Leslie Brain: Dave makes me too angry to write about 'It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.'
G.K. Chesterton
I WAS going to write about DAVE today. A reasoned, fair account of his time in the house, what he had contributed, his strengths and his weaknesses as a housemate and WHY HE SHOULD GO. But I can't. You see he makes me too angry.
What was just irritating on opening night – the clownish monk's outfit and the false grin – quickly became a squirming embarrassment at his touchy feely relationship with Ben. While Mario is the one with the sexual innuendo, it is Dave who takes it all to a new level...a lower level. In an attempt to be fair I went to an appreciation thread on a forum just to check what his fans had to say. Now 'normally' these threads are a gathering place for the besotted where the beloved can do no wrong and is all-talented. The best Dave's mates could come up with is 'funny and harmless'. Not much of an accolade. Even if it were true, which it isn't.
Don't get me wrong. I believe in having a good laugh about religion, with it and at it. (Though the New Testament isn't a great source of side-splitting one-liners.) One of my favourite films is The Life of Brian and I can see the sense, if you have to be employed by someone, to chose an absentee boss. Where I have gone wrong is to look at what Dave does outside the house, something I usually avoid. For me a housemate is a housemate and not of much interest otherwise. But once you have seen the videos of Dave at work in his 'ministry', videos that he has had made and published and we must assume is happy with, then nothing will ever be the same again. A man dressed as a monk being wheeled about the streets offering 'Free blessings from a real monk' and 'healing prayers' IN THE NAME OF CHRITIANITY and laughing about it afterwards seems to me to be neither funny nor harmless.
Dave has said that he did not audition but was approached by BB on the basis of this work. Whether this was true or not – Dave appears to have a tenuous grasp of truth and The Truth - I wonder at their choice. Perhaps they believe that everyone, however deluded or dangerous, should be given a platform and that controversy within a reality show is a good thing. Perhaps they believe that the public will see through this man and his charade and he will hoist himself on his own petard. If only. What really happens is that instead of feeling shame or having some Damascan Road of self-realization all that attention will have served to feed his considerable ego and validate him as a performing artist.
While always sceptical about the extent of the machinations of BB, I concede that Dave has been the beneficiary of some really favourable editing for the highlights. Even so his 'banter and horseplay' has a muckiness about it that makes me want to wash my hands of him. Add to this more smugness than Peter Mandelson and you have one of The Most Distasteful Housemates of all time, a title for which there has been much competition over the years.
I don't believe he will be evicted this week since I believe in The BB Testament according to Briffa and I reckon it will be Jo. But in any case the harm is done. A bad choice, BB, a terrible choice, when you look into his smirking face and shake his clammy palm I hope you are proud of yourself.
'My attitude to transsexual clergy is that if a man becomes a woman or a woman becomes a man, if they are priest they remain a priest willy-nilly.'
Rt Revd Michael Scott-Joynt, The Bishop of Winchester
NOTW
