I ALWAYS feel
increasingly fondly towards the Big Brother
inmates as the show progresses and the chips are down,
and it’s peaking right now. At the risk of being
pretentious, they seem to me to exemplify the silliness
and splendour, the toughness and the tenderness of
humankind in general — stripped down to a bikini, put in
a hot tub and left to stew for ten weeks.
This feeling is even more pronounced this time, as in
the outside world Islamofascism attacks the very concept
of life itself — “You choose life, we choose death”, as
one of their transparently kinky websites had it.
The difference between our
sweet, silly kids — be young, be foolish but be happy! —
and joyless Islamofascist youth is even more resonant
when you realise that Kemal, the gay 19-year-old with
Muslim immigrant parents would very likely be dead by
now if he lived in a Muslim country. In Iran, for
instance, since 1979 when the mullahs came to power,
some 4,000 gay men and women have been among the 100,000
Iranians murdered by the Iranian state under Sharia law.
So I shall continue to follow the fortunes of the
born-free BB babies with a righteous heart; they are,
after all, merely the deserving recipients of a gap year
for those not (un)lucky enough to have trust funds, and
as such are my people. And I will continue to
dread the day when TV bosses finally carry out their
threats to replace my beloved reality TV with “quality
drama”, as Nigel Pickard of ITV has said. And what
riches await us in this new reality-free world? Oooo —
Caroline Quentin being decent (yet complex) and Robert
Lindsay being complex (yet decent), there’s original —
be still, my beating heart!
The dirty little secret here, of course, is that all
TV is reality TV — the difference being that when we
watch “quality drama” we are watching the tragic reality
of an actor’s life, as portrayed in Ricky Gervais’s
brilliant new show Extras (now there is a man I
would switch over from Big Brother for). And that
tragedy is that he or she is a grown adult who is still
mentally at the level of a child burrowing in a
dressing-up box, one who is paid a small fortune for
speaking other people’s words and whose greatest
performance will be believing his own publicity,
dreaming that he knows the meaning of hard work and
honestly thinking that the world takes seriously his
opinions on politics, poverty and which way the port
should be passed. Bless.
You worry for them really, actors — vulnerable
victims of the fame machine, prancing for our amusement,
frittering away their lives when they could be doing
Something Useful. Oooo — just like actors accuse reality
TV stars of being/doing. The difference is that when the
summer ends, the BB kids will come out into the real
world. But the people who bring us “quality drama” are
truly the lost boys and girls of our age — they will
live and die in lala land .
Law against legendary lovers
WE THINK “golden couples” are having great sex. They
live up to our fantasies and expectations, we’ll forgive
them anything. Look at Brangelina, as Brad and Angelina
deserve to be known. She steals people’s husbands, he
lies himself blue in the face, breaks Jen’s heart and
catches meningitis. But because the sex between them is
so hot — in one hotel they stayed in the staff were
reduced to banging on their suite door, believing that a
wild animal was being killed — we’re prepared to forgive
them anything.
But celebs beware. It’s all bless-you-my-children
when they’re living up to our dirty dreams, but should
they trample on those dreams and make us suspect they’re
faking it, then our pleasure in their pain goes into
overdrive. The cynicism and mockery directed at Tom
Cruise’s romance with Katie Holmes stems greatly from
the fact that we never really believed he was having hot
sex with Nicole Kidman (exhibit one, their movie Eyes
Wide Shut) and now we feel he’s trying to pull the
wool over our eyes once again. If he can reach that
high. It doesn’t help that Kidman has joined in as chief
gloom-leader for Team Cruise; “Part of me shut down,”
she told Glamour of her married years.
Over in W magazine, when Katie is asked how
she feels about Tom, her Scientologist chaperone answers
for her: “You adore him.” Cruise may be the one
currently giggling like a fiend on talk shows all across
Christendom, but I think we’re pretty sure who’s going
to get the last laugh here: the paying punter.
And now Jude and Sienna have fallen at that most
straightforward yet strangely treacherous of jumps,
Nanny’s Nook. “We feel totally betrayed,” said Sienna’s
mother, Josephine, this week — what about us, Mrs
Miller? There we all were in Fanland, imagining that
these two glorious creatures were Having It like no one
had Had It since Troilus and Cressida — and it turns out
to be such an everyday nasty that old Jude’ll jeopardise
it for someone smelling of baby-sick. That’s not the
sort of legendary lovers we want.
But what do the golden people want, you have to
wonder. Something more ordinary, obviously, in Mr Law’s
case, something not rich or famous or remotely golden.
There’s a question; if fans fantasise about the famous,
do the famous ever fantasise about their fans? And I
don’t mean anything as acceptable as a pleasing,
individual face in the crowd, either — just a big,
adoring, many-mawed monster, baying for their famous
flesh. Wouldn’t it be just divine if — behind all their
talk of being a Very Private Person and hating the
attention — that was the ultimate fantasy, the ultimate
dirty little secret of the
famous?
