A slight concern of mine, following the death of David Bowie, is the decision by his ex wife Angie to remain on Channel 5’s latest series of ‘Celebrity Big Brother’ (CBB). Along with a cast of nobodies, at least to me, the former Mrs Bowie is a contestant. She was given the opportunity to leave the show with immediate effect, but has chosen to stay.
Doubtless, Bowie’s passing will come have a disappointment for some of the Fleet Street vermin who were hoping Angie would “dish the dirt”. This ghastly, well past its sell by date example of TV voyeurism has, you might think, some degree of responsibility on this, a day when such an iconic figure lost his life.
Aside from being David Bowie’s former wife, I struggle to understand for the life of me just how Angie Bowie is regarded a celebrity, but then that goes for almost anyone who appears on the show. She’s been picked up by the producers, hasn’t she, for shock and outrage rather than a less than stellar career in the entertainment business but a rather more impressive one in the consumption of Class A drugs. Unless she has genuinely erased her relationship emotionally from her entire lifetime, tonight’s show could be car crash TV.
I know that many extra people will tune in to watch tonight, in the same way that people slow down on the motorway in order to look at car crash wreckage. It is a tawdry part of human nature, I guess; something that was noted by Don Henley in his scathing song Dirty Laundry when he sang, “It’s interesting when people die,
give us dirty laundry.” Some will watch, I am sure, out of innocent fascination and others may, for all I know, tune in to find out something about Bowie that maybe they didn’t know before. I will not watch because I worry it will make me angry and it will make me sad. And because David Bowie’s passing is terribly sad for his family who are now grieving and people all over the world to whom Bowie, at some stage of his epic career or other, was the soundtrack to their lives. Although Bowie was not at the very top of my list of favourite artists, I do not dispute his greatness at the very top of the musical tree.
I am not interested in watching Angie Bowie a few hours after her ex husband’s death, no matter how she feels about it. Being filmed and recorded everywhere in the made up ‘Big Brother House’, seeing what should be private real life trauma being played out in the corner of millions of living rooms. I do not want to see her whether she is angry mode, or meltdown mode and I don’t want to see her comforted by a room full of has-beens and never-will-bes who care only about how many quid they will make for prostituting themselves on such a hideous TV show in the first place.
One assumes the CBB producers are making every effort to minimise Ms Bowie’s grief and despair and it is her choice to remain on the show. Or maybe not. Such is the cynical world of the media these days, you can only but wonder if one or two of the suits behind the scenes can see a huge wedge of advertising cash just waiting for them.
In the end, we get the TV we deserve and if enough people tune in to see such dross, then who am I to complain?
From what I can tell, dignity and grace are not words that normally go together with CBB and it will take something quite remarkable to turn something rotten at its very core into something that vaguely resembles responsible, sensitive broadcasting.
I think I owe it to David Bowie’s memory to not watch CBB tonight, but then I wouldn’t ever watch it in the first place. But remember this: if you do watch, it only encourages our voracious media to forever go one offensive step further.
I feel very sorry for Angie Bowie tonight. Whether I still will when CBB finishes at 10.00pm tonight is quite another story. There’s a fine line to be walked here. Can CBB walk it?
