Well, yes actually… a little. As although I successfully stopped myself being sucked into watching Channel 4’s most recent Big Brother offering, I feel compelled to comment on the furore which has swamped our newspapers following the racist remarks exchanged by this year’s celebrity Z-listers in the Orwellian house.

For me, this series has painted a sad portrait of Britain, a nation perhaps less beleaguered by racism, than it is by the growing class divide. While many have shrugged off Jade Goody’s scathing comments about Shilpa Shetty as ignorant ‘underclass’ slip-ups by someone who should have known better, (or perhaps didn’t know better, after all, when once asked what she knew about Rio de Janeiro, Goody retorted, “All I know about him is he’s a footballer!”), I agree with The Independent’s Johann Hari who has condemned our nation’s knee-jerk reaction to “fight prejudice with another prejudice”. With a new series of Shameless back on our screens this month, poking fun at Manchester’s working class down on the fictional Chatsworth Estate and the moronic garblings of our favourite pink-tracksuit wearing character Vicky Pollard exploiting the subcultural stereotype of Britain’s teenagers even further, is it any surprise that we are churning out equally vile characters in real life?

With Endemol proudly holding up a mirror on Britain’s yob culture in its depiction of Jade Goody, Gordon Brown’s inopportune trip to India promoting western values abroad was tainted in irony. Shouldn’t our chancellor educate the electorate about what British values are really about and attend to our failing social system before plugging it to others as a model to emulate?

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