His Bigness
 A Shetty situation

Fasi Zaka
 
England has some of the most intelligent and fascinating television in the world. Their documentaries are incisive and the humour programming wittily irreverent.

It is also a pioneer in the realm of reality television, and the most popular programme in that genre has to be Big Brother on Channel 4.

On paper, Big Brother's concept is hard to describe because it sounds like something which could put an insomniac to sleep. The show puts people from different backgrounds and with different personalities in a house, cuts them off from all outside contact from the world and films them for several months.

Their every move is recorded, cameras are everywhere. For food and some
amenities they have to play games that a recorded voice commands them to (hence the unseen "Big Brother"). Every week someone is evicted from the Big Brother house by a voting public from the net or sms, and in the early weeks the guests have to nominate one another for eviction.
 
 

Did I mention it goes on for months?

That's the appeal of the show. It is voyeurism at its best: people are pitted against one another, all of them trying to win sympathy from the public when the votes are opened to the audience to decide who goes and who stays.

The participants of Big Brother begin to feel claustrophobic, people irritate one another, develop romances and get into arguments. That's why people enjoy it. It is unscripted and you see a true reflection of how ordinary people really, with the exception that it is coming on television. Of course, it also answers the one question almost everyone has: What do other people behave like when they are at home?

The other version of the programme is Celebrity Big Brother where they do the same, except with celebrities instead of the usual people auditioned off the street.

That's the programme which recently had the whole subcontinent up in arms. Shilpa Shetty was a participant, and one of the housemates (contestants) Jade Goody kept going at her in a way most people believed to be guided by racist motives.

Now Jade Goody was in the original series. She became a celebrity because of her extreme stupidity (some would say naivete) in that season. Of course, since she was often lampooned for being like a pig by Graham Norton just added to the buzz of her talk value.

 
In the meanwhile between her original appearance and her current one, she has made millions as a celebrity who was famous, well for... being famous. With no real natural talent a lot of the other contestants of Big Brother participate to become known faces for no other significant achievement than being on television for a couple of hours a day.

Sex is another factor. In a drunken stupor (or not in some cases) the contestants tend to strip off and make out, though no one has actually yet had actual sex on the UK version (in other countries it has happened).

Jade Goody is just an ill educated Brit. Her aggression to Shilpa was thought to be based on a dislike for the brown man. While it
is true that Jade made comments which were racist, it doesn't exactly make her one.

Shilpa is a woman of privilege in India, someone with more access to education than Jade Goody has ever had. The tension was based on class differences, which quite frankly are still rife in Britain.

Goody's behavior did reflect the long standing aggression towards sub-continental immigrants in the UK, but it is the only defense of a British underclass whose only defense against the over achievement of some of the Diaspora (not making it right though) is a racial jibe.

What has come out of the situation is a huge boost for Shilpa's career (which was always mediocre), and an end to Jade Goody's (who was also bullied for being ugly in her first appearance on the show). It's made the British public aware that racism still exists.

But what it hasn't really done is bring attention to the countless scores of the underachieving British working class whose education system has failed to keep them in school and learn meaningful skills.
Shilpa Shetty was a victim, but so is Jade Goody of a system that has taken away public services from the underprivileged. She may not deserve forgiveness, but people like her deserve sympathy.