So, Celebrity Big Brother. I know it’s about as low-rent as a pair of crotchless knickers, but it was also the sole topic of conversation everywhere I went last week. The format has always had an uncomfortable “Let’s go to Bedlam to laugh at the loonies” side, but in previous years this has (sometimes) been tempered with the more palatable business of seeing “celebrities” being “ordinary”, where “ordinary” means “completely boring”. It also works as a telling, if disturbing, insight into the minds of the voting public, given that, some years, more young people vote in Big Brother than in the general election.
Last year the voters handed victory to Bez, a man so frazzled by his vast consumption of drugs and alcohol that he gave the impression of having sustained moderate to severe brain damage. The public loved him. This year they greeted Michael Barrymore with rapture.
Barrymore is the former “family” entertainer whose fame ended in 2001 when a young man called Stuart Lubbock was found dead in Barrymore’s swimming pool. Who is the public that loves this man? I don’t think I know a single member of it. But part of CBB’s addictive charm is that you even get a bit of anthropology thrown in.
In case you’ve been away for the past week or so, the 2006 intake consist of one non-celebrity called Chantelle (who bears a downmarket resemblance to the heiress Paris Hilton, and whose friends thus call her Paris Travelodge); the priapic former American basketball superstar Dennis Rodman, who is 6ft 8in and whose fondness for slipping on a frock and heels has sadly not been apparent thus far; Pete Burns, the cosmetically altered singer from Dead or Alive, who does that uniquely British and rather fabulous thing of appearing extraordinarily effeminate while simultaneously having the ultra-butch, vicious, filthy mouth and demeanour of a navvy; the actress Rula Lenska; some woman called Traci, who used to be on Baywatch and smiles a lot; a pretty boy called Preston, who sings in a band; Barrymore; the glamour model Jodie Marsh, a sort of poor man’s Jordan; Faria Alam, who slept with Sven-Goran Eriksson and with the Football Association’s former chief exec, Mark Palios, in close succession; a blokey bloke called Maggot, member of the Welsh band Goldie Lookin’ Chain; and “Gorgeous” (ahem) George Galloway MP.
The most disturbing moment of the show so far was the sight of Galloway pretending to be a cat while Lenska fed him pretend milk and stroked behind his ears. It was like watching two people playing a particularly sinister sex game.
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You might well say so far so grotesque, and you wouldn’t be wrong. But there are several reasons why this show has become even more compelling viewing than its predecessors. Big Brother’s inmates elaborately demonstrate each evening what it might be like to be richer of pocket, poorer of mind and more desperate of heart than oneself. Whatever doubts one might have about one’s circs, at least it helps not to have surgically bloated disaster-lips or a history of being associated with a mysterious death.
This — the schadenfreude effect — has now become a standard feature of popular television in Britain: we watch celebrity programmes to learn how infinitely better it is to be ourselves. CBB is a close relative of the Victorian freak show, where people handed over their ha’pennies to jeer at a bearded lady. But this year’s CBB intake also have levels of mental, emotional or social disturbance that teach us something about how not to live, and put it in the same category as the best soap operas.
Television makers seem to think that we like programmes that show us how to live better, but they’re wrong: what we really love are programmes about real people in freefall. Like the characters in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, all of CBB’s inmates have a demon by their side, and the demons are dazzling and horrifying in their variety.
Barrymore jibbers with self-pity and mumbles incoherently when his medication kicks in (either that, or he develops a speech impediment at various times of day), but neither of these things stops him from bullying the unfortunate Marsh while claiming to be helping her.
He is joined by Burns, who is cleverer, and therefore nastier — though to his credit, Burns doesn’t claim to have Marsh’s welfare at heart: he’s just hideously bitchy. Burns’s other demon is overwhelming, all-devouring vanity.
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Marsh, poor girl, has demons hanging from every part of her: she is blind to herself, completely insecure and thus completely aggressive, and as self-pitying as Barrymore (she complains endlessly that the public see her as a “slag” and a “slapper”, then flashes her breasts, suggests orgies, talks about how she likes female lovers “young and sweet” and wears a T-shirt that rates her lovers out of 10).
Rodman is sinisterly macho and predatory, and makes me feel uncomfortable. Lenska is desperate. Galloway is a buffoon, puffed-up with self-importance and unaware of the hilariously ridiculous figure he cuts. Alam, while being feisty, is in denial about the wisdom or otherwise of sleeping with your bosses and then selling your story: in her parallel universe this is perfectly acceptable. Why, then, bang on about it 24 hours a day?
Chantelle, the 22-year-old non-celeb, seems to be a sweet girl — not the sharpest pencil in the box but not mean or deranged either, which means she has a good chance of winning the contest — though if I were her mother I’d be worried about my child hanging out with such a bunch of nutters.
And so it goes on, an addictive combination of What Not To Wear, What Not To Say, How Not To Be and How Not To Think, to say nothing of How Never To Behave. And then, of course, there’s the celebrity factor, and its version of the nature v nurture debate: should one object to, say, Barrymore because he’s a sleazeball or feel sorry for him because he is the victim of his own strange narcissism and the celebrity industry?
That’s what this show most demonstrates: that celebrities always have a way out, because they’re celebs, and therefore nothing is their fault. It’s “the industry” that’s made them as they are, never their own rotten hearts.
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Depressingly enough, a YouGov poll published last week found that one in six teenagers believes they will find success through celebrity. More than one in 10 would leave education or training to be on television. Oh dear. They’re not watching Celebrity Big Brother nearly closely enough.