A Bit Jaded...

...The downfall and departure of Ms 'Jade' Goody from the 'Big Brother' house is naturally to be welcomed as a demonstration of the British public's disavowal of an overtly racist woman.

Would though it were that simple. There are some points from the perspective of The Wolds one would wish to make.

First, that howsoever snobbish this may sound one totally deplores the transition in the national psyche of the very phrase 'Big Brother' from the savage and still highly relevant book that inspired it and its significance - George Orwell's '1984' - to a totally trivial television programme. (There is a comparison here with the generational difference of reply to the question 'Who got shot in Dallas?' JF Kennedy or JR Ewing would have been the answers given, totally dependent on the age of the respondent.)

There was a rage and a sadness in the book and in the reader that a world might exist where every action of all citizens would be watched, monitored and controlled, in which even one's thoughts were not one's own. This largely though is the world in which we now live and, it would seem, we have come to accommodate and accept it without protest or even comment any longer.

Ms Goody and her cronies no longer even seem to notice, let alone care, that they can be in an environment in which cameras record their words and their deeds, yet happily utter rampant racist remarks without any hesitation or pause for reflection that they are broadcasting to the watching world.

Ms Goody has made her fame and her fortune on the back of being found to be pig-ignorant, and this very trait may now be the cause of loss of both through the same medium of limitless television exposure. That there is some no little irony in this hardly matters. By acquiescing to the world of 'unreality television' and 'celebrities' - who have nothing in their personality or their lives we would truly wish to celebrate - 'Jade' Goody is our creation. We, collectively, howsoever much we might disclaim individual accountability, are the Drs. Frankenstein who have called this monstrosity into being.

Embarrassed silence, a goodly amount of gazing eyes-downcast dumbly at our shoes, would be the best response at this point. Let Ms Goody return to the obscurity from which she came and let us rather re-affirm a commitment to private and to public good manners.

Will any of that happen? Not a chance. One little doubts, though one deeply regrets, that even now her 'agents' are negotiating a fat fee for an exclusive interview, as well as planning her rehabilitation from fallen star to re-risen ugly angel.

We should walk away from all of this. Take a walk in the Wolds ladies and gentleman. Do it today. It will clear and cleanse both hearts and minds.