‘I want to completely ruin that little chav’s life. I want to hang, draw and quarter her, the disgusting pug-faced, racist cow. Her life is over. I voted 10 times.”
The young mother in a tracksuit grinned as she delivered this considered opinion to anyone who wanted to listen in my local newsagent. The three or four other customers waiting to pay for their Sun, Mail, Guardian and Heat magazine all beamed back. They wanted to hear and join in.
Each made much the same sort of statement of intent, adding a little refinement obliquely and disdainfully. We all smiled at each other, happy to be part of that rare thing in urban life, a moment of togetherness shared with strangers. If we had hung around for a bit longer I’m sure someone would have mentioned the blitz.
I expect on buses and trains, in office corridors, cafes and waiting rooms all over the country much the same sort of cosy conversation will have been taking place, leaving everyone with a warm feeling, a frisson of righteous odium and collective vindictiveness. We’ve all been given permission to really hate someone, and it’s delicious.
Jade Goody is racist scum. We’ve all seen it and she deserves everything she gets. Her gurning face, grabbed at its most unattractive from the screen, stares out of every paper and news broadcast, being a helpful reference for our communal two-minute hate.
It isn’t called Big Brother for nothing. Goody is a nasty dim piece of work. Her self-lacerating performance on the box wasn’t nice, tasteful, entertaining or illuminating, but really, honestly, is it just me or has everyone lost a sense of proportion? I don’t need to trot out the list of more horrifying and pressing concerns that ought to be fighting for your attention — almost anything you can think of is more important than Goody’s temper tantrum and her tunnel-vision world view. She’s not evil, she has no constituency, she speaks for nobody, she can do no real or metaphysical damage, she’s just embarrassing, sad and irrelevant.
However, the pitiful bullying of an Indian film star has unlocked a massive national nuclear response that is out of all rational proportion — a gale of über-bullying that threatens to send silly Jade into protective custody.
She should never have been the focus for this joyous, howling, national happy-slapping fest. Big Brother is a format that is constructed around premeditated bullying. It incites and exacerbates unfairness, encourages cliques. It bullies its contestants with humiliation, rewards and punishment. It foments resentment and hatred.
The people whose faces should be on every front page and news bulletin, who should be answering to the nation’s fury are the producers and presenters who incite vulnerable, stupid people to extremes by giving and taking away basic things such as food, sleep and privacy. It’s not clever or funny; it’s not even 11-plus psychology.
The producers’ response to the fury they have manufactured has been to hide behind a meaningless statement, to run from the media they’re part of and claim for themselves the privacy they take away from their talent. We have the richly absurd vision of Jon Snow on Channel 4 news telling us that nobody from Channel 4 is available for comment, because they’re all sniggering behind their secretaries’ backs upstairs.
To begin with they claimed that the bullying wasn’t racist. It was class and cultural bullying, like the wrong sort of leaves on the line, as if that were more acceptable, or less repellent.
Where does Channel 4, the great arbiter and self-regulator of political correctness, think that race stops and culture starts? And when did class-based bullying become acceptable entertainment? And then some producer said the programme had uncovered and aired difficult issues that needed discussing, as if we should be thanking him for his prescience and rigorous honesty. That is a self-serving argument that barely merits a riposte, but for any Tristrams who might be reading this, if it were valid it would excuse any televised act as a chapter heading for further discussion. For instance, you might engineer a rape because you wanted to talk about women’s safety.
Goody is a foul-mouthed, unpleasant, dim little thing because she’s remedially educated. Endemol’s executives are mealy-mouthed, unpleasant, dim things because they chose to be — and they make a great deal of money out of exploiting both the victims and the audience of their self-imposed stupidity.
The underlying direction of Big Brother has changed. When it began it was a programme that unsubtly tried to incite young show-offs to have sex on television. That became boringly like pandas mating so they turned to engineering conflict and faction instead. Those are the two eternal, unimaginative selling points of popular television — sex and violence. There is a wider argument, a harder argument, to be had about Big Brother: it is about the nature of exploitative, cynical programming masquerading as youthful cutting-edge television.
All previous criticism of Big Brother has been shouted down with howls of elitism and middle-class, middle-aged prejudice — how we don’t understand the interest and excitement of urban working-class youth and, anyway, it got ratings and made money. But this time its audience has plummeted. It was being beaten by BBC2 garden shed programmes until the programme makers managed to get the racist bullying on air.
The truth about Big Brother and the other reality shows is that they are simply bad culture, and bad culture drives out good. Across Europe unrestricted pornography has driven away well-made television. Channel 4 claims that the chunk of change it makes from Big Brother pays for more edifying productions, but that’s the same argument that says slavery was okay because it paid for the classic beauty of Bath.
Big Brother is a boring, embarrassing and manipulative farrago. I wouldn’t censure it, I just don’t watch it more than I need to to do my job. Big Brother created Goody out of a pathetically needy unattractive little girl and had her clutching her tubby nakedness and drunkenly screaming, and now, with the same cynical need, they’ve destroyed her to get the viewing figures and the cash cow phone calls. That’s what they did this time — what will it take next?
