More BB
There’s a suggestion that Ashley and John might make an appearance on tonight’s nominations show, so I’m on the case just in case.
Hmm, nothing in Gretel’s intro to suggest that that’s going to be happening. Seems as if BB is doing its best to get back to business as usual. So I might as well just respond to some of the stuff that’s happened since I posted on Saturday.
The newspapers picked up on the story (in a more substantive way) on Sunday, although they still weren’t discussing details of what had happened. Politicians of all stripes piled on and called for the show to be axed. Andrew Bartlett wasn’t impressed:
[T]o attempt to force a television show – however tasteless it is - off the air because of an incident that wasn’t even screened on television is simply beyond the pale and represents an excessive intrusion into the lives of Australians by moralising, preaching politicians who want to control how people live their lives.
Well, apart from Steve Fielding (who was out for BB well before this happened), I’m not aware that any of the pollies have called for the show to be “forced off the air”. Coonan has asked for an investigation into any code breaches. Presumably there weren’t any, since the incident wasn’t even broadcast except online. Howard and Beazley have both suggested that Channel 10 take this opportunity to axe the show, but I’m not aware of them suggesting government intervention to make that happen. There’s certainly been moralising and grandstanding, unsurprisingly, but as I pointed out before, there are issues here that go beyond standards of decency on television, and Andrew seems to pay those issues minimal attention.
There seems to have been fairly universal condemnation of Gretel Killeen’s “they were terrific blokes and it’s a shame that they had to be kicked out based on one foolish incident” speech, not to mention the stuff about how you’d hear all sorts of exaggerated stories. What’s to exaggerate, you might ask? Did she get held down or not? Did she get slapped with a penis or not? The facts seem to be pretty uncontroversial which is not surprising considering the video footage. Differences of opinion arise over the interpretation of the incident - a good-natured prank for some people, a serious sexual assault for others. As you’ve probably gathered, I’m one of the ones who takes this very seriously.
In a comment on my last post, Bianca alludes to the fact that the video footage seems significantly less harrowing than one might expect from the description of events (or even from the still photos). Unlike Bianca, though, I didn’t see anything on the video (which was available on YouTube - sees to have disappeared now) to suggest that this was anything other than a serious assault. I don’t think that anyone really knows how Camilla felt about it, but there was certainly no indication that she consented - that’s the only relevant issue.
The Queensland Police, it would seem, see things differently. From the brief newspaper reports, it seems that they have viewed the footage and interviewed Camilla, but decided not to proceed with prosecution on the basis that Camilla didn’t want to make a complaint. That raises the question as to whether anyone else could make a complaint and have the matter brought to court - I wouldn’t have thought that there’d be any lack of Queenslanders happy to get the process moving. I don’t know enough about legal process, particularly in Queensland, to know whether or not the decision of the police not to proceed was reasonable enough in the circumstances, nor not.
For a good list of links to other posts, see Mark Bahnisch’s post at LP.
UPDATE: Looks like I had my wires crossed - the two guys are apparently appearing on the up late edition tonight. Which means I watched the nomination show for nothing except the spectacle of Claire being badgered by BB to be specific about her reasons for nominating Krystal, and Claire doing her best to point out that she couldn’t because it was related to the Ashley/John issue which they’d obviously been instructed not to mention. Gretel Killeen, meanwhile, was doing a splendid job of pretending that nothing had happened.