Читать книгу Jade Goody: How It All Began - My First Book - Jade Goody - Страница 8

Normal human behaviour in the Big Brother house includes the participants rowing and making up. And what even many of the show’s biggest fans cannot believe is that such events are unplanned. The manipulative, all-seeing producers must have chosen Jade and Shilpa in order to provoke racial conflict. They do not understand that Big Brother is 12 characters in search of a story. The producers put this group together, but the cast wrote the script. And no one knew in advance what that script would be. With 35 cameras, 20 security staff and a production team of 200, it is carefully managed. There are rules which the housemates must abide by, including prohibitions on violent or threatening behaviour. Of course they fall out and take sides from time to time, but the production team finds that the housemates usually resolve their differences, as happened on this occasion when Jade and Shilpa made up. All sorts of things occur in the house, but it is absurd to claim that this series was designed to serve up racism as entertainment. Indeed, was racism involved at all?

No doubt about it, according to the Sun, the Mirror and the News of the World (‘Vile racist’, ‘Vile Jade Goody’). But the many columnists who debated the issue were evenly split between racism, bullying and class as the motive for the fallout. The complaints to Channel 4 were also divided. The point is that you cannot be certain about a person’s motives. So this was never an open-and-shut case. As it happens, I know Jade Goody and I do not believe her to be remotely racist. Her father [was] mixed race. She spent nine weeks in the Big Brother house in 2002 with three black people without the hint of a racist attitude. She had a blazing row with one of them, Adele, but that was about verrucas.

Jade certainly has a temper and may be prone to bullying – not an attractive trait, but not a crime either.

Peter Bazalgette, chief creative officer of Endemol,

Prospect magazine, March 2007