[Amy]

Her mother applauded her for 'being herself', her father thanked God for his new daughter, and 74 per cent of viewers voted for Nadia, the transsexual who won the latest 'Big Brother'. But was this a victory for liberal acceptance or a vote for the freak shows of less enlightened centuries?

'I am now accepted by the public as a woman," said Nadia Almada after emerging from the Big Brother house on Friday night as the winner, tottering on unsteady legs with her mascara streaming. "There is no words that could show my heart that is inside me," said the woman who was born a man 27 years ago on the Portuguese island of Madeira. "I am so happy. Thank you." She crossed herself frantically, and a big diamanté cross jiggled in her now-famous cleavage. Fireworks burst overhead; cameras flashed and the crowd screamed.

"For you, Big Brother was all about acceptance," said the presenter Davina McCall, aware that now, at last, after endless hours of dead-end television featuring catfights and bitching, snogging and snoring, the programme she has presented for five series had a real story on its hands. Boy, did it need one. In the beginning, just having real people locked up together night and day was fascinating enough, but then we got bored. They put celebrities in the house, which was diverting for one series but not two. By last year BB was just tedious, a gathering of quiet, sensible people too ordinary to be interesting. So the production company Endemol went "evil", its melodramatic word for rounding up unstable extroverts and playing psychological games with them. Emotional fires were stoked; there were fist fights, surprise expulsions and even the first live sex in the house (an anti-climax for all but the participants, who were hiding under a table). But it would all have amounted to nothing without a bank clerk from Surrey with a fierce addiction to fags and a big secret.

Long before the end viewers knew far more about Nadia than the people she was living with. They appeared not to guess that she was a post-operative transsexual, which almost suggested that they did accept her as a woman, although the blunt Victor did describe her look as "like putting boobs on Antonio Banderas". And her friend, self-appointed mediator Dan, said: "It doesn't take Einstein to work out there's something there ... or not there any more."

Nadia knew what she wanted - validation, by as many people as possible, and not just because she wanted to be famous like so many of the preening, posturing prats who auditioned and shared the house with her. That was her secret weapon: there was a purpose to her craving - not just vanity but the end of a journey out of the confusion and misery of being a woman trapped in the body of a boy, into a new identity. As well as the money her reward would be love, a national explosion of it that allowed the true, vivid and glorious Nadia to emerge.

Full article at The Independent