This was not in fact racist behaviour, as I've argued in some previous blog entries on the subject. Indeed, the Ofcom report makes no judgement as to whether the actions in question were racist; nor does Channel Four – in the formal apology that it has been obliged to make by Ofcom – accept that it was racist.
The issue that I am mainly interested in here is not a debate on what constitutes racism, or whether racism still has deep roots in British society. Rather, the whole episode casts a fascinating and somewhat dark light on what might lie behind the much-vaunted British value and national characteristic of tolerance; and on how we react to those who attack and threaten the socio-economic system we have built up around it. The question it raises is, how do we – as a nation – tolerate those who are intolerant: those who question the whole liberal basis of our tolerance and who may even seek to overthrow it altogether?
The British solution is not to seek to take on and eradicate intolerant movements and their representatives through direct political action, repressive measures or draconian laws. Such an approach would itself violate the principles of tolerance for the freedoms of others, even – within reason – those who portray themselves as the enemies of our own freedoms. The British method is to suppress and mute intolerance: to censor it and remove from the public domain into the private realm. In this way, we act towards the intolerance of others as we do to our own: we wall it up in the privacy of our thoughts, hearts and homes, and do not allow it to voice and manifest itself in our interactions with others – at least, if we want to be thought reasonable and respectable.
In the case of Big Brother, a group of private individuals are indeed locked away into a sort of home. But here, the reverse process seems to be at work: the people concerned are confined in the Big Brother House in order to be exposed in the public domain, not hidden from it. However, precisely because of the intense public scrutiny to which the housemates are subjected, along with the dictatorial rules that are imposed on them, the participants are placed in a situation where they do in fact have to suppress and hide away their intolerant reactions to one another, along with their self-seeking stratagems and tactics to take advantage of one another and enhance their chances of winning the game. Often, of course, within the intimacy of the 'Diary Room', the contestants will 'open up' and express their irritation or prejudices towards one or other of their co-residents, thereby covering up an attempt to damage the chances of their rivals under the guise of an all too understandable private exasperation at someone they cannot stand – a feeling that they must suppress within the 'public' domain of their interactions with other contestants inside the house.
The whole 'premise' of the Big Brother House is that it blurs the distinctions between the public and private realms in this way. In the case of Celebrity Big Brother, the model of confinement within a private space being designed to at once suppress and expose in the public domain individuals' private thoughts and feelings is complicated still further. In this case, the contestants are already well known to the public. Their sojourn in the BB House therefore appeals to the audience's curiosity to peer through celebrities' public personae and catch a glimpse of their private selves (and even their 'private parts', let's be honest). By contrast, the appeal for the participants themselves is almost the opposite: that the show offers them some further 'exposure', puts them in front of the public eye and offers them a chance to present an attractive public persona, thereby potentially revitalising or relaunching a flagging career.
In this sense, the Shilpa Shetty episode clearly delivered on Celebrity Big Brother's dual selling point: exposing normally suppressed intolerant and aggressive attitudes to the public view; and providing an avenue for a fading Bollywood star to launch her career as a Western movie actress and celebrity. However, the programme has now been adjudged guilty of being too honest and realistic: too much 'reality TV', in fact, and not enough mindless entertainment. Indeed, you could say that the show failed to be sufficiently Big-Brother with regard to the naked hostility that was shown towards Shilpa, expressed and justified – in the eyes of those responsible – in the terms of cultural prejudice and stereotype.
The original Big Brother – the Orwellian one, in the novel 1984 – did not merely seek to watch over the private actions and intimate thoughts of citizens; but, where these were ideologically intolerable, the state sought to transform those thoughts from within by inventing a new form of language – Double Speak – that represented a sort of knowing lie that the individual came to believe because the old honest language came gradually to be forgotten. In the case of Celebrity Big Brother, the show failed to make the outbursts of Jade Goody and others 'acceptable' by presenting them within an editorial context that allowed a politically correct spin to be placed on them and appropriate sanctions on the offending individuals to be imposed. In other words, the programme merely exposed the private prejudices and intolerant reactions of its contestants but did not – unlike its Orwellian predecessor – seek to transform them by making the transgressors publicly confess to their 'crimes' and commit themselves to not 're-offending' in the same way.
Celebrity Big Brother got its brief wrong: its purpose is not merely to expose the ugly face of hidden intolerance but, in fact, to participate in society's attempt to suppress it, in part by narrativising a process whereby individuals come to recognise their faults, reform their ways and reconcile their differences. The object of Big Brother's systematic surveillance, in fact, is precisely not to watch intolerance but to censor it from the public domain. The editorial failings of the programme boiled down to the fact that viewers were indeed forced to watch a spectacle of intolerance. Big Brother may well have been watching the housemates, but it wasn't vigilant: it didn't see what was going wrong early enough in order to prevent it from escalating almost to the status of a crime.
And now, in order to prevent a recurrence, the ordinary, non-Celebrity version of the programme that is once again starting up will itself be watched over. The author of the Ofcom report stated: “I . . . welcome the measures that they have taken to ensure proper and rigorous oversight. We will be watching very closely to ensure that these have the desired effect”. The Commission for Racial Equality also said it would be “keeping a close eye” on the new series of Big Brother: “We will be monitoring it carefully to ensure that such disgraceful behaviour is not repeated”, a spokesman said. And so we now have the 'spectacle' of the watchdogs of the media and of political correctness watching over Big Brother in order to ensure that as Big Brother watches the show's contestants, it keeps a watchful eye over what it is acceptable or not for its viewers to watch. More a case of 'Big Brother, you're being watched' than 'Big Brother is watching you'.
But the one thing we won't be watching, if the regulators get their way, is any all too realistic scenes of unacceptable intolerance.
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