Pat Kane, New Integrity
I hadn’t watched Celebrity Big Brother as religiously as others, but I couldn’t help being completely struck by George Galloway’s final orations in the house. There he stood, in his “UK” overalls, delivering a jeremiad against the imperialist horror of the United States, while the massed ranks of his celebrity housemates looked on with a symphony of indifference and annoyance.
What was so tragic for me, as George prefaced his tub-thumping (most of which I politically agree with, it has to be said) with ‘brothers, sisters, comrades’, was the sense of the end of a certain brand of political rhetoric. His exaggeratedly precise language (“down the with be-heh-moth!”), his booming, arm-chopping delivery, was perfectly tailored for the striking crowd outside the factory games – a strong working-class voice to restore strength to the fragile and beleaguered. (I've witnessed him doing this on many political campaigns in Scotland, and others like him - Jim Sillars of the SNP was another classic exponent).
But for the watching, post-class millions, and certainly for the botoxed, hair-extended and deeply therapised celebritariat directly in front of him, this must have seemed like some cabaret act – perhaps one of Micheal Barrymore’s cheesier Saturday night routines.
Galloway's sojourn into reality tv has to be one of the greatest media miscalculations that any modern politician has ever made – precisely for the way that it unravels an older form of political “integrity”, in the face of the “new” integrity demanded by our omniscient media spectacles.
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