Jade Goody evicted from Big Brother house
Sam Knight
Jade Goody, the former dental nurse, has been evicted from the Celebrity Big Brother house tonight after being accused of racism. She will emerge to a deserted studio lot after Channel 4 banned the public from attending the show.
Normally contestants ejected from the house by a telephone vote walk out into a blaze of spotlights, camera flashes and the screams of a baying or rapturous crowd, but such are the "heightened feelings" surrounding Goody, the likely evictee, she will be alone.
"Due to the controversy and heightened feelings surrounding the evictees, there will be no crowd for tonight’s eviction," said spokesman for Applause Store, the company that sells tickets for the show.
After four days of defiance — which have seen nearly 40,000 people complain about the alleged bullying by Goody and two other contestants of Shilpa Shetty, a Bollywood actress — Channel 4 appeared eager to dampen the controversy surroundings its prized reality television programme today.
"Over the past few days, Celebrity Big Brother has generated an intense and, at times, heated public debate which the evicted housemate will be unaware of," the broadcaster said in a statement. "As a result, Channel 4 and Endemol have taken the decision to conduct tonight’s eviction in front of a studio audience and without a crowd."
As well as removing the risk of nasty, televised scenes this evening, the broadcaster announced that all the profits from its telephone vote — a direct contest between Shetty and Goody, which the latter is expected to lose — would be donated to charities chosen by contestants at the end of the show.
Last night, a mood of reconciliation even permeated the programme, where the contestants have no idea about the arguments and international attention being paid to their actions. Shetty appeared to drop her earlier suggestion that she had been racially abused while Goody apologised and hugged the actress to make up.
"It’s not in me to be racial about somebody," she said. "If it offends any Indians out there I apologise."
Front-page headlines in Britain and India about the alleged bullying of Shetty by Goody and Danielle Lloyd, a former Miss Great Britain, and Jo O’Meara, who enjoyed brief success as a pop star, have made the show a subject of a police investigation, led to questions in the House of Commons and caused it to be an enormous commercial success.
More than 5.7 million people watched the programme last night even as Carphone Warehouse, the main sponsor of the show, ended its relationships with the programme and the Culture Secretary, Tessa Jowell, called it "disgusting".
The treatment of Shetty, a popular star in India, has even threatened to overshadow the visit of Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, to the country. Mr Brown hoped to use the trip to state his vision of international relations and raise his profile ahead of his expected accession as Prime Minister this summer but he has been dogged by repeated questions about the programme.
Today the Chancellor was given a red-carpet welcome to an Indian film studio in a northern suburb of Bombay, where he carefully expressed his backing for Shetty, saying: "There is a lot of support for Shilpa. It is pretty clear we are getting the message across. Britain is a nation of tolerance and fairness."
The Times of India, which described the show as "Big(ot) Brother" earlier this week, concluded today that there was no need for diplomatic action over the show, saying: "There is absolutely no reason for the Indian government to get involved or for the British government to be required to respond."
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