Stuart Jeffries: Big Brother Bullies Little Sister

It's hard, isn't it, to feel sympathy for the exhibitionists currently living in the Big Brother house? True, they may not have known that the place was going to be divided into rich and poor zones, with those confined to the latter forced to subsist on a grisly diet, while those in the former lorded it in an insufferably la-di-da style. But that's not a plight that should concern us unduly. Nor should we be bothered that one of them, Tim, furtively shaves his chest in bed in the misplaced hope that the cameras won't capture his dogged struggle against exposing himself as naturally ginger.

Their spartan suffering is justified and their humiliation by snoop camera poignant, one might think, particularly when so many evicted housemates go on to maintain their worthless celebrity when they take up fatuous if short-lived TV contracts.

This at least is what I thought. Worse, having watched the latest series develop, I came to hate one contestant virulently and hoped she got a quick and painful comeuppance. Jade, after all, was an intolerable loudmouth, a moron who thought that Sherlock Holmes was alive and related to Mother Teresa, and that East Anglia was near Tunisia. She got drunk and swore at her housemates, bad-mouthed them incessantly behind their backs (but in front of a huge TV audience), and kept her more charming points securely hidden.

That was until I read message boards on unofficial Big Brother websites in which threats to kill Jade from furious, hate-filled contributors would appear briefly. She was routinely, on account of her appearance, called Miss Piggy. I learned that a girl had been bullied at school because of her resemblance to Jade. Then I started taking the tabloids, a bad idea if you want to opt out from British hysteria. Typical was the Sunday People which yelled: "Ditch the Witch! Gobby Jade is public enemy No 1".

Then on Monday the 21-year-old from Bermondsey was nominated by her fellow housemates to be evicted from the house. This prompted Dominic Mohan of the Sun to write an article under the headline: Vote out the pig, which included this piece of reasoning: "Jade is one of the most hated women on British TV and life will be hard for her when she leaves the house. But don't feel sorry for her. It is better that she leaves now - she'll only make things worse for herself." By this evening, when the phone lines for viewers to vote out the nominated candidates are closed, Jade could be out on the streets and into an unprecedented maelstrom of British public hatred mercilessly whipped up by the tabloids.

What a shameful man Mohan is. If Jade's life is going to be hard when she leaves the house, it is in substantial part because people like him have ensured that will be so. A few pages earlier, the Sun published another article under the headline: My Jade will be lynched, in which the Big Brother contestant's mother said she was afraid her daughter would be attacked by the viewers who gather at the house on eviction nights.

It's not just the tabloids who are to blame for creating this understandable fear. Also responsible are the show's producers who, by means of contemptible editing, have helped make a flawed and evidently vulnerable young woman into a hate figure. But, unlike the Sun's showbiz correspondent, they at least have some liberal compunction about this and are offering Jade hired muscle and a phalanx of shrinks to help her through her looming eviction ordeal as well as her difficult adjustment back to life on the outside.

Such compunction is hypocritical. Channel 4, which thanks to the 25p-a-minute eviction phone lines and costly "news updates" which misguided people can have texted to their mobile phones, is making money out of this hate.

Since its inception, the show has been an unpopularity contest in which the most detested are the most compelling. Channel 4 needs its Jades and Nasty Nicks to keep the revenue coming in; it must ensure its theatre of cruelty is supplied with novelty to keep its jaded (sorry) voyeurs titillated.

As a result, Jade has been served up as Ms Detestable. Brash, graceless and ignorant, she's all the things that middle England hates and fears from inner-city working-class Britain. Mohan claims Jade is a "damning indictment of the British school system", which even if true does not require her to be punished further. It's crucial that she's a woman, too: women are all-too-readily cast as backstabbing bitches, and it has proved easier to condemn Jade for having surreptitious sex in the house than her willing partner, PJ, who shabbily told housemates he was too drunk to remember what he and she had done under the covers (what a guy thing to say).

A common, lascivious, attention-seeking bird what don't know nuffink? Why, hand me the phone, I'll vote her out immediately. That is how viewers are being encouraged to think about Jade. Much harder to have sympathy for a woman who, all but unwittingly, is being prepared for the most horrible time of her life.

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