Arab Big Brother's demise should be mourned
Brian McNair
Sun 7 Mar 2004
ON PAPER the latest incarnation of Big Brother wasn?t all that different from its predecessors. Twelve men and women live together in an isolated, controlled environment. They get to know each other and develop relationships. Regular tasks relieve the boredom and the viewers decide who goes and who stays. The winner emerges to a large cash prize and the regulation 15 minutes of fame. Just one thing. This Big Brother house was in Bahrain and the show would be going out to 150 million people across the Middle East. Uh-oh.
There are obvious dangers in exporting Western-invented TV formats to the Muslim world. When the organisers of the 2002 Miss World competition thought it would be a really good idea to stage their tacky pageant in Nigeria, they set in motion a chain of events which led to the deaths of hundreds, and a hasty evacuation of the leggy lovelies.
I?m not blaming organiser Julia Morley for the murders committed by religious fundamentalists in Nigeria, any more than I?d blame the female Nigerian journalist whose light-hearted observation that Mohammed would have enjoyed the Miss World spectacle sparked it all off. This, however, was globalisation at its most damaging; a thoughtless, insensitive export of our toxic cultural waste to a society far from able to process it.
Big Brother producers Endemol have a lot of experience in making their format travel, though, and the risks of the Arab version provoking unrest and violence were recognised from the outset.
To respect local sensitivities, there were religious prohibitions on filming males or females in a state of undress, or in the toilet. Men and women were provided with separate living rooms, as well as bedrooms, to allow both sexes privacy. There was a prayer room, and the idea of anyone having sex during the 10-week run was ruled out.
Even with those limits on the dramatic possibilities of the format the Arab Big Brother would have been a ground-breaking experiment. If it had been allowed a chance to work, we?d have had some welcome and much-needed evidence that the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds aren?t as far apart as some would like us to think.
It wasn?t to be, though. Protests in the streets, legions of veiled women demanding that their unveiled and marginally more liberated sisters in the Big Brother house be covered up, clerical outrage at the "threat to Islam" this "entertainment for animals" presented, all persuaded the Bahraini authorities to pull the plug. You can?t blame them, but it should be seen as huge setback nonetheless, even if you?re the type of person who thinks Big Brother is telly trash.
These are dark days in the history of relations between the Islamic and non-Islamic worlds, sucked as we all have been into the clash of cultures unleashed by September 11.
But watching footage of young Muslims arriving on their camels and entering the Big Brother house, smiling and waving for the cameras, whose heart wasn?t lifted with the possibility that there?s still common ground between us, even if it?s only in our shared desire for a bit of fun and flirtation between the sexes?
That was the hope of reasonable Muslims and non-Muslims alike. It was also the fear of those wary of the show?s destabilising impact on their strict patriarchal societies.
Would it encourage their young men and women to get it on without the obstacles put in the way by beards, burkas and all the other temptation-shielding devices favoured by islam?
Fundamentalists in Bahrain?s only parliament protested when one female contestant greeted a male with a kiss on entering the house. A young Muslim female, after watching the opening episode, expressed her disapproval that unmarried men and women were living in the same house.
The interesting thing, though, is that she was watching it, and was going to keep on doing so, as were a lot of Middle Eastern men. And their reasons for watching appeared to be the same as ours: to watch relationships and personalities develop, to eavesdrop on the rich complexity of emotion and interaction which lies beneath the apparent banality of everyday experience.
They wanted to be voyeurs, as we?ve been voyeurs of Big Brother since it launched in 2000, not for sinister or sleazy motives but because we human beings, Christian, Jew, Muslim or atheist, are united in our existence as social animals, and the behaviour of other human beings interests us intensely.
Big Brother opened up a window on a dimension of the human experience we?d not been exposed to before in such forensic detail, and the Arabs were itching to take a peek.
Had they been allowed to do so, Muslims might have been making news in the weeks to come for something more positive than the fratricidal slaughter and alleged honour killings which dominated last week.
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