Britain's got to get out more

As a long-term critic of reality TV, I posted the above (miserablist?) line as a Facebook status update yesterday evening. It provoked a few responses from people who really should be going out on Saturday nights, including a school mate of Stavros Flatley.

Note how I didn't name this post "lancing the Boyle", or something similar. Roll on Big Brother.

It's not OK

In the past 15 seasons of ER, one of the "money shot" moments was when a patient expired after unsuccessful surgery, not long after the line "crack open his chest" was uttered. A cast member then got to call the time of death.

ER drawing to a close does not mean the end of such scenes, however. Jumping into the ER-shaped void nice and early with such a final diagnosis is OK magazine, running a Jade Goody tribute special that assumed, at the time of writing, she would have pegged it by now. This seems like the logical consequence of having her mass media celebrity deathwatch of the last few months unfolding in real time.

At least wait until the body is cold, OK?

Jaded opinions

Celebrity Big Brother 5 might be closing, but the row over race carries on. I've chipped in my two penn'th for BBC local radio, so I won't repeat myself here. Except to say that if Britain was as racist as some commentators make out - based on projecting "Jade Baddy's" mindset onto everyone else - then Shilpa Shetty would have been voted off the show by now.

Part of Goody's problem is that she is seen as white trash, therefore a legitimate target. The sentiments that fuel the bashing of 'rough estates' get personalised in the name of anti-racism. (For a snapshot of this more general snobbery, see Paul Barker, 'Homes for heroes, or designs for despair?' [r. Lynsey Hanley, Estates: an intimate history], Independent Art & Books Review, 12 January 2007, p.22.) The transformation of official anti-racism into elite etiquette is pretty breathtaking.

That's not to say that this is the first time such ideas have been chopped and changed in line with other priorities. Right now I'm reading Popular Eugenics, edited by Susan Currell and Christina Cogdell, which shows how support for eugenics flourished and crumbled at the same time. Ideology is of necessity flexible if it is to be effective.