Severe storms hit the UK: God is clearly a Big Brother viewer.

In Highgate, I find out what a cyclone sounds like first-hand. And yes, I do think about The Wizard Of Oz.

The snowballing international media fuss around alleged racism in the UK’s Celebrity Big Brother is all as unlikely as, say, disproportionate fuss over a Danish newspaper cartoon.

Even The Independent has turned its head away from Iraq and toward a lowbrow Channel 4 reality show about women in a house in Elstree shouting over Oxo cubes. The one attacked, Shilpa Shetty, is a well-spoken Bollywood film star. The one doing the attacking, Jade Goody, is a British reality TV star of noted limited vocabulary. Modern role models, the pair of them.

Big Brother made Jade Goody a celebrity, so if as rumoured this is the end for both her and the programme that spawned her, at least it makes it all tidy and poetic.

From The Sun, turning on their own creation with their usual restraint:

HERE’S your chance to prove Britain is not a nation of racists — by voting Jade Goody out of the Celebrity Big Brother house.

From The Independent, reporting from India:

In effect, Goody and her friends are trampling on poverty-stricken Indians’ dreams. What Goody et al are saying to Indians is that no matter how rich and successful they become, they can still be called a ‘dog’ by a white person.

Claudia Webbe, executive member of the National Assembly Against Racism:

The current CBB story reflects the very core of the Black experience in Britain that we have deep race and racism problems resting firmly in our institutions and at the heart of some of our neighbourhoods. In my view it is the same type of racism that led to the murder of Stephen Lawrence.

Paul Morley on Big Brother’s Little Brother:

Jade Goody might be the cause of the next nuclear war.

If you’d told me five years ago that the singer with S Club 7 would one day have effigies of herself burned upon the streets of India, I’d have found it difficult to believe. Though at least the method of protest is apt, given all Jo O’Meara seems to do is smoke and consume.

Ms Goody’s lower class, poorly educated background is no excuse. These days she is a millionaire, with a career as a favourite with readers of gossip magazines. She appears in those magazines; that’s what she does. It’s rumoured that her CBB appearance comes with a six-figure fee. All that money, yet she spends it on improving her breasts, not improving her attitude, temperament, or education.

Along with Chantelle Houghton, BB is part of the current magazine and TV trend to reward young women for being lovably dim. It’s very easy to have a go at such figures, but they seem like fun, friendly company, perfectly aware of their intellectual shortcomings, and harmlessly unpretentious in a culture of backbiting cynicism, cruelty and sarcasm. One can understand their popularity. But now Ms Goody has been shown on TV being far from lovable, it’s hard to see what redeeming qualities she has left.

So today there’s a campaign of bullying the bully, ganging up on those that have ganged up. Today’s Sun has photos of Ms G as The Face Of Hate. The ghastly Edwina Currie goes on Question Time and helpfully labels Ms G and her sidekicks (S Club 7 singer Jo O’Meara and glamour model Danielle Lloyd) as ‘slags’. The Question Time audience applauds this comment, while fellow panellist Shami Chakrabarti is appalled and tries to get the crowd to desist. I admire Ms Chakrabarti: a civil rights campaigner with a Talulah Gosh hairdo. But believing in redemption and re-education is never entertaining. Ms Currie gets the applause. Hatred must be met with hatred.

Unwittingly, BB has reverted from a trashy annual TV show parading breast-enhanced flibbertigibbets and shrieking exhibitionists to its original purpose: an experiment, a test bed of attitudes and colliding worlds. It’s going to a place previously uncharted: too much reality for a reality TV show. I am naturally hooked.