With another race row enveloping Channel 4, this time thanks to 18-year-old Lucy Buchanan on Shipwrecked - who said she was, "Quite for the British Empire. I'm quite for slavery and things, but that's never going to come back" - I am forced to wonder whether there is any real value in using reality TV to explore social attitudes to issues such as race any more. In the last two weeks, it has seemed like little more than a theatre of cruelty and is as such a morally defunct format - after all, Jade Goody and Buchanan are real racists subjecting real people to real racial abuse.
Of course, race has upped the tempo of Channel 4 shows before to create always unpleasant, occasionally enlightening, flashpoints. Just look at Wife Swap. But with Big Brother, and now Shipwrecked, they seem to have crossed a line. Is Britain any less racist or any more tolerant now that we've been exposed to the attitudes of Goody and Buchanan? Probably not given that Channel 4 had to ban the audience from Jade's Friday night eviction for fear of the hostile reaction from the disciples of tolerance.
In fact, to believe that reality TV leads to more enlightened attitudes is as infantile as believing that Jade, who admitted she was a racist in last Sunday's News of the World, was suddenly and magically no longer a racist by Tuesday's Matthew Wright Show. Equally incredibly, Buchanan is supposed to undergo some Damascene conversion during the show, which is Channel 4's justification for airing the programme. Are we really supposed to believe that the opinions of Buchanan and Goody can be changed in such a tiny amount of time?
In the next few days, chief executive Andy Duncan will have to go cap in hand to the government for Channel 4's annual £100m subsidy. There are many at News International who will be hoping the broadcaster does not receive it, as this would undoubtedly put Sky TV on a stronger economic footing. The argument normally given as you beg for taxpayers' money is that trash like Big Brother and Shipwrecked pays for the good stuff. It is nonsense, of course - all trash does is pay, and create the appetite for, more trash. In making Shipwrecked, Channel 4 may have steered themselves into the rocks.
