Reality television is a cheap and profitable way to create programming and it doesn’t come much cheaper nor more profitable than the British TV company Channel 4’s “Big Brother” show. Contestants live together like goldfish in a house filled with cameras that record their every word and action round the clock. Meanwhile viewers can call premium rate phone numbers to vote on who should be expelled from the community.
The latest show features celebrities including Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty. The actress has been exposed to bullying by three other women contestants, which has taken an ugly racist turn with ignorant and bigoted comments. Shetty has been reduced to tears. Her treatment has produced more than 30,000 complaints to the UK TV watchdog, far exceeding any previous protest. The Indian press has joined UK newspapers in condemning the show. The controversy is now receiving worldwide coverage, which is ironic if you consider what Irish poet Brendan Behan famously said: that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Despite losing the main sponsor for the program, the number of viewers has almost doubled since the controversy broke out. Some media critics have speculated that the entire ordeal is an engineered scandal, not unlike the eruption in the UK in 2005 over the racy musical “Jerry Springer: The Opera” which, among other things, includes a troupe of tap-dancing Klu Klux Klansmen.
Channel 4 has been mealy-mouthed in its defense of “Big Brother”, denying that it believed the behavior had really been racist while pretending that what was happening was a fascinating social exercise. Late last night, the public was being given the chance to vote Shetty or her chief tormentor off the program. Viewers and votes were expected to be at record levels. As a sop, Channel 4 has promised to donate the evening’s call income to charity, but it’s laughing all the way to the bank.
Viewers are partly to blame for watching such contemptible nonsense in the first place. They are voyeurs, peeping Toms lapping up the generally banal life and conversations of complete strangers. They are encouraged not only to watch but also participate by calling in judgments. If it weren’t real, one could imagine such a bizarre, farcical exercise of democracy appearing in a film by oddball director Terry Gilliam as a way to lament modern society’s depraved and sad infatuation with fame.
Nor does Shetty come out of this well. She has since retracted her accusations of racism and hugged the woman who denigrated her. All the celebrities are being paid to participate. It must be suspected that Shetty has been told by the program’s producers to take just a little — but not too much — steam out of the row. In doing so, she has become an accomplice, not a victim.
“Big Brother” is a tawdry and unpleasant item of TV programming, one of many that appeal to basic instincts and affirms stereotypes — least of which the stereotype of the average British television viewer.
