Reality show?

Racial slurs targeted at famous Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty on the popular Channel 4 television show in Britain, Celebrity Big Brother, have been around the world and back and the issue has since taken on international proportions. According to reports India’s Junior Foreign Minister, Anand Sharma; British Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown and British Prime Minister Tony Blair are among the heavyweights who have weighed in to condemn the remarks. As fate would have it, Brown was in India when the story broke and the media gave more prominence to his condemnation than his speech on globalization and economic issues in Bangalore.

Thousands of viewers of the show, which is aired nightly, have denounced the statements, as well as millions of Shetty’s fans in India and around the world. Over 20,000 viewers of the show were said to have bombarded Channel 4, British television regulator Ofcom and sponsors of the show with complaints. According to MSN, the complaints arose after three of Shetty’s female British housemates constantly called her “the Indian”; asked whether she lived “in a house or a shack”; and advised her to “go back to the slums”. She was also derided for her background and her cooking. The Big Brother shows involve strangers sharing a house and constantly on camera. It is really a competition between the housemates as they are given various tasks to complete by ‘Big Brother’ an unseen character and one is evicted each week. The last person remaining wins.

While the ‘Celebrity’ version of the show has always been somewhat popular as reality shows go, the number of viewers tended to depend on which celebrities it was able to attract each season. However, MSN reported that after the racism claims which came to the fore on the show on Tuesday, about one million more viewers tuned in on Wednesday to see what would happen next.

On Wednesday, the television station denied that the India-born star had suffered racial abuse. By Thursday, with a police investigation launched; a major sponsor threatening to pull the plug; one of Shetty’s tormentors, a former Miss England, losing a lucrative modelling contract; and calls for the show to be taken off the air all as a result of the issue, it changed its tactics.

Defending its decision to keep the show on the air, Channel 4 said that while the issue raised was an uncomfortable one, it had provoked a debate and shown that certain attitudes, while distasteful, persisted. Honest words indeed. Politically correct to the core, both Blair and Brown have made speeches about Britain espousing fairness and tolerance, but controversial British feminist writer Germaine Greer disagreed, insisting that Britain “is a racist country”.

It is well known that there is intolerance in practically every society in the world in some form or other. For inasmuch as there are laws against it in some places, individuals and sometimes groups can be found discriminating against each other on the basis of race, gender, health, social and financial status, religion and sexual orientation. It stands to reason therefore that if one is doing a reality show these issues will emerge once people let their guards down. And it is difficult for an inherently intolerant person to be on his/her best behaviour 24 hours a day, even when s/he knows that s/he is in the public view or not. In fact, sociologists agree that some bigots have so convinced themselves that they are right and that others will agree with them that they have no qualms about publicly displaying their intolerance and are genuinely shocked when others disapprove.

That said, it should be noted that of the tons of the footage filmed in the Big Brother house, only excerpts can actually be shown. Therefore one has to consider if those in authority made the best decision in leaving those segments in. In the dog-eat-dog world of western television where ratings determine whether a show sees the light of day at the end of its season, it is obvious that such a controversial issue would have served Big Brother and Channel 4 well and some shrewd executive must have observed this. However, if the only intention was simply to show the reality of what really plays out in the house, then leaving it in was the correct decision.

By the time this editorial is published the issue may well no longer be in the news since one of the women has already been evicted-not over this issue-and Shetty herself and another of the women are now up for eviction.

Ever on the ball, British bookies have now named Shetty a favourite to win the series, at odds of 6/4, indicating that as a result of the controversy she has the “public sympathy” vote.