The end

As finale nights go, this one was rather brilliant. Obviously, Perfect Pete won. No surprises there, as this was in alignment with God's Holy Order.

With the two-minute live-delay button working overtime, Pete ran out of the house shouting the nation's favourite catchphrase, "W***ers!", before treating everyone to his vaudeville clown act. With his faith in angels reconfirmed, Pete monkeyed down the runway, fell over a lot, pulled a variety of faces, then picked up his cheque for £100,000.

That should keep Nikki in eye kohl for three weeks. Or buy Pete an extra-long session of being beaten with paddles at the Naughty Hellfire dungeon.

Whatever he does with the cash, well done to him anyhow. He won fairly and squarely. A landslide vote. There were so many things he did over 93 days that carved him out as a winner. Like that time he saved a bumble bee from the pool. And, erm…(flicks through 93 days of notes for a while, sighing)…erm?…weeks three to seven when he made a colossal racket with a wooden spoon and a plate. That was great, too.

And the way he put fractal-print orange rave pantaloons back on the fashion map. And the way he preached on for 12 weeks about peace and non-materialism, then fell in lust with Nikki and became fixated with winning.

Taking second place, Glyn truly did his country proud. Wrapped in his Welsh flag, wearing his beanie hat and dog tags, Glyn was a different man on Friday to the little boy who arrived 13 weeks ago. I think it was making that cheesecake on week three that did it.

OK, the cake may have looked like just a pile of old mashed digestives with cream cheese splatted on top, but to Glyn it was heavily symbolic. Anything was now possible. Snogging porn stars, dying his hair like Yazz from the Plastic Population, masturbating and vomiting on television, re-introducing congealed pig's blood as a national snack food, depleting the rainforests with his anal toxic emissions: the world was Glyn's oyster.

I'll miss Glyn. I'll miss hearing that familiar sing-song "Oooh, nooooo" when he gets called to the diary room. I'd have given him the £100,000 just for the impudent determination on his face when he tried to drink the lamb chop and pavlova smoothie.

Aisleyne took third place. Not bad going at all, especially since we were told week after week that Ash was "a very unpopular housemate". This made Ash top Big Brother 7 woman, beating Nikki, Grace, Lea, Lisa etc. I hope this made Ash feel a bit better about being booed every week, I hope she got a good look at the gangs of women with corned-beef legs, neon hair scrunchies and missing teeth who were her tormentors. It would have probably cheered her up no end.

Grace seemed happy about Ash's win, too. I'm planning to have her expression put on a coffee mug to cheer me up every day for ever.

Nikki's exit was so deliciously perfect that I had to rewind it four times to get the full benefit

Nikki's exit was so deliciously perfect that I had to rewind it four times to get the full benefit. It couldn't have been more satisfying if it had been the closing scene of a Lindsay Lohan movie.

I don't know what I loved most - Nikki's contorted face when she realised she'd come fifth? The fact that she needed to put her shoes on in a hurry as she clearly thought Ash was leaving? Her wild-woman-of-Borneo hair-don't? The way she climbed the stairs to a sonic boom of boos, wibbling to herself in her baby voice: "Ooooh, somefing has gone wrong. They are booooing me! Why are they booing me?"

I loved the bit after Nikki got on the stage, began to ham it up that she was actually catatonic with shock, then the crowd shouting "Off! Off! 0ff!" And the bit where the producer eventually lost patience and cancelled Nikki's interview, with Davina telling her that she wasn't getting any more best bits as she had them last time. Or her trip as she left the stage.

Then best of all on Sunday it's plastered all over the News of the World that Nikki was working for an escort agency charging £500 per hour!

Where this all leaves Princess Nikki the reality show, I'm not sure. I know that as a TV critic I often lament the dearth of light entertainment shows focusing on someone being asked to work a photocopier then crying and banging her head. Tell me when it's on. I'll set my Sky +.

When I first said I'd watch Big Brother every day for 93 days, my friends didn't seem too jealous of the task. "It's like that film Super Size Me," people said, "What will you be like by the end?!"

Well, 13 weeks later, I'm sitting at my computer feeling weirdly serene. Quite light-headed, in fact. It's like an angry red mist has lifted. It's only now that the final housemate has been evicted and the lights snapped off on the BB7 house do I realise how scarily obsessed I became.

During summer 2006, I sat up late at night shouting at the TV about Sezer, Lisa and Mikey. I dreamed about fighting Grace and clubbing with Richard. I sat up to the early hours of the morning bickering over email with people who dared to think Pete was fantastic or Lisa was misunderstood. Housework went undone. Birthdays were forgotten. Plants died. The gym was unvisited.

If people told me they liked Nikki, it would make me think twice about them as a person. "Why would they like Nikki?" I'd fume. "Can't they see?!"

I began ranting in pubs about the social impact of glorifying bullying, laziness and cheating. I became genuinely concerned about the fate of Dawn and Shahbaz. When the slander of Ash began, I went all class war post-feminist and would bash out stern emails rebuking the Trashleen hatterz. (Occasionally I'd use green lettering and text speak - that was when I knew I'd gone to the bad place.)

I became obsessed with Endemol's "unfair" editing. I was angry to the point of hairy-handedness about the ICSTIS investigation. When they put Ash back in the real house after she nominated Jonathan, I sounded so depressed in my blog that little old ladies wrote and offered to make me a lovely cake. I slept badly as my head was full of human beatbox or Imogen's Hot Topics jingle playing on repeat on my internal jukebox.

Luckily, hundreds of emails arrived every day proving I certainly wasn't alone. They proved in fact that I was a bit of a Big Brother lightweight. Millions of people feel as passionately as me about Big Brother. Imagine if we all put this energy into something useful?

A few days have passed now and I can finally see that it was only a bloody game show. Big Brother 7 was amazing fun, but I don't think I could ever get so deeply involved again in watching a bunch folk with no real talent making huge fools of themselves on television. Aside from Celebrity Big Brother, because I bet that'll be bloody great.

Come back on Friday for my brand-new weekly television column
TV OD. Mail me on grace.dent@bbc.co.uk.