Yours truly has been in glamorous London for the past 10 days or so, on business for VLICA. Many things have happened here, including David Beckham signing a deal with the L.A. Galaxy soccer team for a cool $250 million, not to mention a possible split being possible between England and Scotland right on the 300th anniversary of the Acts of Union which founded the United Kingdom. But more on all topics Britain in future blogs.
Tonight's blog entry has to do with an otherwise boring story which has managed to blow into an international diplomatic row. It seems that there is a TV show on ITV channel 4 here in the UK called Big Brother. From what I can gather, the show appears to be one of these reality TV shows where you throw a bunch of disparate and otherwise incompatible people together into a house and watch voyeuristically while the friction starts. I got back to my hotel, ran a workout, then turned on the telly in time to catch the last 10 minutes or so of tonight's episode.
Well, the main sauce surrounding this TV show is that this program features, as one of its cast members, a certain smokin' hot Indian Bollywood actress by the name of Shilpa Shetty.It seems that some of Ms. Shetty's local British house mates can't pronounce her name, they don't like how she carries herself, they don't like her accent, they don't like her looks, and for that matter they just don't seem to like the fact that Ms. Shetty is Indian. Meanwhile word has it that the cast members themselves seem to be blissfully unaware of the controversy that their own behavior is generating, being effectively being isolated from the outside world.
The uproar over charges of racism has generated enough heat that British Prime Minister Tony Blair has had to comment on the program in the House of Commons. His finance minister, Chancellor Gordon Brown (timing is everything in politics) just happens to be in India while all of this is happening and he finds himself having to condemn whatever is happening on the show in front of protesting Indian mobs. There is a certain irony to all of this. And what is that irony? That irony is that neither man has ever seen the TV show, yet find themselves having to fend off charges that their country is full of racists and that the program be perhaps censored, condemned, or taken off the air completely. Back in Britain, the TV watchdog group has received over 10,000 complaints about racism on the program, with 2/3rds of those complaints coming from non-Indians.
With all the fuss, what is The Mighty Wizard's verdict on the program? Well after 10 minutes of watching the program, I was ready to watch something else. It wasn't because of racism or fireworks mind you. It was because I found the program to be incredibly boring! The best part of the program was watching Ms. Shetty strut her bod around. She is hot! Otherwise, if it weren't for this controversy, I would not be able to figure out why anyone would watch the show. Amazingly I was watching CNN tonight and saw a reporter ask a British MP about how it could be that Mr. Blair had never seen the show? I couldn't believe that a CNN reporter (I'm sorry but I didn't catch the woman's name) could ask a question like that. The MP replied (quite truthfully for once - not bad for a politician) that Mr. Blair was a very busy man and that if he did watch TV, then the PM was probably watching programs like The West Wing.
As far as I can tell, this is nothing more than a bunch of women (and men) living under the same roof, and you know what you get when you do that - lots of catfights! It seems Ms. Shetty did this at least partly as a career move, but she did receive over $700,000 to do the show so clearly money was a factor too. Ms. Shetty said on the show the other day that she is sad about what has happened on the show, but I suspect that at the end of the day that the matter will blow over and in a year or two nobody will remember that this ever happened. By that time Ms. Shetty will still have both her money and a bad taste in her mouth about people from Britain.
Ciao for now from a rainy and blustery London.
Posted by The Mighty Wizard at January 17, 2007 05:06 PM