Complaints about racist behaviour broke all previous records over the Big brother program… People have called for Big Brother to be off the air, and channel 4 heads to role… And I too, it is worth adding, am furious… Not because of the racist behaviour, not because of Jade Goody (directly anyway) and not because my poor little mind can’t cope with what is happening… Because I’m now forced to come to the defence of BB, its existence and the things that were said on it… Not because I agree with there sentiment, but because it seems the whole country has utterly missed the point.
First… reality TV, if we have to have it, it cannot be censored for the audience… If we do that, if we edit reality for the consumer then what are they watching? Many pundits rightly judged that most, if not all of what was described as racism, wasn’t. All of it was small minded, shallow and retarded, but very little of it was direct racism. And even if it was? Do we really want to be lied to? Do we not want to see how very stupid and shallow any racist arguments really are? Do we not want to be made aware how easy it for some to get caught up and a schoolyard bullying mentality and say things they probably don’t really mean? From a limited stand point, of someone who doesn’t watch the damn thing, I don’t think anyone there is actually racist, I didn’t here anyone say other people were lesser. What I heard was cultural ignorance and small mindedness.
The schoolyard reference summed it up entirely. I was guilty of similar crimes when I was about 8 there was a boy at school we used to call Paki. He wasn’t actually Pakistani in origin, in fact he probably barely qualified as olive skinned, he was just the most different person we had met and we commented on that… In short, we didn’t understand what we were saying. (Amusingly the same boy later threatened to sue me for slander, for calling him Paki when I was 8 – figure that out). The things I heard, on the news, were that simplistic and childish, there was no deeper hatred of race…
To me this was very much a case of trying to shoot the messenger, reality TV is supposed to be about real people and people being themselves, and other people watching, for fun, and I would hope interest. So should channel 4 be under scrutiny because it showed us some real people being stupid, or even racist? When Nick Griffin was caught being openly racist the BBC did come under flack for showing it. Channel four showed us what these people we apparently revere are really like, why should we be upset? The truth should set you free…
I’m not saying the way people are treated in bullying situations is ok, it shouldn’t happen, but here is another interesting point… People have been bullied on BB before, people have been reduced to tears on BB before, people have been called horrible things and degraded publicly by stupid people before… so why did 33,000 people complain this time? Did Shilpa Shetty get preferential treatment from the public and the media because she was Indian? Maybe…
But free speech is free speech, and if it ever become limited, in any way, then it is no longer free… By letting and hell, even encouraging racists, and those with unhealthy agenda to speak their mind, then we know who they are, where they and we can expose the flaws in their arguments. It was good that we heard about what was said, and maybe it has helped expose the peculiar fascination everyone has with that goody woman as propping up a monster…
Or maybe the British people are too stupid to learn… and this will only happen again…
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