A delightful reader asks whether I have anything to say about the current Celebrity Big Brother. Just this. Where is the screaming queen? Only the self-created sexual deviant with his or her falsetto lunacy can save the show and drive it back to the heights of improvised rapture we have come to expect.
Cross-dressing Pete Burns was the last CBB. Without him it would have just been The Waltons, unscripted. Transsexual Nadia (formerly Jorge who won 74% of the overall popular vote) completed embodied a non-sleb BB series: the mood music of each show was entirely orchestrated by her biorhythmic peaks and troughs. Just when normality threatened to crowd in and depress us all with family values familiarity, up popped Nadia with another self-dramatised, screeching projection.
I had hoped Cleo Rocos might be this time’s screaming queen: surely something of Kenny Everett would have rubbed off on her? No. What can you expect of a 42-year-old who’s lived with her mother all her life? Leo showed some promise as a screamer but his angst was rooted in suburban things, such as fear of dirty underpants. He only wanted to be loved. H was never going to deliver. He’s just a sweet bottom who can sing. Announcing he was gay before he went in was strategically sensible: it disarmed the tabs. In other words, he is capable of unsexy, pre-meditated action. This is lethal to entertainment CBB-style.
The screaming queen is a creature of staggered, unleashed fury. Love is not sought, only trembling awe. In his or her soul a lifetime’s worth of rejection has transmuted into conversational terrorism and a real-life parody of bigoted expectation. The screaming queen is revenge on the normals. And provided the revenge is on the other side of the TV screen, the normals just love it.
Because that’s showbiz - so wise up Big Brother before I get seriously pissed.
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