The Great British Bitch Off

In recent weeks my Facebook and Twitter have been swamped with a whisked and beaten, flambeed frenzy of Gas Mark 9 debate. The return of the much loved Great British Bake Off has inspired an endemic of terrible puns and uncharacteristically British fervor. I personally haven't been a viewer, due to my current obsession with apathy and a general unwillingness to engage in normal human activity. However I've been witness to the odd snippet when Mum's had it on in the kitchen.

From what I can gather the programme itself is a rather jovial romp through the world of cupcakes and innuendo. The presenters, Mel and Sue make light of the good-hearted silliness of the whole affair whilst the adjudicators, Bread-Man and that guy from Animorphs who turned into a hawk, step up to their allocated characters and bestow their incontrovertible judgement upon the contestants with all the farcical piety one might expect from such a show. It's a glorious TV pantomime executed to deliver the viewer with an hour of 'something nice to watch' and the only people who take this competition with any level of seriousness are the kind of people who might turn up in Bizarre magazine after having married a cupboard. 

With this is mind, it might prove shocking to some, the level of enthusiasm and in some cases ferocity with which the general public have taken to social media to vent their personal opinions.

Clearly one person is appalled by the nations reaction. Finalist, Ruby Tandoh took almost immediately to her bureau to discuss how nasty everybody had been about her and how it was probably all to do with her having a vagina. It was published this morning by The Guardian and within hours, hordes of bra-burning feminists and independent coffee house bothering uber-liberals were heralding it as the most important piece of social comment since Das Kapital.

The article itself was very articulate and clearly Miss Tandoh has as good a method of mixing words as she does eggs and butter. 

There are two major issues with it though:

Firstly, she assumes that the vitriol she personally and other contestants received is somehow exclusively a feminist matter. 

If there is one thing I deeply despise it is the misuse of gender inequality in a current affairs debate. I have no doubt in my mind that if Ruby Tandoh was a 6 ft 4 pectorally sculpted, fireman he would have received just as much online 'trolling' for taking a baking contest so insufferably seriously and generally being as irritating as his female counterpart.

I mean no ill to this woman whatsoever and I doubt anybody else does either, I am sure she is probably a genuinely lovely human being but to me she is a face from the TV. A celebrity, a kind of ethereal entity that's purpose is solely to entertain me, void of a soul and probably not really real at all. This brings me to my second and most important problem; Is it OK for celebrities to complain about people talking about them? Is it OK for somebody who willingly offers themselves up as entertainment to the masses to go on and dispute their own reception?

Well no, it clearly isn't. Could you imagine Sir Lawrence Olivier clawing back the curtain after a performance of Hamlet to demand that the audience clap harder? 

 Within hours of the final , Tandoh climbed onto her public podium, denounced us all as mean nasty sods and all but ordered us to never air our opinions of other people in public ever again. Ignorant to the fact that she was granted this public podium by us, the viewer and the reason that programmes such as this are so very popular is because of their ability to arouse opinion. Our price for this precious place among the elite is her soul. It may be an unusually cruel system but that's how celebrity works. She was never led into the stocks, she stepped voluntarily into the shit storm and then complained when she got some in her eye. The devil came a knocking and she signed the release form.

There are two ways to avoid the pain of being called a miserable bitch on Twitter.

 1. Don't go on TV and act like a miserable bitch

and

 2. Don't type your name into Twitter.

Clearly she ignored both and it reminded me of the scene out of The Young Ones where Ric interrupts the dinner table to ask everyone who likes him to put their hand up and when nobody does he threatens to kill himself with laxatives.

 On the one hand I feel for these types of reality stars. They may be inexperienced in the ways of the demon TV producer and how the goblins in the editing suite will do everything to pick out the contestants weak points and reduce them to a ridiculous caricature but it is unbelievably naive to appear on a prime-time slot and expect the world to critique you on your baking skills alone. Human nature is at it's very core a nasty, repugnant witch. Lets face it, the vast majority of people probably only remember Einstein because he had funny hair and stuck his tongue out. British people in particular don't like those doing better than us and so we naturally ridicule anyone and everyone we see being even slightly more successful. It must be an ancestral instinct. One day they'll probably find the perfectly preserved bones of a Homo-Habilis, sticking the V's up behind the back of a Homo-Erectus, presumably mouthing "Upright BASTARD!".

I'll never condone threatening or violent abuse aimed directly at a celebrity and that sort of thing is a criminal matter but what we must remember is that when people voluntarily give themselves up for scrutiny in the public domain, it is not only egocentric and sanctimonious to expect to receive no scrutiny at all but it diminishes the very point of fame itself. The mystical status that differs you from the common man. I like most others I suspect, would love to see this modern concept of the instant celebrity demolished. It has become not a status attained at the merit of the individual and more about being famous just for being famous. The more possible celebrity becomes, the more immediate it's effect takes hold and the less you seemingly have to do to get it, the less the general public will respect those that have it and the less they will hold it in regard. 

So as sad as it is that this is what we do with our evenings. Sat there eating crisps and spitting unfounded bile at people we've never met, it's human nature to discredit others, in particular those on an elevated platform. Qualified or not, we as a species have been passing judgement since the dawn of time. Lowly serfs, probably spent their evenings chewing parsnips staring wistfully at the palace and calling the current monarch a 'malodorous witche' or a 'Bile tract' or whatever.

The message has always been there, it's just with the rise of social media the alarm bells are louder; If you hanker so badly for the attention of the world, please be prepared for the fact that the majority of it won't be very nice.