Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Celebrity Big Deal

I've been extremely underwhelmed by the 'debate' triggered on racism by CBB. While I can't go so far as Simon Heffer in dividing my life into the era before I'd heard of Jade Goody and that after, I will say that I have never watched more of Big Brother in any incarnation for longer than it takes to identify what it is and change channel. I don't say this in a particular spirit of pride, just that the concept of watching seemingly tedious people do nothing for ages has never seemed to me remotely appealing: I've worked in academia.

So the fuss that Jade Goody and her mother disliked a pretty, educated Indian actress and consequently 'bullied' her using potentially racist remarks has seemed peculiarly irrelevant. Headlines of 'Stupid graceless person acts with graceless stupidity' are not Pulitzer-worthy stuff. There is a slightly more interesting angle from the class perspective - but the people writing the Shilpa-victim pieces are also those who, presumably, would espouse Jade as their class-victim.

So can we all agree that what Jade Goody may or may not think is of no more significance to the culture of Britain than what I think is. And for God's sake talk about something else...

1 Comments:

Blogger Serf said...

The worst bit is that most people don't include pictures of Shilpa instead of Jade with their articles.

1:58 pm  

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