timesonline
by urban fox, times online correspondent
For most of Britain in the past few weeks, Davina McCall, the Miss Whippy front-woman of Celebrity Big Brother, has been thrilling if terrifying
She’s pretty and young and she wants you to be bad. She giggles and nods and eggs you on. The nastier you are, the more she’ll love it - because you’re on camera.
For most of Britain in the past few weeks, Davina McCall, the Miss Whippy front-woman of Celebrity Big Brother, has been this thrilling if terrifying She. Millions of us have watched her interviewing the evicted inmates of the Big Brother house: shaking her head, widening her eyes in mock surprise, making her mouth into a big innocent O - then interrupting their narrative with apparently spontaneous, apparently girlish bursts of cruelty. This is popular programming at its best (or worst; after all, what’s the difference?): fostering an all-in-it-together gang mentality, as audience and presenter team up to torment a victim, then go off to whisper together in the corner, picking over the pieces like playground bullies.
Davina isn’t the only girl in the news recently to personify this kind of not-quite-adult viciousness, giving victims from Jodie Marsh to the deflated George Galloway a kicking on their way back to reality (before Celebrity Big Brother moved to its implausibly saccharine conclusion at the weekend).
The 9 pm CBB slot, which I admit I waited for every night with all the twitchy eagerness of an addict craving a fix, is now mixed up in my mind with January’s ugly news story of the “happy slapping” killing of a gay bar manager by a teenage gang led by a 14-year-old girl. Teenager Chelsea O’Mahoney told 37-year-old David Morley to “pose for the camera” before she took pictures on her mobile of her friends attacking him. Then she kicked him in the head herself. She and her three companions were acquitted of murder but convicted of manslaughter. “She kicked him like you would kick a football or rugby ball,” recalled David Morley’s friend, who was savagely beaten himself but escaped with his life; “just swinging her right foot back and kicking him really hard in the head.”
Now obviously these two spectacles differ in some important ways, not least that no one actually dies on Big Brother. The people we’re watching in the Big Brother house are celebrities; they chose to be there, so their stress and pain are everybody’s business, so who cares if they cry?
The editing of events inside the house makes their viciousness seem unreal and cartoonish. No sooner have we joined forces to detest someone than they’re brought low. First we’re given permission to slaver over George Galloway’s pop-eyed bullying of Michael Barrymore. Just hours later, we’re complicit in Davina McCall’s bullying of the evicted George Galloway. Pride comes before a fall, we cackle. She showed him. The feeling we get left with is one of power: Davina’s power, the power of the medium, but also our own reflected glory as the arbiters of these people’s fate.
It’s hard to feel too sorry for some of the victims. But what qualifies Davina McCall to teach them those harsh lessons on behalf of the public at large? And, if we suspect that even a few of the tears we’ve been treated to on screen are sincere, what are we doing getting such pleasure from watching?
Before we try too hard to justify ourselves, it’s worth looking at what Chelsea O’Mahoney’s judge Brian Barker - who was so repelled by the crime of the teenage bullies from Kennington that he lifted an order banning identification when he jailed them - said to them as he gave O’Mahoney and her friends eight years behind bars. “No one listening to this case could fail to have been affected by your selfishness and blindness to the suffering of others. You sought enjoyment from humiliation and pleasure from the infliction of pain.”
This - the pleasure from the infliction of pain - is the syndrome that will be familiar to all Big Brother watchers. Germaine Greer walked out of an earlier round of the programme after five and a half days “because I was being drawn into complicity with bullying, originally instigated by the production team, and slavishly followed by the housemates … I wasn't prepared to join in the persecution of any of these people, even if in retrospect I think they were callously indifferent to their own degradation.”
Then again, perhaps it’s as wrong to blame Big Brother as it is to blame George Galloway. Perhaps we should go straight for the jugular and turn on ourselves, the audience, egging producers and presenter on to ever worse excesses because we, like Romans at the forum, can’t wait for the lions to tuck in to their living dinner. When a Big Brother punter - I forget which – growled: “I’d like to smash your face in,” the ugly truth is that we would all have wanted him to go ahead, just for the fun of it. A culture in which cruelty is so openly celebrated is one in which future Chelsea O’Mahoneys may not see the dividing line between professionally made bully TV and their own home-made violence videos.
