Last Thursday night (January 7), Celebrity Big Brother stooped to torturing its own contestants in a last ditch attempt for ratings as the program bows out ungracefully from our screens.

Jonah Altburg otherwise known as Basshunter was locked in a room and forced to listen to his own song ‘All I Ever Wanted’ and if he attempted to sleep an alarm would sound to keep him awake. He was not told how long this would go on for, but all in all, the experience lasted seven hours. When Jonah and the rapper Lady Sovereign who he had brought with him in to the ‘punishment room’ emerged shell-shocked and unhappy, he branded the experience “torture”. I guess we have all become used to the idea of ‘Torture Light’ or what the CIA would call ‘Enhanced Interrogation Techniques’ but their use in reality TV is dangerous in terms of marketing these practices as harmless.

I have spent the last two years looking into the use of music as a form of torture, helping the legal charity Reprieve build a campaign called Zero db, and I would say that most who have gone through this experience would agree that it is most definitely torture. When we interviewed Ruhal Ahmed, who spent two years in Guantanamo and was repeatedly blasted with heavy metal and Eminem tracks, he said that the use of music was much worse than physical torture as it would “make you feel like you were going mad… and losing the plot.” Donald Vance, an ex-US Marine who I interviewed for an upcoming program on torture said that the constant use of music, coupled with sleep deprivation affected him so deeply that he “would have said anything” to get it to stop and everyday thinks of the people that admitted to things they didn’t do because of the psychological torture they were subjected to. In Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Camp Cropper and countless other detention facilities used in the War on Terror, music has been used as a way to break down detainees. The use has been well reported in the past with journalist Justine Sharrock even putting together a torture playlist including songs from Metallica, Barney the Purple Dinosaur and this years Christmas number one, Killing in the Name by Rage Against the Machine.

I guess part of me should be happy that Big Brother and their production company Endemol are bringing the torture debate to a wider audience, but I can’t help feeling disgusted by its use and worried by its larger implications. Endemol and Channel 4 have previous in this area with 2004’s sleep deprivation inspired ‘Shattered’ where contestants had to stay awake for a week and I would argue that a lot of Big Brother itself is tortuous. Nothing Endemol have come up with has been as weird and scary as Fox’s ‘Solitary’ in the US, which pits isolated individuals against each other in gruesome tasks on the orders of a disembodied voice called Val. For me, the use of these well established torture techniques on reality TV conjures up images of a horrible future reminiscent of ‘The Running Man’ where torture and execution are played out for the public’s entertainment.

I know that these contestants volunteer for these programs fully aware of what they might have to go through, but what does it say for us as a society that this is seen as entertainment and what effect does it have on the fight against torture when the issues are diluted by producers and commissioners? I can’t help but think that the more these methods are brought in to the public consciousness, the harder they will be to eradicate and it’s probably not a coincidence that all of these programs have been commissioned and aired since the beginning of the war on terror and images of hooding, short shackling and the like have lost the ability to shock. I for one think that as a form of entertainment it’s all gone a little far and I’m sure after the Sixth hour of his own song, Jonah would have agreed with me.

Words: William Francome. William is the writer and presenter of 'In Prison My Whole Life' - his investigation into the arrest of famed Black Panther Mumia Abu Jamal (who is now on death-row).  Williams's next documentary, ‘Life After Guantanamo’ will be shown on Current TV on January 25th. For more info, and to keep up to date with William's work, visit  here