Culture

The groans of derision are audible, yet there is really no denying it: Big Brother is the king of reality television and now the one-time social experiment is back with its seventh and final dose of celebrity-based action. In a culture as celebrity-driven as our own, Celebrity Big Brother should be the highlight of any Perezhilton.com-surfing Heat readers out there – and if we’re quite honest that’s a lot of us, even if we’d hate ourselves a little bit if we said it out loud.

Ah, the book token. Or the book card, as the modern plastic world has forced it to become. Whether you slide it from an Aunt’s Christmas card with the same world-weary sense of inevitability each year, or happily receive it, glad that someone has attempted to massage your intellectual dimension as well as give you a bit of choice, the chances are they’ll still be sitting in the back of our purses/wallets come February unspent.

You might already be following Stephen Fry but if you want to widen your Twitter horizons The Event has tracked down the top Arts followees for 2010.

Theatre

@Interval Thinks Describing itself as ‘guerrilla criticism’, it tweets reviews from play intervals, this is Twitter at its most immediate. Mentions the odd art exhibition too. Slightly bitchy, but in the nicest possible way.

In a year over-shadowed by the global recession, fashion perversely turned to the decade of over-indulgence and general ostentation that was the eighties. Shoulder-pads, sequins and denim reigned supreme, sending boho on its way. No designer capitalised on this back-lash better than Christophe Decarnin at Balmain. In a year that began with acid hues and graphic colours at Alexander McQueen and Chanel exhibiting sheer metallic fabrics coated in angular patterns, Balmain went one sartorial step further in developing the new rock-chick look of 2009.