newcritics

Something remarkable happened at the conclusion of this year’s Celebrity Big Brother (the one with the exciting race and class theme that I’ve been going on about). Shilpa won. Britain voted, and Britain voted — by a substantial margin — for an Indian actress never heard of outside the subcontinent. In fact, to count off the remarkable facts about this particular trashy reality TV show: none of the top three contestants was British and the top two weren’t even white (Jermaine Jackson was runner-up). Meanwhile, further down the scoreboard, three stupid young white women, each of whom intended the show to transform or kick-start her career, got the kind of treatment from the public and the pop media usually reserved for people who kick dogs or stub out cigarettes on their children.

Fans of the show, which, remember, was sort of loosely based on the famous Stanford Prison Experiment — so I guess some kind of bullying is inevitable — have been glued to a totally contemporary, totally international and totally ‘real’ story about ignorance, difference and nastiness. The conduct of the ‘bad girls’ in the house — humiliation, aggression, isolation… the works — will have taken many viewers straight back to the miserable playgrounds of their childhood. I hope the video has been replayed in school assembly halls around the country. This story, of course, was vastly improved by the grace and humour of the victim/winner, Shilpa Shetty, who even found it in her to let the principal bully off the hook in her post-show interview.

Anyway, did Britain suddenly abandon racism and bullying? Unlikely. Did Britain just learn a useful lesson about humanity and difference? I guess we did. And what I find interesting about this micro-episode is how it sits alongside the other big race story of the moment which is the one about integration vs multiculturalism, particularly in the context of muslim immigrant communities and their apparent unreadiness to join the British club. Two behaviours are under the spotlight: the ancient and nauseating habit of intimidating and humiliating people who are different and the equally ancient resistance to assimilation by an inhospitable host. Should I make a glib attempt to connect them here? I don’t think so.
(the picture is from the front cover of Rupert Murdoch’s notoriously ugly The Sun, on this occasion impeccably anti-racist)