Miriam Gross

Diary – 4 February 2006

Britain has again become a two-nation state - those who watched Big Brother and those who didn’t

The other day I went into the National Portrait Gallery gift shop to buy a postcard of George Orwell. There wasn’t one. I then looked for Anthony Powell. Again, no luck. V.S. Naipaul wasn’t there either. In the course of my search, however, I couldn’t help noticing that there were two versions of Helena Bonham-Carter and two of Michael Caine.

Britain has again become a two-nation state. It is divided between those who watched Big Brother and those who didn’t. But this split is not between the elite and the masses, or between the more and the less intellectual (some of my most intellectual friends watched), or between those with good taste and those without. The difference, it seems to me, is rather between the high-minded and the low-minded, between the squeamish and the unsqueamish. In any event, I belong to the wrong side of this divide. But I’d like to say a few things in defence of watching this horrible and uncivilised show. One is precisely that it illustrates so graphically the stages by which civilisation breaks down. As has often been claimed, if we all knew what other people, including our friends, said about us behind our backs, society would collapse. And that is precisely the process which the programme-makers set in motion for our entertainment. Another is that the spectacle of George Galloway gradually being driven to reveal his true character was utterly fascinating. At the start of the series he adopted a pose of avuncular, worldly bonhomie which was almost persuasive; by the end he had emerged as cunning, vindictive and mean. And lastly, I suddenly realised what this Big Brother series, with its humiliating confrontations and its shifts in power, so often reminded me of — a play by Harold Pinter.

One minor question which kept worrying me while watching Big Brother was: how does Dennis Rodman, the much-tattooed and much-pierced Don Juan of basketball, who claims to have ‘bedded’ thousands of women, manage to kiss them, or indeed hold them close? Apart from his spiky nose-studs, he has a ring through his lower lip and large studs on his nipples.

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