I Don't Want Virtue To Exist Anywhere

"Uncultured Swines of the World, Presume You're Already United and Hopefully Not Bother For All Our Sakes", Prij, 18/05/06

The Grauniad, which I only use to pass those few extra minutes that sometimes remain, had a full back page advert for the new series of "Big Brother" - oh how the masses love our new Orwellian future™. There was also a slightly smaller BB7 ad in my beloved The Independent which also got the overdue culture-jamming treatment (ironic given this feature, which I hand copied whilst reading it, expecting it to be a pay article on the site). You'll have to make do with the above recreation until I get a picture of the ad tomorrow.

Deborah Orr, in said Independent feature, expressed so easily what I had tried to say about "Big Brother" but couldn't for sheer inability to express it without using the words "fuck", "shit" (and their variations) over and over again, intersperesed only by nonsense sounds which came the closest to describing my utter hate of the show, its makers, its contestants, its viewers and the circus that hovers around it in a pure vacuum of unimportance when compared to the depths of time, space, and the human mind *starts making frustrated sounds*

Big Brother is, as its critics attest, exploitative, vacuous, crude, cruel and voracious. It is a nasty, petty, psychological circus that in its popularity exposes the nation as a bunch of superannuated schoolchildren, still childishly fascinated by the sight of an emerging pecking order, and still keen to witness a playground free-for-all in which the contestants are naked and exposed - generally, alas, without even a sharp wit to defend themselves. It enrolls the desperate, the deluded and the downright disordered, into a physical and mental wet t-shirt contest, and makes of its audience a leering, sneering bunch of pitiless, shameless, voyeurs.

I'll admit to having watched the last month of the first series...

That first series now, though it caused no end of a furore at the time, seems looking back like the last summer of innocence. Years after the programme had aired, I saw Craig on a DIY show (he'd been a builder) and momentarily thought he was someone I'd been to school with. Craig, who came closest to guessing what was going on outside by suggesting that the show would be obsessively watch, turned out well. He won the series, came his money to his Down's Syndrome friend Joanne so that she could get a heart operation, then got on with his life.
He's a wiser, better man than the fools who line up to take part these days. Which is what provides the show's repulsive, slimy, evilly glittering fascination. In a better world no one would be shallow and silly enough to watch Big Brother, because no one would be shallow and silly enough to take part.

And what has changed since that first series? I watched the first series, but then I grew up after seeing the second series and I started thinking about more important things, such as where this planet and its petty "civilisation" is going.

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