THE CLAIM that Makosi Musambasi — aka The Most Repulsive Bitch In The World, Ever — is an actress, the day before the finale of
Big Brother 6, will have come as a gift to the sort of constipated seat-sniffer who reserves a loathing for popular culture which might be more appropriate for global poverty.
“Seeee!” they’ll gloat, “It’s not real!”, before lolloping off to see some opera in which — quelle surprise! — some poor broad dies in agony. And everybody sings everything.
Well, apart from the fact that actors are as “real” as anyone else — in that they have hopes and fears and flaws, the latter in spades in Makosi’s case — this will do nothing to detract from the enjoyment that this most excellent of reality TV shows has given us yet again. Who cares that voting figures for evictions from the house are down — reportedly by 22 million in 2003, 15 million last year, and around 10 million this year? Means nothing. Voting isn ’t the point. We’re still watching.
During the run of this year’s Big Brother, I have had the pleasure of making a documentary called Reality TV Is Good For You, to be screened by Sky One on August 22, and my experiences with everyone involved, from the divine Dermot O’Leary (one of the show’s presenters), to the gorgeous Saskia Howard-Clarke (a former housemate from this series), have made me love this modern phenomenon more than ever. And feel real pity for the people too snobbish/misanthropic/unimaginative to enjoy it as much as I do.
Why do people hate reality TV, and Big Brother in particular? I believe it is mainly because they hate the human race in general and the working class specifically — and the participants are mostly working class — and find them acceptable only when filtered through the flimflam of chronic thespianism.
Some weird people “ooo” and “ahhh” over Cathy Come Home on one hand and EastEnders on the other, because the characters in them suffer ceaselessly and end badly — yet find the fact that Jade Goody (a housemate from the third series) has gone from being a damaged child with a dead-end future to a high-living young businesswoman and millionairess in the space of two years highly unsettling. Maybe they look at her willingness to take chances, and feel less happy about their own bourgeois blandness.
Or maybe they envy these kids the giddiness and silliness and unquenchable high spirits of youth having its day in the sun. The sort of people who get into the Big Brother house are, for the most part, kids who go straight from school into work; to some extent, Big Brother is their gap year, their long hot summer of being young, foolish and happy, albeit in front of millions of people.
When I interviewed Jade, not only was I impressed by her professionalism, thoughtfulness and great tits, but she said a thing that made me feel like crying. She told me that she knew she’d been silly in the house, but in a way it was the first chance she’d had to be a proper kid. Jade loved her mum to bits, but she’d been looking after her since she was very little because she is disabled.
Jade went into the house to escape, really, and the night when she was silly (when she stripped bare), it was her birthday — and the first birthday she’d had where she didn’t have to be the grown-up. In my opinion, anyone who is not moved by what she has to say has something wrong with them — something far worse than the exhibitionism that the Big Brother kids are constantly accused of.
Youth-envy is a great poisoner of an otherwise sound mind, and surely it was this that warped Germaine Greer’s views when she wrote that Big Brother is “for people who like watching torture . . . sad and lonely, worse than voyeurs, for the part they agree to play is not that of a helpless Peeping Tom but that of a Big Brother, Chief Of The Thought Police.” All that’s missing is blood foaming in the Tiber and the sky falling on Chicken Licken ’s head.
There is inevitably a hierarchy of hatred for the Big Brother kids from their critics, which came to a head this year with the spiteful and groundless accusations of racism levelled at Team Saskia. White working-class youngsters are always the most reviled by uptight middle-class journalists who wouldn’t know how to have fun if it jumped up and snogged them on Faliraki high street. So when Saskia had fun with her steady boyfriend, Maxwell, in the dark, under the bedcovers, she was a slapper; when Makosi had sex with Anthony in front of everyone in the pool, she was a free spirit. When Team Saskia were rude and loud and confrontational, they were racist bullies; when the freaks of Team Makosi acted the same, they were divine divas, dahling!
By the way, one of the funniest moments of this year’s Big Brother came when the ghastly Kemal (lost his virginity in a skip, the dirty pig, and had the nerve to call the divine Saskia a slut) commented that all the white kids were in one group and all the ethnics in another. You should have seen the flashing look of dismay with which the Italian Roberto reacted to being classed as an “ethnic”!
Not that these kids care what the carpers say. They are living the dream, as the gorgeous Anthony might put it, and loving it. Not everyone can be a brain surgeon, rocket scientist or Guardian journalist; some people are born with the desire to prance, caper and entertain and ’twas ever thus, since the first court jester appeared.
Showbusiness, like journalism, used to be one of the few good jobs (by which I mean well-paid and a skive) that a bright prole kid could get into. But for the past decade it seems that even the daytime TV chat queen or frock-maker has to have a double first or a famous father. And it seems that many people have no problem with this; that the well-connected have an intrinsic right to nab any job they like, regardless of merit.
See the embarrassing amount of indulgence lavished on well-born, charisma-voids like Jade Jagger and the Redgrave girls, while girls such as Atomic Kitten, who had the sheer nerve to make it from nothing, were labelled by Popbitch, a celebrity gossip website, as “council”, “chip-shop” and “pram-faced”.
To quote the producer Richard X (who we’ve heard of mainly because of his work for the reality-TV act Liberty X): “We live in a trashy world, where the girl from the checkout can be in the Top Ten.” Gosh, Mr X, what would a non-trashy world be like — one where the likes of Girls Aloud would know their place behind the checkout, and the Top Ten be kept safe and pure for decent public school sorts such as Dido and Chris Martin?
When we see the likes of Nadia Almada embraced by the nation, crying with joy as she leaves the house fully known and fully loved (as the winner of Big Brother 5), we are moved not because we are simple and sentimental saps, brainwashed by the evil geniuses behind Big Brother, but because we recognise that nothing human is alien to us.
At the end of the day, reality TV is nothing more than a way to make the sort of “luck” that middle-class kids take for granted — gap year, “uni”, building up a network of chums that will serve to buoy them up all through their mediocre lives, no matter how ungifted they are — available to those born with a plastic spoon in their mouths and a view of a dead-end street from their bedroom window.
What’s wrong with spreading the wealth, sharing the spoils? And what sad, resentful, hierarchy-worshipping bit of us is so upset by this harmless, righteous, glitter-dusted revolution? Get a life? Are they bothered? END OF!
