David's Daily Diversions

Big Witness

We haven’t been big Big Brother watchers. We watch a bit during the first series, because it was a novel concept. It has gotten more and more boring by the year. However, it is impossible not to know some of what is going on, when it fills the tabloids and even drifts over into the broadsheets.

This year it appears that the producers, Endemol, chose 12 people least likely to get on each other's nerves, in an attempt to actually get someone to have sex in the house. This seems a bit strange. First, the British contestants seem disinclined to do anything intimate in front of the camera. More importantly, Channel 4, which has no qualms about showing sex and the nudest of nudity otherwise, cuts away from the live Big Brother feed at the hint of anything remotely risqué about to happen.

Nonetheless, in this godless society, who would have thought that the winner would be a 32-year-old Christian virgin? Maybe it would have been more likely if he had acted in some sort of scandalous way or otherwise made Christianity look bad, even with careful editing by the producers. All they could show was him getting along very well with everyone. Even at times when after weeks locked in with the others he would get a little frustrated, he would express terrible regret if he even said an unkind word in the Diary Room.

Cameron probably doesn’t believe in patron saints, but if he did, his would be St Bartholomew, in words of Jesus, “...in whom there is no deceit.” As I watched the "Big Brother: The Winner's Story" tonight, it was clear that what you see is what you get with Cameron. He didn't talk about Jesus, or church, or anything else -- or if he did, it wasn't included in the final cut -- he was just himself. That was witness enough.

I also watched the final programme of the contest, where the winner is announced. Being live, it is more difficult for anything to be cut out. When he was asked what he was going to do with the £70,000 prize money, he said the first thing was to buy a new piano for his church.

At first I had to wonder why a Christian would go on Big Brother, and expose themselves to such media scrutiny and ridicule. It shouldn't come as a surprise that even those who have never been in the tabloids are on Big Brother. The world is watching. Isn’t that what we are all called to do? We aren't even supposed to go looking for a place where the cameras can't reach. Even as fish trader Cameron Stout acquitted himself well, “Let your light so shine before men...”