Comment: Big Brother farce highlights deeper cultural problems: ThePost.ie


TCH Archives > Sunday Business Post > 2007/01/21 > Comment: Big Brother farce highlights deeper cultural problems

Comment: Big Brother farce highlights deeper cultural problems
Sunday, January 21, 2007 - By Diarmaid Ferriter
In a Belfast hotel during the week, deprived of RTE, I settled down to watch Desperate Housewives on Channel 4. This US programme is often farcical - involving the seduction of neighbours, the hiding of corpses and the dramatics of messy divorces between rich and bitchy protagonists - but it is easy on the eye and raises the occasional laugh.

The same cannot be said of Celebrity Big Brother, the programme that preceded Desperate Housewives, which I had the misfortune to catch a glimpse of.

As the week’s events demonstrated, Channel 4 has created an ugly monster with the ability to cause, not just public outcry, but the spectacle of politicians having to debate it in public. Welcome to ‘Racism, Ratings and Reality TV’, Channel 4 style.

How has the fifth season of a faltering, truly awful television show - where Z-list celebrities live on top of each other before they are voted out by the public - managed to provoke so much ire? Part of the problem lies in the fact that the Big Brother programmes, and the reality television genre in general, can be summed up in one word - humiliation.

There are plenty of ingredients that combine to give rise to humiliation, including bullying and personal vindictiveness.

These have all been employed to great effect in reality television programmes.

Another programme I watched while in Belfast was You Are What You Eat, in which the victims are forced to confront their obesity and then go on a drastic diet.

This week, a young mother addicted to breakfast cereals was forced to stand in a large bath filled with the amount of cereal she eats in a week; she got in and broke down in tears.

When it became apparent during the week that the process of humiliation and bullying could involve unbridled racism, the producers of Celebrity Big Brother got a lot more than they bargained for.

There can be no denying the extent of the racism witnessed during the week in comments directed at Indian actress Shilpa Shetty, a major Bollywood star.

Channel 4 issued a statement last Wednesday insisting: ‘‘To date, there has been no overt racial abuse or racist behaviour.”

This was a barefaced lie, in keeping with the general nastiness of the Big Brother programmes. One of the contestants, housemate Danielle Lloyd (don’t ask me what she does to justify her existence outside of the Big Brother house), referring to Shetty, said: ‘‘They eat with their hands in India, or is that China? . . .You don’t know where those hands have been . . . Does that mean I need elocution lessons because she can’t understand what I say? She can’t even speak English properly.”

Another contestant, Jackiey Budden, asked Shetty: ‘‘Do you live in a house or a shack?’’ Apologies were made later in the week, but by then the issue was dominating news bulletins.

Budden is the mother of Jade Goody, who also directed racist comments at Shetty. Goody became famous on an earlier (non-celebrity) Big Brother programme, due to her constant humiliation and drastically limited intelligence.

Subsequently, through her keep-fit videos, magazine and television interviews, and riding on the back of a wave of sympathy, she was made into a very rich woman, with an estimated fortune of more than stg£8 million. All for being locked up with fellow emotionally and intellectually-challenged contestants and being humiliated daily for nearly three months.

The celebrities do not have to stay in that long, but there is still a premium placed on humiliation. Goody expressed regret about her comments in the house after she was evicted last Friday night.

Why did this week’s show cause such a fuss? Partly because of the unprecedented number of viewer complaints and partly because it became a live political issue.

Gordon Brown was in India and had to respond to journalists’ questions about it.

Both he and Blair subsequently indulged in bland soundbites about fairness and the need to counter any perception abroad that racism is in any way tolerated in Britain.

Last Thursday, Channel 4’s press conference denied that the comments had any racial motivation, another blatant lie.

Adding to the controversy was the fact that there seemed to be much consternation in India, where all the political parties complained about the programme (though reports of ‘riots’ may have been exaggerated - people in India cannot watch the programme on television).

India, of course, was once the jewel in the British Empire’s crown. When its independence became inevitable, many of the British ruling class struggled to deal with the new reality - ‘‘one’s whole world view had been altered’’ was the comment of a young Tory MP. As the empire quickly crumbled, immigration from the former colonies rose and, while there was much success in terms of integration, racism remains a serious problem.

During the week, Mahesh Bhatt, a Bollywood director, told the Guardian newspaper: ‘‘It is no aberration.” It revealed, he said, ‘‘the hidden biases of Britain’’.

Brown and Blair are no doubt also conscious that they need India more than India needs them, as the former colony has grown in confidence, stature and wealth, with its economy on course to become the third largest in the world, after China and the US.

Recently, an Indian billionaire, Lakshmi Mittal, filled the coffers of the British Labour Party with a stg£2million donation, his third in three years.

It was pointed out during the week that laws exist to penalise the broadcasting of racist comments, but arguably, it is more important that these comments were broadcast for all to hear, holding a mirror to a racism in Britain that is sizeable and worrying; a product of ignorance, lack of education and a still latent cultural attachment to the concept of imperial superiority.

The soundbites from Blair and Brown cannot paper over the fact that Britain is far from the multicultural, cosmopolitan bastion of tolerance it likes to think it is, but is a deeply fractured society.

Undoubtedly, a few individual careers will be ruined as a result of last week’s controversy. Companies that sponsored Goody on the back of her original rise to fame through reality television humiliation have self-righteously withdrawn their funding, while Carphone Warehouse has pulled its sponsorship of the show.

Only Channel 4 will still be smiling - following a jump in audiences to close to six million at the end of last week - knowing that it has achieved the oxygen of publicity to justify yet more of these hideous, juvenile and degrading programmes.