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Senior Member
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Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Rutland
Posts: 25,358
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Senior Member
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Rutland
Posts: 25,358
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It\'s time to leave the cheap, exploitative Big Brother house for good
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It's time to leave the cheap, exploitative Big Brother house for good FOR those of us who loved the show from its inception and defended it valiantly year after thankless year against its legions of priggish detractors, it's time to face the terrible truth: Big Brother has become exactly what its critics always said it was, namely a trashy, cheap, shallow and exploitative freakshow with all the subtlety of a herd of stampeding buffalo.
There is nothing going on in the latest series except a desire to take a group of skimpily dressed, socially inexperienced, intellectually underdeveloped young girls - whose only form of meaningful interaction is bouncing up and down on the furniture, shrieking and singing, "I'm a Barbie girl in a Barbie world" - and then laugh cruelly at the oestrogen-fuelled bitchfest that inevitably erupts. Forget the latest storm-in-a-teacup over alleged racism, with contestant Emily's removal for using the word '******' about black housemate Charley.
What should disgust us far more is the way in which Channel Four cynically pitched these flaky bimbos into an environment in which they are clearly lost and confused, then callously threw one of them to the moralistic lynch mob outside the first moment that controversy struck.
Barely a week gone, and one young woman's life already lies in tatters for a single foolish remark taken out of context. If this personal destruction of naive, vulnerable people is what Big Brotheris all about now, then they're welcome to it.
The truth is that Big Brother has failed to notice as the competition upped their game and overtook them. The supreme example of that right now is BBC's The Apprentice, in which 12 contestants vie to become the £100,000-a-year novice to the charismatic and formidable Amstrad boss, Alan Sugar. That this has become the must watched reality show of the moment was confirmed again last week when posh Sandhurst Military Academy graduate Katie Hopkins, who had been built up during the current series as the virtual Wicked Witch of the West, voluntarily gave up her place in the final two when forced to confront the effect of uprooting her two young daughters for the new life on offer.
It was compelling stuff, proof that reality TV can provide many of the redemptive epiphanies of classic drama, when perceptions of a character are completely inverted and we see them anew - though, ironically, the show didn't seem to want it that way, but persisted instead in portraying Katie as a pantomime villain to the end.
Behind the drama, all sorts of big themes were being played out here, for women in particular, touching on how motherhood and career can be made compatible; how a woman's family ties can still be used against her, sex-discrimination laws notwithstanding; how the corporate culture punishes women who are honest about their conflicted feelings instead of hiding them behind a macho, feel-nothing facade. Katie was portrayed throughout the series as ruthless, but in the end her downfall was that she wasn't ruthless enough.
As an example of the multidimensionality of character, it easily knocks the adolescent histrionics of Big Brother 8 into the proverbial cocked hat.
The other reason for preferring The Apprentice, of course, is because it still features an Irish contestant for us to cheer on. And Wicklow-born-and-bred Kristina Grimes's passage into this week's final would certainly have been something worth celebrating, had it not been for the slant she gave to her own personal history, as revealed to viewers last week.
The story itself was powerful. Kristina told how, at the age of 17, she became pregnant, and then gave birth to a boy while staying in a convent. Resisting pressure to give up her son for adoption, she went to England, where she set about supporting them both with a series of dead-end jobs before completing a degree and getting a prominent sales post with a phramaceutical company. So far, so inspiring.
It was when Kristina interpreted those early experiences in Ireland that the natural goodwill towards a succesful compatriot began to turn sour, for listening to her speak was like being plunged back into some cliched, Angela's Ashes-style miserablist saga of Oirish woe in a land where the scared little people were ruled with a rod of iron by an all-powerful Church.
"Girls were sent away to hide their pregnancy . . . once they gave birth they gave up their babies" - this vision of Ireland was presented as if it was plain fact, the normal way things are done. It was the Magdalen Laundries all over again, only it wasn't the Fifties she was talking about, but the late Eighties and early Nineties. (Kristina's son is now 18.)
Nor were her parents some poor, struggling peasant farmers. Her father was managing director of Coca-Cola Ireland at the time.
We should still be urging Kristina on to victory in next week's final, because she's the best candidate and, well, blood will out. But let's hope she gives the simplistic myths about Irish canonical tyranny a rest in future. By peddling them, Kristina is only deepening the already prevalent and corrosive cultural climate of blame avoidance.
That is apparent in everything from the Taoiseach's risible flailing at the media and the tribunals to explain his ongoing difficulties, through the tendency of every thug before the courts to explain his actions with some sob story about deprivation and family breakdown, right down to the hilarious bleatings of the G8 protestors last week when their faux anarchist antics were met with water cannons and a line of German riot shields rather than a cup of tea and a chocolate digestive.
In our culture, someone else is always to blame. Personal responsibility is in retreat. That was what made Katie Hopkins such a breath of fresh air, actually. Pity she wasn't the Irish one instead. Oh, never mind - there's always next year.
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Source: Irish Independent
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10-06-2007, 10:01 AM
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