Well, clearly I stand corrected about Big Brother, and how! It's currently reigning supreme as lead story on BBC News. Of all the interesting things happening in the world, the cultural compass of the UK has decided that Big Brother is the most significant. The moment I give up watching, and suddenly there are early day motions in the commons, riots in India (including burning effigies of the programme makers!), Newsnight is at the ready with a feature (probably too far down the bill to feature on scottish newsnight, annoyingly) and David Cameron (the man is always primed with a soundbite) is urging people to use that 'great regulator called the off button', and switch off.
The problem is that rascism is very hard to define. In parts of rural Dorset, for instance, people from non anglo-saxon backgrounds might be subject to polite curiosity, which doesn't count. Still, I'm happy with the broadest line of rascism as using someone's ethnicity as a vehicle to treat them unkindly or unfairly. Is that different from bullying? I think bullying could be defined using any characteristic about a person as said vehicle, so perhaps rascism is a subset of bullying.
If that is the case then Big Brother, (although alleged in previous years to have deliberately create an atmosphere of bullying in the house), is actually providing a public service by provoking some much needed public soul searching about the definition of bullying, rascism and solutions thereof. So David, I shall not be switching off, but tuning in, to see for myself exactly what form this rascism takes and how it is resolved. I suspect many other people will do likewise. And it's now a foregone conclusion that Shilpa will win, which is good news as I wanted this to happen from the first day, but neglected to place a bet on it.
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