Television
Ordinary stars
Simon Hoggart
In the past, as Daniel Boorstin pointed out, a celebrity was a 'person who is wellknown for his well-knowness'. Now people appear on television because they have appeared on television. Big Brother (Channel 4) finally ended, having made stars of people whose only claim to fame is that they were once on Big Brother. They were all ordinary in a quite extraordinarily ordinary way. Davina McCall, who seems to have a sort of presenters' Tourette's syndrome, in that she barks out words for no discernible reason, told each exiting contestant that they were now to be shown 'yer best BITS! Yer best MOMENTS!' These flashbacks consisted of them falling down, or sticking their bottoms out, or pushing someone into the pool or, in one case, urinating in the kitchen rubbish bin. These were people of whom it was impossible to say whether they were drunk or sober, since everything they did had an entirely random quality, bringing laughter without humour, hilarity without wit. 'Kate is the awesome, AWESOME winner of Big Brother 3!' yelled Davina, though it would be hard to meet a less awesome person. Kate is unutterably ordinary, even dull, The image she left with us was of her failing to get her left leg into her jeans and collapsing on the floor. In Lord Reith's day you had to have slightly more to offer. Actually, you did last month. But no more.
Big Brother has been a very unordinary success for Channel 4. As well as making tens of millions of pounds (the £70,000 prize is puny when you realise that the public paid 1.2 million in phone calls just to eject the number 3), it almost doubled the ratings of the Graham Norton chat-show which followed it, and which has had disappointing ratings. Yet everyone agreed that these were the most dreary, the least appealing housemates ever, even less attractive than the people on Celebrity Big Brother — which is probably coming back this autumn. My hope is for a more upmarket version, perhaps an Egghead Big Brother. My choice would include Simon Schama, Oliver Letwin, Melvyn Bragg, Beryl Bainbridge, Dame Mary Warnock and Baroness Scotland as the token black woman. I'd like to see them wackily fumbling round in the shower.
Davina McCall shouts and runs a lot, and tries to persuade young people to do stupid things. But she is Joan Bakewell compared to the two women who present Wudja? Cudja? on ITV2, a digital show which takes all the dignity out of Big Brother and bins it in favour of naked breasts and buttocks. 'Wudja get yer baps out for a 100 quid?' one of the presenters asks. One woman earned £1,000 by eating a dish of tripe, custard, salt and tabasco. A young man was asked to cover his backside with treacle and feathers, but they didn't bother to tell him he could keep his underpants on. `Yer just got yer bum out for no reason!' the girls shouted. Getting your bum out for no reason is the future of television. Weep silently and turn back to your books.
The physical evidence is scant, but by examining tantalising fragments . ' said the voice-over on Sex BC (Channel 4). Actually, there was almost no evidence at all, but that didn't stop them trying to prove something, and what they proved was that women were free and liberated until they weren't. When someone held up a tiny piece of chipped bone and declared it proved that in prehistoric times women did all the work while men sat around having a good time, I decided that this was a comedy anthropology show, a Smack The Pony spoof in which the remains of a fossilised cucumber sandwich could be used to prove that men had always been oppressors. Who needs physical evidence when your convictions are so strong?
Padilla In Euroland (BBC 2) took Michael Portillo around Europe talking to rather grand people and reassessing his own views in the light of what they told him. The best part was his running battle with the French Euromaniac and television presenter Christine Ockrent, a woman whose beauty masks a fathomless complacency. But then if you tell a member of the unchanging French elite that you don't really want to have your life run by the unchanging French elite, you are always going to receive an incredulous reaction.
The main problem was that the show consisted of talking heads, if in various gorgeous settings. But this was relieved by the surprising fact that Portillo is a television natural — sincere, thoughtful, convincing. appealing. Now, if the BBC can persuade him to drop his pants for a bet, they'll finally have the yoof political show they crave.
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