BB's scary reality

By Ian Macrae

Knowing that “Big Brother is watching you” must be a surreal enough experience in itself; knowing that up to four million people are also watching and waiting for you to make a complete prat of yourself takes a certain kind of ego-fuelled courage. But being in the Big Brother house as a representative of a whole community, well, that’s just weird beyond imagining.

Let’s face it, who’d be Mikey Hughes? Whatever happens, he’s unlikely to win, even if he’s the last man standing at the end of the current series of the Channel 4 reality show. In that event, people will say, “He obviously benefited massively from a sympathy vote.” Or he’ll have been voted off by people wanting to put an end to his misery.

Mikey’s clearly something of an individual. He likes wearing lurid ponchos and women’s underwear. He’s not shy about joining in, dancing, arguing or unashamedly finding his way round with a cane. This makes him either a completely untypical blind person or someone always set apart and defined by his cane. The one thing he can’t be and should never be judged as is a representative. But doubtless he will be.

If responsibility weighs heavily on Mikey’s shoulders, what about the other disabled housemate, Darnell Swallow? How many dogs has he got on his back? His being black is less rare than it once would have been. Mikey’s presence takes some of the focus off his own visual impairment. But he also has albinism. This makes him part of a sub-community, at the mercy of a complex mélange of cultural and identity issues as well as the fear of the different, which is familiar to other people with albinism. Talk about a crowded house!