Gore Vidal once famously said that ‘Television is for appearing on, not watching.’ I feel the opposite. I’ve just turned down a financial offer from Celebrity Big Brother for this summer’s series so big it made my eyes water — and I’m not easily impressed, size-wise. Verbal people just don’t do well in such a visual medium — and speech is my second language, anyhow.
It would be easier to go in if I was guaranteed first eviction — but Liz Jones was stuck in there for weeks, and I’m a good deal more entertaining and lovable than she is. There’s a chance I would end up walking out, thus losing my fee. I would miss my husband, being alone (a textbook only child, I feel like murdering someone if can’t be by myself for six waking hours each day), and reading.
But O, I love Big Brother so! When, as part of their effort to bag me, CBB arranged for me to go into the house and call one of the housemates to the Diary Room, it was one of the most exciting vertical experiences of my life.
When I read about the recent study by Bonn University claiming that reality TV makes you nicer — or rather ‘reality TV formats with high vicarious embarrassment content activate brain regions associated with empathic concern and social identity’ — I wasn’t in the least surprised. In the halcyon hinterland of Big Brother, humility and honesty are rewarded by housemates and voting public alike, and snobbishness and sneakiness are punished. Bring me your gays, your transsexuals, your misfits and wallflowers, and Big Brother will dust them down and polish them up and make them Queen of the May, if just for a day.
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