The whole world loves a dummy

I am not a fan of reality television. Even back in the days when Big Brother was supposed to be "good", I really couldn`t find anything compelling in watching a bunch of boring people doing absolutely nothing at all. These aren`t the kind of people I would normally spend time with, they have no contact with the outside world and they`re hanging out together in a tacky house with their only pastimes being playing the kinds of games that keep five-year-olds entertained.

Watching a houseful of boring people getting along is far less interesting than watching them go for each other`s necks.

Georgina Guedes, journalist, ITWeb

My first introduction to this phenomenon was in England at the end of 2000. Visiting all my itinerant friends for only two short weeks, I was determined to enjoy everything the combination of good company and a cultured city had to offer. My friends rose to the occasion spectacularly, with the exception of my second night at their house, when I was "shushed" into submission while they all crowded around the television to watch the Big Brother Reunion.

It was explained to me during the commercial breaks that the previous summer, the UK had lost massive income due to the fact that Londoners stayed in watching their televisions, rather than venturing out to enjoy the short-lived balmy weather. Central to their fervour was the character Nasty Nick, so hated by UK television watchers that he was taken to a place of safety after eviction, in fear for his life.

A lot of people raised the question of why, if he was so hated, did the ratings soar with each of Nick`s despicable actions? And the answer is that people love to watch disasters. We slow down on the highway and crane our necks at the scenes of accidents. Watching a houseful of boring people getting along is far less interesting than watching them go for each other`s necks. Perhaps, deep down, we are nursing the hope that they`ll bump each other off.

While the first season brought the UK a national hatred, a subsequent season (I`ve lost track of which) brought them the phenomenon that was Jade Goody. While, in SA, we have a tendency to vote off any people who have enough personality to make for moderately appealing viewing, the English have enough personal insight to know that their hatred is compelling. Every time it seemed that Ms Goody might get voted off, the masses swarmed to their telephones to ensure she stayed in place.

This was of significance to me, here in SA, for the simple reason that the daily UK online news services were infiltrated with anti-Jade rhetoric. Even the newspapers hated her for the simple reason that she was spectacularly stupid. And her stupidity seemed to give them the justification to attack her on just about every front. Her broad-faced, blonde looks encouraged a nation to attempt to capture a freeze-frame moment of her looking as porcine as possible. These images then accompanied headlines like "Vote out the Pig".

Her stupidity, borne out by comments like "East Angular [sic]? Isn`t that somewhere abroad, like Tunisia?", didn`t win her any friends, but the outright dislike of a nation came when she tried to play the Big Brother game in a ham-handed and manipulative way. This time, the fears of threats to her well-being after eviction weren`t from the general populace, but from a genuine concern that she might take her own life upon discovering that she had become public enemy number one. Fortunately, she proved to have a thicker skin than that, and after having gone for autograph lessons because she had never been too good at writing her own name, she is now happily married with a small baby.

More recently, another programme that I`ve never seen that is taking up a little more of my bandwidth than I would like is Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica. Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson are two recently married, B-grade celebrities in the States. They have invited a television crew into their house to document the start of their life together. The show has been so successful it has gone into a second season, and ratings are showing no signs of abating. The international news Web sites I visit are cluttered with Newlyweds anecdotes.

Jessica, it seems, is another magnificent bimbo. Her moments of glory, like commentary about whether tinned tuna, purporting to be "the chicken of the sea" was in fact chicken, are enshrined forever on our airwaves. At least the Americans haven`t been moved to hatred of this ditz, partially, I suspect, because she`s rather pretty. Instead, they seem to regard her with a kind of exasperated affection, and her ability to parry the attacks on her intellect must be supported by the fact that her slip-ups are earning her millions in network coverage.

The Beckhams, George W Bush, it seems the whole world loves a mentally deficient anti-hero. So perhaps, instead of perpetually bemoaning the lack of inspiring South African celebrities, we should be looking for the thickest morons out there to catapult to national, and even international, stardom.