‘Celebrity Big Brother’

England is once again firmly in the grips of Celebrity Big Brother, the most popular of the many so-called reality shows that help make up airtime. The premise is simple, much like the mind set of the majority of the participants come to think of it. A handful of celebrities is forced to live together for a number of weeks with their every action and word recorded and broadcasted live. Well, perhaps forced is not the right word since they’re all volunteers. It’s a cheap way to get media coverage and bolster sagging ratings. The producers of the show like to think it’s based on the Orwellian classic Nineteen Eighty-Four with its multitude of microphones and telescreens. It makes them feel less like traffickers in smut one supposes. In actuality it’s a bit like MTV Real World just with quasi-famous people and a much smaller budget.

Even the term quasi-famous is being generous. Take the first contestant to be evicted, Jodie Marsh, one of the more well known members of the house. Marsh is famous for being a page three girl, one of the regular posers on the third page of The Sun newspaper that regularly features topless blondes with vacuous smiles. Posing “semi demi hemi” nude in the papers seems to be a guarantee to certain fame and limited fortune and is the driving ambition of many a girl possessing clear skin, firm posterior and limited ambition.

Or take Pete Burns, ’80s Dead or Alive pop star and abuser of plastic surgery. He’s best known for the song “You spin me (right ‘round)” and having lips that look like a painfully swollen and festering haemorrhoid. Having boasted that the coat he was wearing was of gorilla fur, police sneaked into the Big Brother house and arrested the coat to make sure he wasn’t breaking the law. The nation waited collectively and impatiently to find out whether he would be dragged out and thrown in jail; for days the newspapers dedicated entire editorials to it. The coat was eventually returned after a multitude of tests determined that Burns was only guilty of bad taste and not of slaughtering endangered animals.

Thrown into the mix is the quickly fading into distant memory but still odious to look at aging bad boy Dennis Rodman, boasting of having slept with over 2,000 women. Can there really be over 2,000 women that desperate to claim they’ve slept with a former NBA player? And there’s former bouncing Baywatch babe Traci Bingham who’s intent on showing everyone that despite the fact that she’s a brunette she is the quintessential dumb Californian blonde. One of the more interesting housemates was Faria Alum, the thirty something former Football Association secretary who caused a national scandal when it came out that she’d been having an affair with Sven Goran Eriksson, coach of the English football side. On the first night when introducing themselves to the other members of the house saying what they were famous for, (an act which in itself shows how ludicrous the show’s premise is, since famous people don’t have to introduce themselves) she said she was infamous for having had an affair with Sven and now famous for being on Big Brother. Right.

She caused a stir when she declared to Bingham that the British public would never allow a black or Asian to win the show. The public was so offended at her accusation of racial discrimination that they voted her off the next day. Thus, proving her right. Walking out of the house the crowds gathered outside booed her, the English sense of political correctness offended by a reference to a past that many still remember, even if the collective conscience wants to forget. It is the past Samuel Selvon wrote about and that Lord Kitchener sang about, a past where getting a place to rent was a lesson in degradation, where certain races worked certain jobs and knew their place or were put in it. And even though things have changed a lot — no one sprays semi literate graffiti on walls saying “N*gers nut welcum” anymore — it’s shows like this, shows that grip national attention, that are a reflection of social reality, though not in the way the producers like to think.

In this the fourth season a non-white person has never won, neither has a non-white personality ever won any of the other dozen reality shows out there. A transvestite has though, which says something, though I’m not quite sure what. My own experience has been both funny and sad. Unable to explain my racial identity and recoiling from the horror of actually asking, co-workers and casual acquaintances alike tumble all over themselves to list all their black friends, Chinese girlfriends, Indian neighbours, Latin pen pals in an effort to convince me — and mostly themselves — that they don’t see my colour. Which, sadly, proves that they do. Comments? Please write suszanna@hotmail.com