It seems that across the Pond, the UK's Celebrity Big Brother is causing a huge uproar and strained diplomatic relations with India over accusations of racism on the show. It has soured the diplomatic trip of possible future UK PM Gordon Brown in India where he has had to answer questions on British racism, and even Tony Blair has chimed in during a session of House of Commons, stating more or less that the British don't tolerate racism.
It's on the front pages of all the daily papers and new sites, and the scandal just keeps growing. A debate now has begun there over issues of race in England, of whether this is an isolated incident of reality television bullying, or of a larger reflection of underlying racism in overall British society.
On this season, Bollywood superstar Shilpa Shetty is one of the castmembers, and has been attacked by three or four of her housemates on issues of race, culture, and class. (Them being foul-mouthed White Brits of lesser class, her a more restrained & refined, upper class Indian.)Complaints about the show have flooded in since housemate Goody, her mother Jackiey Budden and boyfriend Jack Tweed; model Danielle Lloyd and former S Club singer Jo O’Meara allegedly began bullying the 31-year-old Indian star.
In one outburst, Lloyd asked Shetty: “Do you get stubble?”
In another, Budden, who constantly called her “the Indian”, asked: “Do you live in a house or a shack?”
The latest row between Shetty and reality TV star Goody erupted when the pair clashed over Oxo cubes.
Goody told the actress: “Go back to the slums”.
Lloyd also weighed in but out of earshot from the actress, saying: “I think she should f*** off home.”
And that's only a selection of the statements they've been making to her face. They've stated they worry about her touching their food, because they don't know where her hands have been, that Indians are so thin because their food is undercooked, so on and so forth.
On Wednesday's show, Shetty told housemate Cleo Rocos she feared she was being targeted because of her race.
Rocos, comforting the Bollywood actress following the row which began over stock cubes, told Shetty: "I don't think there's anything racist in it."
But Shetty said: "It is, I'm telling you."
OfCom - Britains' version of the FCC - has received the highest number of complaints ever from viewers furious over the treatment of Shetty on the show.
And now today, a major sponsor of the show has just dropped its backing of the series, and many are calling for the show to be pulled and for the network, C4, to be fined heavily.
The Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, said it appeared Celebrity Big Brother had been “deliberately” edited to air the alleged racist comments.
He said: “The company producing Celebrity Big Brother, Endemol, is editing down 24 hours of coverage to one hour and it is therefore clear they have deliberately chosen to broadcast participants’ racist comments.
“The programme makers should instead explicitly warn participants that such behaviour is unacceptable and contestants making racist comments will be evicted.”
Read the articles and you'll see that there are alot of issues loaded into this scandal - race, class, education, culture, so on and so forth.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/portal/main.jhtml?xml=/portal/2007/01/18/ftbb118.xml
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/6271139.stm
http://www.cnn.com/2007/SHOWBIZ/TV/01/18/bigbrother.racism/index.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6271161.stm
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/18/world/europe/18britain.html?ref=world
http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,11049-2007030000,00.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/01/18/nbb118.xml
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6273803.stm
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