Valentina Siropulo: "I confessed during torture with electricity. They put small wires on my toes and on my thumbs. Sometimes they put one on my thumb and another on my tongue, neck or ear. It had a hand crank to make it go. They had two kinds of machines, one with a crank and one with buttons".

Siropulo was one of the Bulgarian medics held in custody in Libya for eight years, and repeatedly sentenced to death by firing squad, on absurd charges by the even more absurd Gaddaffi regime for supposedly infecting hundreds of Libyan children with HIV. Released after a pardon by Bulgarian President Georgi Purvanov following the medics’ return home through a bilateral custodial agreement, Siropulo technically has a criminal record, because the effect of the pardon is only to "exonerate" from the verdict of the sick stooges who pass for judges in Gaddaffi’s courts.

Siropulo, so media reports say, is to be a contestant on the next season of the Bulgarian version of Celebrity Big Brother, known locally as VIP Big Brother. She will be up against a motley clutch of popular singers, a politician of neither great achievement nor renown and a model and the model’s twin sister.

We may be a step closer to reality TV depicting live executions. Mushy liberal that I am, may I for a moment cast aside my scruples against the death penalty and nominate the producers and programme directors responsible for such travesties? If I am to keep to my opposition to capital punishment, may I at least invoke the phrase that if these scoundrels are not to be hanged by the neck until they are dead, may they at least be hanged by the neck until very, very unhappy?

At least one of Bulgaria’s national commercial channels has chosen to wallow in reality TV land, and the other is only marginally less superficial. Soon we will be favoured with Fear Factor (the Bulgarian-language title translates simply as "Fear").  As if we did not have quite enough fear, of that ogre stalking the planet and the land, the Credit Crunch Monster, a beast rather akin to the Cookie Monster, except that CC Monster prefers to snack on crumbly vulnerable enterprises.

Rumour has it that the commercial stations are not doing awfully well, er, commercially. Facts are more difficult to come by, although it may be noted that while I do not watch them very much – only around news bulletin time – there is a perceptible drop in the number of advertisements, which seem to have thinned to the inevitable basics of detergents and shampoos (one simply cannot face the prospect of recession with anything less than embraceworthy fresh jerseys and gleaming, bouncing hair).

Ratings, circulation, impressions – these are the golden nuggets which all of us in the media seek to heap up. Sadly, too many are too eager to trade dross for nuggets.

I am not a psychologist, but amateur observation from a distance seemed to suggest that after their release from Gaddaffi’s madhouse (Libya being one of the classic cases of the lunatic being in charge of the asylum) the medics, who had been subjected to gross abuses of human rights, needed human shelter and counselling.

Apparently the rules of VIP Big Brother vary slightly from its "classic" parent show, but any such form of reality TV involves a degree of confinement, confrontation and, by definition, prolonged scrutiny. I would be astonished only to the very slightest degree if some enterprising showman put some of the other nurses on the local equivalent of Fear Factor. Bring on the water-boarding and the scorpions.

I am too long in the tooth to imagine that there would be some kind of public moral revulsion at this spectacle, as much as I would hope for one. The most recent edition of Big Brother in Bulgaria had a contestant who was required to pretend to the unwitting others to be mentally challenged. The same season featured tattoo-bedecked 28-year-old Sofian Daniela Kostova to whom presenters mockingly referred as "the man of the house"; another contestant was Mila Petrova, a 35-year-old Shoumen woman left blind after a motor vehicle collision.

Some in the Bulgarian press will no doubt eagerly make a meal of the Siropulo spectacle; little can be expected from the country’s major mass-circulation dailies, which resemble in content and design a clutter of badly-pasted-together scrawlings by grade zero pupils. One such daily edition on February 26 had, facing its "culture items" a garishly illustrated item headlined Penelope Cruz Nominated for Best Nude Scene.

Perhaps, but only perhaps, in the absence of any other kind of guidance, insight or grasp of reality from the country’s leaders (partisan political attack and defence blatherings, as per this past week’s no-confidence debate, do not fall into these categories), the Bulgarian public might go seeking some sensible perspectives from the country’s media, which in its current state is just not up to the job.

I am convinced that at least some of the enterprises, for example those in manufacturing and mining, that have failed in the opening stages of the local fallout from the economic crisis have collapsed only slightly earlier than they inevitably would have anyway, because they were run by people who knew nothing about adapting to a changing market economy.

The same rules apply to the media. If some of the purveyors of voyeurism and sensationalism fall by the wayside because the public weighs them and finds them wanting, it will be no loss. My sympathies are solely for their victims before that stage is reached.