Muriel Gray protests that rather than be mocked by the small-minded for leaving the Big Brother house, Germaine Greer should be applauded for unmasking the depths to which reality TV will sink in order to boost ratings
IT may be an old chestnut, but the question as to whether popular culture moulds society or merely reflects it, never really goes away.
The surreal opening of this year’s Celebrity Big Brother, that saw iconic feminist scholar Germaine Greer waving at a baying crowd of teenagers before entering the infamous building, has ended, for her at least, in a howl of malice being spat in her direction by envious and less intellectually capable female commentators.
Greer’s early exit from the Big Brother house was regrettable for a number of reasons, but was at least conducted with dignity and a rare admission of error, self-deprecation and repentance. However, reading the vitriolic response to this mundane incident, spewing from fellow eccentrics Julie Burchill and Janet Street-Porter, one could be forgiven for thinking that Greer had bitten the head off a kitten.
Street-Porter labels Greer as part of a dull, middle-class, wine-bar chattering class, not tough enough to stay the course, and Burchill goes off the scale by calling her a snob, as sexlessly sterile as a mule, a club bore and a loony. In reality, the only crime that Greer committed was to throw into sharp relief the stark limitations of reality TV, and for some reason that fact enrages those who hold up exploitative populism as some kind of common virtue.
Janet Street-Porter’s appearance and tenacity on I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here was hailed by some as a new era of reality TV, one that now had room for the intelligent as well as the attention-seeking airhead. Street-Porter, of course, revelled in this conclusion, regardless of the fact that it is blatantly not true.
Street-Porter may be many fine things, including bold and entertaining, but she is not an intellectual. Partially educated and in possession of a useful animal cunning, her success at surfing the wave of the popular and the fashionable is undoubted, but as her columns demonstrate, writing as she does like a self-obsessed 14-year-old girl to a French pen pal, her intellect is substantially limited. So her ability to survive a camp full of uneducated publicity seekers, with demonstrably limited intelligence, was largely because she is very much one of them. She constantly seeks attention and praise, analyses nothing beyond the immediate, and her status, described by Paul Burrell as “a very bright lady”, was a perfect example of the old saying: in the kingdom of the blind the one eyed man is king.
Julie Burchill, somewhat similarly, is an uneducated, non-academic in possession of delusions of intellectual grandeur that have begun to border on the psychotic. Her main attack on Greer seems to be that Greer previously criticised one her pals, or her “girls” as she calls them, and this is an opportunity to get her back in print. The call of the playground has never been louder. Bragging that she, of course, was offered a spot in Celebrity Big Brother but was too clever to say yes, Burchill’s demolition of Greer is characteristically malicious and empty of any real substance.
But the ferocity and childishness of these personal attacks are not interesting in themselves. What is much more absorbing is why Greer’s appearance so upset them.
The real reason seems to be that Greer broke the unwritten rule of populist reality television, by dissecting not just the process of it but also the consequences. What’s worse is that she did this not from the safety of a column in a broadsheet, but from inside the machinery itself. Furthermore, she did so as a wounded spirit, honest and bold enough to admit humiliation and defeat, utterly taboo words for reality TV participants. Being on these shows must always be “fun”, “just a laugh”, and “a bit of a giggle”’. That there could be any real hurt involved is not something that the viewer, the participants or the producers ever want to hear.
Consequently, the producers at Endemol, the company that makes Big Brother for Channel 4, must have had a few nasty moments when they realised that, unlike Street-Porter on I’m A Celebrity, Germaine Greer was paying attention to what was going on around her rather than thinking only of how she might be perceived. Hence, when she rightly regarded the programme makers’ taunting of John McCririck, a man obviously profoundly psychologically damaged by his boarding school years, as institutional bullying and something she would look into as an academic exercise later to see if there was any connection with the rise of bullying in the young watching the show, a few hearts in Endemol’s production offices must have substantially increased their beats.
Greer’s observation that the introduction of Brigitte Nielsen’s ex-mother-in-law, a woman who Nielsen regarded as having been integral to the break up of her marriage and family, as an act of irresponsibility that bordered on the obscene, is not the usual jolly de briefing talk of ex-housemates. Her refusal to see the malicious tricks and nasty surprises as postmodern and ironic, but as potentially damaging to the subject and deeply unhealthy to the society that expects and condones them, puts Greer in the category of the little boy who sees that the emperor has no clothes on. It seems to be precisely this debunking of the orthodoxy of populism that has truly riled Street-Porter and Burchill.
So the experiment has proved that the new mutation of reality television cannot tolerate the participation of the intelligent. It’s a medium that relies 100% on stupidity, venality and solipsism on the part of the subjects, and cruel disengagement from normal morality from the viewer. Should we be ashamed?
The consensual, collective public bullying of Natalie Appleton on I’m A Celebrity, voting for her time and time again to break her physically and emotionally, asks once more whether we have been taught the formula of cruelty by TV, or whether the shows have merely recognised a natural biological imperative to bully the feeble. Same old question. Maybe Germaine will find the answer.
16 January 2005
Sunday Herald
