Don't know if our American cousins will have caught this.

The recent series of the UK version of the TV show 'Big Brother' (which i believe also gets inflicted on Americans) has stirred up a storm of controversy, and i'm sort of at a loss to know why.  Being the anti-social iconoclast that i am, i have no TV, so i've been following this frenzy in newspapers and the lunch-time discussions of my work colleagues.  Incidentally, can anyone think of anything much more stupid that the western world has created than one form of media reporting on what is happening on another form of media?

Anyway.

This is a 'celebrity' Big Brother series, which as far as i can see is a euphemism for people you had never heard of, but who once appeared on TV, or at least slept with someone or are related to someone who did.  Michael Jackson's brother is on it.  Wow.  Also appearing is a woman called Jade Goody, who became famous for being almost unbelievably stupid and ignorant on one of the non-'celebrity' Big Borther series', and who the media have adopted as being in some way lovable and cute in her terminal denseness.  Bizarrely, she's pretty much the most famous person in the program in the UK, or was (but i'm getting to that).

Also in the house is/was an Indian Bollywood star, who i'd never heard of before called Shilpa Shetty - very attractive lady from her picture.  It is unlikely that the producers didn't forsee conflict between this high-caste well-spoken (by all accounts) woman and the likes of Jade, who has made a virtue out of being ignorant and crass.  As it turns out, there's a couple more like her (Jade) in the house, so of course they've ganged up on Shilpa with some borderline racial abuse and bullying which has been widely greeted by the press with hands thrown up in horror.  Obviously, no one saw this coming.

Jade got evicted fairly early, unsurprisingly, to be met by a barrage of focussed hatred from the media far more brutal than what she was accused of.  i just read that she's checked into some sort of therapy-retreat place to escape it and deal with her resultant depression.  Her overnight (from her point of view) transformation from the icon of lovable goofs everywhere to an internationally reviled race-hate figure must have come as a bit of a shock.  Apparently they've been burning efigies of her in India, which is about the same level of intelligent debate as has been had in most British newspapers.

Shilpa, of course, has won the event, and emerged from the house with her previously non-existent UK fame unshakably established.

i realise at this stage of the post that i have no particular point to make, plus i really need to get on with tidying my flat, but i thought i'd see whether any of this 'news' had reached the US.

it's weird.