Home Minister John Reid wants to split the Home Office into the Ministry for Security and the Ministry for Justice. What’s even more Orwellian is the sinister phrase he uses to describe the Home Office as it stands, which like ‘inappropriate’ has started to creep into everyday authoritarian language. “Not fit for purpose.”
Talking of not fit for purpose, yet more Jade Goody thoughts.
Davina McCall’s schoolteacher-like question to Jade Goody on her crowd-less eviction from the Big Brother House: “What have you learned from your experience in the BB house?”
Like a lot of measures from the programme makers, this is to my mind rather disingenuous. If they really wanted their human lab rats to actually learn anything, they should let them have easy access to reference books: dictionaries, encyclopaedias. Even the residents of prisons and rehab clinics are allowed books; it’s just the BB house that bans them. Presumably because they might stop threatening each other and sit around talking about novels. Less engrossing TV, perhaps, but then books have helped to reinvent Richard & Judy. Why not BB, given the show now badly needs a major rethink itself?
Implementing a modest Big Brother library and book group would be my suggestion. Then the UK housemates who can’t pronounce ‘influential’ or ’embryo’ or have any idea where Suffolk is could rectify these shocking shortcomings, and not just feel comfort in remaining ignorant.
Unlike many columnists and pundits, I don’t want Jade Goody to have her career ruined. I want her to spend some of her fortune enhancing her mind the way she’s enhanced her chest. She could have the best teachers in the country. If, like everything else she does, this top-rate private tutorship would have to be covered in the public eye, then why not start a new series called Educating Jade? Finally, a makeover show that didn’t induce suicide. No doubt the producers would insist on the usual Trinny-and-Susannah format of two bossy teachers tearing a strip off her, but so be it. Get me Endemol!
