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March 12, 2005
SOME RESIDENTS of the village of Harby in Leicestershire believe that a new BBC reality television show which will see most of the village’s women removed for a week and the men left to get on with life in a male-only environment is likely to cheapen and humiliate the village. I can’t see it, myself. That’s like saying that I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! in some way cheapened jungles, or that Big Brother humiliated prefabricated houses.
For it is not locations or cultures that are cheapened by reality television, but people. And then only if they choose to cheapen themselves. I believe that The Week The Women Left represents an opportunity for the people of Harby, who have until now been of no real use to the wider human project and would otherwise have been entirely forgotten by history, to make themselves briefly useful by taking part in an exercise of enormous social value.
“I don’t think this kind of tat is what the BBC should be spending licencepayers’ money on,” a villager, Paul Marshall,told reporters this week. “Just last week they were attacked for not showing enough public service broadcasting, and now they are spending money on this kind of rubbish. I have seen this kind of TV and nobody comes out of it looking good.”
Whereas Paul Marshall comes out of his decision to boycott the programme looking, what? Open-minded? Grown up? Or like a small-minded English bumpkin who doesn’t know who is going to cook his tea if his wife is lording it up in a hotel somewhere, getting drunk with her friends on BBC expenses and flirting with the film crew?
Come on, this is marvellous. This is exactly what the BBC should be doing with our licence fee: constructing small-scale eugenics laboratories in the middle of nowhere and playing mind-games with dispensable Midland grockles for the long-term benefit of human society.
[url=http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,10653-1521455,00.html]Rest of the Article[/url=
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