I’ve often wondered what George Orwell would have made of Big Brother. Would he have acknowledged his own influence on the concept or would he have totally disowned it? I suspect the latter. And now, at long last,it has gone. Or at least we hope it has.
Big Brother, the programme that spawned a celebrity culture, has long been past its sell-by date and should have been ditched years ago. But even as I write this, I fear that we still haven’t seen the end of it.
When it began it was novel, hilarious even – that people could subject themselves to such ridicule and effrontery. As time went on and the novelty wore off, that anyone should continue to take part was almost beyond belief. And that MP George Galloway should have been naive enough to act the part of a cat lapping up its milk was equally baffling. It was so humiliating that it marked the end of his career. And then there was Jade and Nasty Nick. But let’s not go there.
Big Brother initially was a popular experiment in human behaviour that sadly seemed to go wrong at about series three when it got caught up in its own publicity. The binge drinking, the swearing, the sex, the games, were all contrived for the benefit of a television audience and the publicity that might be earned by the winner or most outrageous household member.
Now, you might suppose that Big Brother and the Vatican have little in common. But you’d be wrong. The Vatican – said to be the size of 40 football pitches – has 350 CCTV cameras, a control room with banks of TV screens, an army of security guards and is under the continual gaze of the outside world. The Vatican’s only housemate is trapped in his house while the world outside watches. Just like Big Brother.
BBC4’s Vatican: The Hidden World kicked off in a promising way, its opening sequence telling us that the Vatican was “shrouded in secrecy until now”. This would be a behind the scenes look at what went on inside the Vatican. I held my breath. Was someone going to take the lid off all that secrecy, I wondered?
No, of course not. In the end, there was nothing about child abuse, celibacy, God’s bankers or the links with Nazism during the Second World War. Instead it was just about the most sycophantic programme I’ve seen on the BBC for some time. It was an appalling Disneyworld look at life in the Vatican. We were shown the alleged tomb of Saint Peter, archives relating to the trial of Galileo Gallilei, a few religious artefacts and restoration work being carried out high on the roof of the basilica. And always accompanied by appallingly sentimental music.
However, we were appeased by a woman journalist, working for Vatican Radio, who was doing a feature about women who have worked in the Vatican – and there haven’t been many. The first turned out to be a German Jewish archaeologist in the 1930s. But generally the first women were toilet attendants in the 1960s and then a few secretaries in the ’70s. It’s still rare to see a woman in the Vatican. She asked if she could see some of the pre-war papers, covering Pope Pius XII’s dealings with the Nazis. She was shown only a handful of inconsequential memos. The rest remain under lock and key, she was informed. There’s a surprise.
The Vatican has its own newspaper, its own radio station and its own chemist where, we were told, they do not sell contraceptives. Oh really! Like the Big Brother house, the Vatican remains cocooned from the outside world, existing on a diet of selected information, money and celebrity.
Of course, with the Pope’s visit to Britain we could not be shown anything that might offend or cause a diplomatic stir. If I’m sounding a bit like Ian Paisley, let me assure you that nothing could be further from the truth. The last time I tried to get into St Peter’s (merely from a cultural point of view, you understand) I was barred. Not because they detected that I was a militant atheist, but because my shorts were too short. Three handsome, young, trainee Italian priests gave me the thumbs down and got on with ogling the slim, tanned legs of young women. My legs were clearly offensive to their god.
The BBC’s coverage has, to say the least, been over the top. Rolling news coverage, on-the-spot reporting, plus a plethora of associated programmes. Even sacrosanct Test Match coverage on Radio 4 was interrupted. And I thought that only happened for the Shipping Forecast.
