Big Brother as a microcosm of society.
It's silly enough to attempt to extrapolate from problems in the capital what problems are affecting the country as a whole, so when you start to attempt to extrapolate from the inhabitants of one house, even if it is the Big Brother house, what's wrong with wider society you really ought to just quit while you're ahead.
Kudos have to go then to Alan Finlayson who having viewed the latest series of Big Brother (which up till now I've succeeded in not mentioning) has decided that we are a selfish society. To begin with you don't have to watch one of the most vicious and pernicious of television programmes to recognise that, but to state that the individuals who inhabit the Big Brother house are selfish is akin to describing Hitler as really rather nasty or John Inman as really rather camp. There are three main reasons why someone thinks that going on Big Brother is a good idea: one is to boost their own ego; second is to attempt to become famous; and the last is to try to win the prize money at the end and become loved by the public at large at the same time. All three of these things mean that at some point you're going to have to be extraordinarly selfish or guilty of avarice, otherwise you'll get voted out first, and the few individuals who are nice or normal tend to get booted out early on because they're considered boring. The first series was largely an experiment with mainly normal people, and although it started the phenomenon off, it couldn't just be that continously or people would stop watching. Instead it's turned into a microcosm of the celebrity world as a whole - noisy, unpleasant, garish, hypocritical and utterly vacuous. As a nation we may be selfish, but the vast majority of people, including the young that habitually get it in the neck are still polite, kind, intelligent and a joy to be around. Big Brother levels of alienation, hatred and threat have not become the default mode for society at large -- yet.
Kudos have to go then to Alan Finlayson who having viewed the latest series of Big Brother (which up till now I've succeeded in not mentioning) has decided that we are a selfish society. To begin with you don't have to watch one of the most vicious and pernicious of television programmes to recognise that, but to state that the individuals who inhabit the Big Brother house are selfish is akin to describing Hitler as really rather nasty or John Inman as really rather camp. There are three main reasons why someone thinks that going on Big Brother is a good idea: one is to boost their own ego; second is to attempt to become famous; and the last is to try to win the prize money at the end and become loved by the public at large at the same time. All three of these things mean that at some point you're going to have to be extraordinarly selfish or guilty of avarice, otherwise you'll get voted out first, and the few individuals who are nice or normal tend to get booted out early on because they're considered boring. The first series was largely an experiment with mainly normal people, and although it started the phenomenon off, it couldn't just be that continously or people would stop watching. Instead it's turned into a microcosm of the celebrity world as a whole - noisy, unpleasant, garish, hypocritical and utterly vacuous. As a nation we may be selfish, but the vast majority of people, including the young that habitually get it in the neck are still polite, kind, intelligent and a joy to be around. Big Brother levels of alienation, hatred and threat have not become the default mode for society at large -- yet.
Labels: Alan Finlayson, Big Brother, broken society bullshit, bullshit, celebrity culture, Comment is Free, greed, television
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