And then suddenly – finally – it was all over. All the pseudo-celebrity nonsense. All the anti-intellectualism. All the attention to pedicures, makeovers, hair extensions, waxing, Manolos, ugg boots, thong bikinis, colonic irrigations, pilates, flat screen televisions, stainless steel ovens, gazebos, water features, designer clothes, designer jewellery, designer bags, 4 x 4s, miniature dogs and massive barbeques. All these micro-choices of no importance had created a culture where how we looked was more important than what we thought.
But it has all gone now. One degrading and degraded woman in the midst of a reality television programme destroyed the pseudo-democracy that had been breeding through wikipedia, text messaging and bloggers. The acidic ugliness of racism exploded over our faces. We have valued, laughed at and validated the stupid, inane, dense, dumb and thick. Now we see the consequences of a life where bread and circuses television has held a greater profile than bread and butter decisions about social policy and military strategy.
There was karma to the crisis. Jade Goody, a single mother with little education and fewer career prospects, did not win Big Brother 3. She came fourth. On the basis of this ‘fame’ she made public appearances, went on the revolving door of chat shows, lost weight, didn’t tell anyone that it was through liposuction, released a workout DVD, put her name to a perfume and then – two years later – completed the cycle. During January 2007, Goody returned as a ‘celebrity’ to Celebrity Big Brother. It was the high water mark of reality television. A woman who was an ‘ordinary person’ before the programme had now become a celebrity in her own right. It seemed the conventional trash to treasure, zero to hero tale where a screened life was a successful life.
The problem was that the programme that made her also broke her. When paired in the House with Shilpa Shetty, a Bollywood actress, all the nodes of tension and decay in popular culture and public life were revealed. Jade Goody was part of a gang of three, including Danielle Lloyd, the (former) girlfriend of a footballer, and Jo O’Meara, the (former) member of S Club 7. Like the worst bullies from high school, the three Queen Bees strutted their ugly opinions without the restraints of evidence, knowledge or reasoned discourse. They were beyond bitchy. They were an embarrassment to their gender, their country and television. Effigies of Endemol executives, the producers of the programme, were burnt in India. The Carphone Warehouse withdrew its three million pound sponsorship. The Perfume Shop removed Shh…, Goody’s best-selling scent, from its shelves. Lloyd lost her modeling contract and her opportunity to be the face of Bennetts, a motorcycle insurance business. Her relationship with Teddy Sheringham seemed in shreds. Celebrity Big Brother – punctuated by racism – became the most complained about programme in television history. It was mentioned in the House of Commons. It summoned international protest and press coverage.
What did these women say and do to initiate such hostility? The following provides some of their lowlights.
January 12, 2007: Shetty bleaches her facial hair.
Lloyd: “Do you get stubble?”
Goody: “She wants to be white … She makes me feel sick. She makes my skin crawl.”
Lloyd: “She’s a dog.”
January 14, 2007 Shetty cooks food in the House.
Lloyd: “They eat with their hands in India. Or is that China? … You don’t know where those hands have been.”
Lloyd: “Me and Jo and Jade are really good friends – you’re just the cook.”
Lloyd: “Shilpa is a dog.”
January 16, 2007 Ordering Oxo cubes
Goody: “It’s not the only f***ing thing you ordered, you liar … You’re not some princess in f***ing Neverland … Go back to the slums and find out what real life is about, lady … You f***ing fake. You’re so far up your own arse you can smell your own shit.”
Shetty: “Oh please learn some manners. You need elocution lessons, Jade.”
Lloyd: “I think she should f*** off home.”
January 17, 2007 Conversation between Lloyd, O’Meara, Goody
Goody: “Shilpa Poppadom.”
Goody: “I look at her and I wanna headbutt her. I wanna wipe that smug look off her face.”
Lloyd: “She can’t even speak English properly.”
January 18, 2007 Goody talking with Shetty
Goody: “A lot of stuff got said … I didn’t say it in a racial way … I do not judge people by the colour of their skin.”
January 20, 2007 After eviction, watching a clip of herself
Goody: “I look like an utter nasty small person – the sort of person I don’t like. I am not a racist.”
January 21, 2007 In an interview with News of the World
Goody: “It was racist. I am a bully.”
It was political theatre at its most bombastic. But it was the response to these three women that captured – with jagged clarity – the xenophobic clashes after 9/11. They were racist. There is no doubt or questioning of this label. Goody, O’Meara and Lloyd saw a skin colour different from their own and made judgments about cleanliness, linguistic capacity and the value of a person. Yet it was the reaction to this racism from the encircling journalistic vultures that was so extraordinary. The women’s comments were used to confirm that working class people are intrinsically racist. In other words, this public racism was justified and explained through public class-based prejudice. Attacking racism through class is not the way to build social or political justice. Prejudice on the basis of race or class can not be ranked or balanced, with one being worse than the other.
To attack three women for being working class – and therefore racist – is as offensive as these same three women abusing an actress for being Indian. Matching intolerance with intolerance is not the way to enact social transformation or a consciousness that prejudice is unacceptable in public and popular cultural discourse.
The Age of Terrorism has mean that ‘we’ need to be very clear on who is one of ‘us’ and who must be excluded as a threat to ‘us.’ ‘Fundamentalists’ are the easy targets of terrorist campaigners. ‘They’ hate ‘the West,’ which is supposedly synonymous with freedom, democracy, progress and modernity. In this fantasy land of good and evil, any racism and prejudice instigated by ‘the West’ on ‘the East’ can hold no place. Any label, liable or law can be justified if it is part of winning the war against terrorism. That is why racism from the white working class fits the narrative of middle class politicians and educators. ‘They’ can be blamed for all the ‘unfortunate’ statements about ‘moderate Islam,’ while a war is fought against ‘fundamentalists’ without purpose or end.
The Chief Executive of Channel 4, Andy Duncan, hid behind the mantra that ‘discussion’ about volatile topics on television is always valuable: “The debate has been heated, the viewing has at times been uncomfortable but, in my view, it is unquestionably a good thing the programme has raised these issues and provoked such a debate.” Such a statement is like the manager of a losing team braying to the waiting journalist pack that “rugby was the winner today.” A debate initiated by narrow minded, self absorbed English women is not ‘a good thing.’ It is cheap television presenting inflammatory ideas without a context or framework.
Such a genre and platform is not the way to understand the relationship between Britain and India, the colonizer and the colonized. Instead, we require a careful grappling with history, geography and postcolonial theory. It is no coincidence that some of the most complex research in the media and cultural studies palette from scholars such as Gayatri Spivak, Etienne Balibar and Homi Bhabha was written in an attempt to grasp the tissues of connectiveness between past and present, domination and resistance, commerce and culture, empire and nation. In comparison, the theorization of class has been neglected since the high water mark in the 1970s from scholars like Paul Willis, Stuart Hall and John Clarke. This gulf in understanding leaves space for three working class women to represent all the ugliness, narrowness and banality of a little England, rather than a Great Britain. We deserve better than Endemol framing and feeding a debate on race.
This controversy over race is really a controversy about class. Michael Collins’s The Likes of Us is a pivotal book that deserves not only a wide audience but constant re-reading. He shows how the white working class has become the one group that can be abused without fear of legal or social retribution. These attacks are not only built on middle class snobbery but feed the hyper-consumerism and credit cards that blur the line between the haves and the have-nots. The battle is now between the haves and the have-mores or – more precisely – the wants and the wants-more. Therefore new markers of class are invented and fresh strategies to undermine working class consciousness and collectivity are constructed.
Alexander Chancellor presented this problem at its most evocative: “Is the Big Brother row really about race – or is it more to do with old-fashioned class hatred?” One answer to his question is to provide a context around the controversy, and recognize the consequences of placing fame on the shoulders of the freakishly inarticulate, inexperienced and ill-educated. Goody justified her reference to Shetty as “poppadom” by explaining that she wanted to use an Indian word, and this was the only one she knew. In other words, the fount of racism was a lack of reading and an attendant simplification of thinking.
Goody, O’Meara and Lloyd are all located outside of a clear class structure. They are a long way from the organized labour movements of the nineteenth century. Raised in Bermondsey London, Jade’s father had a lengthy criminal record. From such a family, gaining social mobility would always be difficult, but her route to fame and fortune was through reality television, therefore circumventing any challenges to her excessive emotions, malapropisms or intellectual flabbiness. Her aberrant behaviour created evocative sound bites and humour. For Endemol, there was no reason to circumscribe her anger or limit the exposure of her errors and inadequacies. Jo O’Meara grew up in Romford, became a singer in S Club 7 and then failed to develop a solo career. Big Brother was a chance for her to reclaim some connection with the word ‘celebrity.’ Danielle Lloyd was born in Liverpool and after leaving school studied as a beautician. She went on to become Miss Great Britain, but lost the title for supposedly having a relationship with one of the judges.
The similarity in these women’s stories is that they all used whatever media resources they had to be famous. Their path to this goal included reality television, popular music and a beauty contest. In class terms, they aimed for mobility without the struggles of formal education or the daily grind of conventional employment. They were grappling for fame. They were not aiming for integrity, credibility or sustainability. Their current difficulties could have been predicted. Fame is a fickle mistress. Early in his career, the writer and comic actor Ricky Gervais was probed about his attitudes towards popular cultural success.
“I was asked what advice I would give to anyone who wanted to become famous, and I said ‘Go out and kill a prostitute.’”
Goody, O’Meara and Lloyd have not followed Gervais’s advice. Instead, they have gone out and killed liberalism and civility. They were prepared to say the unsayable because they had a belief that all that matters is celebrity and opinion, not respect and analysis. Since her earlier Big Brother appearance, Goody was given the benefit of the doubt in the press. The Cinderella story is an appealing distraction during a time of war and environmental destruction. For example, just hours before the racism became blatant, The Observer columnist Kathryn Flett expressed her support for Goody.
“I can only suppose that the desperately unhappy child-woman Jade’s mum Jackiey, was voted out by the public on Wednesday to spare Jade any more misery because, you know, We Love Jade … Jade isn’t a moron any more – probably never was.”
This statement was published on the day Jade stated that Shilpa made her skin crawl and just prior to publicity cyclone encircling her behaviour. The ‘we’ who love Jade turned on her quickly. She did not have to kill a prostitute. She simply had to open her mouth.
Structural inequality creates institutional racism. Colonialism continues through consciousness. Our eyes are ideological organs. We do not see the truth, but view the world in a way that reinforces our social position. That is why the statements by Goody, O’Meara and Lloyd were so offensive. Their grasp on ‘fame’ was tenuous and fleeting. To cling to their ambiguous social position, it was necessary to not only see difference, but to mark and judge it as inferior. As Justin Huggler and Saeed Shah realized “what Goody et al are saying to these Indians is that no matter how rich and successful they become, they can still be called a ‘dog’ by a white person.” This prejudice perpetuates the injustice of colonial history but also the fear of losing a house of fame built on a deck of cards.
The problem is that – post-Thatcher, Major and Blair – there is no space to think about the relationship between the economy and identity. Fame and celebrity have become circuit breakers to a rational analysis of social structure and social mobility. To translate Marx for the Big Brother discourse, life does not determine consciousness any more than consciousness determines a life. Jade Goody, by making millions from selling an identity based on reality television ‘celebrity,’ has been granted a public profile and role that she could not manage. Goody possesses the unfortunate combination of a slow brain and a quick mouth. She spent the money earned through celebrity not on education, but on her body. When the time came for her to stand against racism and xenophobia, she merely recycled two centuries of assumptions about Britain and the colonies. In a violent re-emergence of Orwell’s Big Brother rather than the Endemol translation, her celebrity self was killed through surveillance.
When the intensity of the media event subsided, the ‘problems’ of racism and class-based differences initiated a discussion about British education. Alan Johnson, Secretary of State of Education, entered this examination.
“The current debate over Big Brother has highlighted the need to make sure our schools focus on the core British values of justice and tolerance. We want the world to be talking about the respect and understanding we give all cultures, not the ignorance and bigotry shown on our TV screens … We must teach children about our shared British heritage while fostering an understanding of our cultural diversity and the uniqueness of our individual identity.”
Alan Johnson is wrong in his curricula advice to teachers, parents and students. Actually, the last lesson that is needed at the moment is a celebration of ‘British values.’ The forgetfulness of British colonization and recognizing the consequences of imposing law, language, religion and military power on the Middle East, Africa and the Asian and Pacific region through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has forged the current attitudes of superiority.
Whereas once British military power ruled the colonies, now ‘core values’ rule the political landscape. Only a deep unawareness of how British colonization effected indigenous peoples could trigger such a statement from Johnson. Instead of abusing India and Indians, a clear-headed recognition of the changing nature of international capitalism is required. India is second only to the United States as the biggest investor in London. The Empire is buying back.
We need much less talk about British values and much more discussion of human rights. We need much less celebration of ‘British heritage’ and much more critical interpretation of British history. For those of us who teach for a living, the culture of blame, retribution, ignorance and fear built since September 11 has been visible in our classroom for some time. Celebrity Big Brother simply screened this vision of the future. Trevor Phillips, chair of the Commission for Equality and Human Rights, stated that, “What we are seeing is a noxious brew of old-fashioned class conflict, straightforward bullying, ignorance and quite vicious racial bigotry.” While the diagnosis of what we have seen is correct and necessary, it is even more important to find a positive path to the future. We need to let a woman who was born on Big Brother to die on Big Brother. For the rest of us, her fame must be a warning to demand more from our popular culture.
While popular culture has been implicated in the bigotry, narrowness and meanness, it is also part of the solution. Racism has spilled out of television screens in the past, but the circulation of the comments through 24-hour news channels, newspapers, magazines, web fora and YouTube clips fed the fire. It does not have to be this way. Instead of blaming television, the goal for politicians, educators and citizens must be to develop a literacy and movement to create better television. The main problem is not racism or class-based oppression. Instead, women and men with few ideas and less vocabulary to express them have been granted a televisual space to express their limitations through ephemeral fame.
So much money has been spent on war, home improvement and breast implants. So little has been spent on education. It is no surprise that Goody, O’Meara and Lloyd are ignorant. Even The Sun termed Goody “the dim reaper” and a “halfwit.” Their inability to understand the life experience of others resulted in petty jealousies, unsubstantiated rage, tacky conversations about sex and endless fascinations with nail polish, burping and farting. Being working class did not cause these problems. Not being given the opportunity to read and think about a world beyond their small lives is the fount of discrimination.
Celebrity Big Brother is a destructive fracture – but also an important opportunity – to transform popular culture and to reassess our cultural assumptions, biases and prejudices since September 11. Anti-intellectualism has presented a bill. Emma Cox, from the nest of The Sun, realized that even she had mis-read the cultural landscape. She stated, “All those years I defended Jade to pseudo-intellectuals – saying, I admired her honesty and realness. I regret every second after last night’s performance.” The hope is that this media event is a lesson to journalists and all of us interested in promoting a thoughtful popular culture. Being ‘honest’ is a destructive force when it corrodes the matrix of modernity, civility and respect that is necessary to operate a working democracy.