life was big news back in a gentler time when the nation could really get itself into a tizzy about extra-marital affairs. Pre-Instagram, the Nineties newspapers cajoled us into believing that posing for publicity “content” for Cadbury’s Flake on one’s wedding day was up there with homicide in the list of unforgiveable acts.

Nowadays, Bovey resembles a careworn Darren Day. He is, I suspect, too smart to stand the assorted reality TV backwash he’s now pitted to share a MDF prison with for four weeks.

Bovey will live alongside stars such as blonde Californian pop star Aubrey O’Day. Perhaps O’Day’s name leaves you resembling an open-gobbed smiley emoji, like it does me. Perhaps, also like me, it’s time for a millennial to push your bath chair into the sun, away from the stresses of keeping up with pop culture.

O’Day, who has 793,000 followers on Twitter, has ridden a reality TV wave for 13 years, since P Diddy’s Making The Band through to the recent Famously Single. O’Day is a celebrity to some people, exactly like fellow housemate Stephen Bear.

Bear is one of those berks from MTV’s Ex on the Beach, who you might have seen in the show’s raucous trailers that play incessantly on digital channels and make me toy casually with the notion of booking a one-way ticket Pfaeffikon near Zurich for a lovely long sleep.

Bear climbing out of a speedboat, Bear snogging a Doris in a bikini, Bear squaring up to a boyfriend, Bear shaking a champagne bottle, Bear rounding the lads up for another trip to Banter-namo Bay. Bear’s main rival in the house will be The Only Way Is Essex “personality” Lewis Bloor, a shirt-phobic personal trainer.

Regardless of how this whole mess may appear, the casting of Celebrity Big Brother is not chucked together willy-nilly. Huddles of TV executives spend weeks at a whiteboard blending faces and followings. Bear and Bloor have been put in this house in the hope one of them shags Aubrey, or Marnie from Geordie Shore, then makes a play for stalwart mob wife Rennee Graziano, before dumping her for X-Factor reject Chloe Khan.

Khan is a rather pitiful entity who entered the house in a gold Bacofoil dress narrowly covering her new enormous chest implants, wearing a weave as subtle as a Scots Guards bearskin. Khan makes me cry out for the relatively classier days when her housemate Sam Fox got ‘em out for Page 3. Fox claims she is there to “relaunch her career in the UK”. Understandable, yes. But why the perfectly intelligent and continuously employed radio presenters James Whale and Saira Khan have signed up for this is a mystery.

Sometimes I think the biggest winner of any summer of Celebrity Big Brother is HMRC the following January.

Last night’s other incoming housemates included Katie Waissel, pilloried endlessly by the public during The X Factor, clearly desperate for another dose of public scapegoating. Meanwhile Frankie Grande is the highly strung, glitter-strewn, pirouetting, attention-thirsty brother of the singer Ariana.

Frankie behaves incessantly like a sort of 1980s politically incorrect BBC version of a “camp man who came to help Alf Garnett” over whom Stonewall would write a terse letter of complaint.

Grande, however, is in no way as annoying as Heavy D from Storage Hunt UK who claimed, without a flicker of irony in his pre-show interview, that his personal hero was Another Level’s Dane Bowers. This is the kind of logic one can’t argue with. And the kind of blind, hapless stupidity that will take you a very long way in the CBB house.