"I'm a truth machine," Judge Judy is fond of telling people, and she really is pretty good at it. You can say what you like about the frilly lace collar and the attitude, but when Judge Judy enters the room, polite smile just barely grazing her face, I am immediately reassured. Nobody is going to be getting away with anything. Judge Judy is here, and she's in control.

In one of the first shows I ever saw, when things seemed to be at a total stalemate, she managed to get both the plaintiff and the defendant to acknowledge that they had travelled to her courtroom in California from their home state together, in the same car, having a great time cooking up a fake case just for the heck of it. She threw them out.

So you can say what you like about her abrasive manner, her sarcasm, her occasional rushes to judgment ("I don't believe you!" she says to somebody after a minute or two of testimony. "Your case is dismissed."), her often-repeated "On your best day, you're not as smart as I am on my worst day." I think she's exactly what she says she is, and I wish I could take her to work with me. I'd love to have just one day when nobody got away with anything, and where there was absolutely no bullshit. Meanwhile, I'll settle for the two half-hour segments I get back-to-back every day.

 

Last summer, I would head over to my TV set pretending I wasn't really going to watch Big Brother. After all, why would a mature woman like me be interested in the antics of a group of twenty- or thirtysomethings, along with a couple of token chronological adults? Being an honest individual, I finally had to admit I was hooked. It might have had something to do with the group process course I was taking at the time - oh, hell, no it didn't, I just wanted to see who was going to win the money. And some of the contestants were oddly likeable, although the premise of the show did nothing to encourage their likeability.

What they do is put 12 people, 6 men and 6 women, in a specially-constructed house on the CBS lot, where they live for 3 months with no outside contact and no access to anyone but each other. Every week, two people are nominated for eviction, and the housemates vote to see who gets to stay. (Last year the viewing audience had some part in the voting; this year, it's houseguests only.) When they're down to the last 2 or 3, the elimination process gets more complicated but eventually the last person left gets a big cash prize, somewhere in the neighbourhood of half a million dollars.

This year, I've been up front about my interest in the new series. I've been watching it. So far all we've seen is a bunch of sociopaths saying one thing to each other and then "confiding" something entirely different to the camera. Somebody with the improbable name of Bunky came out to the viewing audience within the first half hour; it took him days to get real with his housemates. In a way, though, I can understand it; these are NOT nice people. They don't even pretend to be, at least not to us; they only pretend in front of each other. Millions of viewers (if they still have that many) are privy to their deepest confidences.

So am I going to stop watching it? Actually, no. But don't tell anybody, okay?