I find Big Brother pretty revolting and in fact extremely boring. A bunch of vile yobs and pouting princesses does not entertainment make. But regardless of post-modern or post-structuralist analysis (neither of which I can understand), it is not academics with weird theories who are the real problem.

The problem is (and I regard dross like Big Brother as a problem if not blight on television) that shows like this make a motza. John De Mol, Big Brother's creator, is in the Forbes richest 500 list. Big Brother and its clones will continue year after year as long as fortunes are to be made. Forget other "isms", its capitalism which delivers us "reality tv" and as long as money can be made, it'll be around for sometime yet.

Congratulations on a well written piece. A great attempt to teach a few misguided academics a little decency.

I would have liked to have seen some clear cut examples of the ‘exclusion’ and ‘abuse’ that John talks about in regards to those academics who so much as ‘refer to high culture’. Saying it is so does not make it so.

I’d like to make another point though John. This whole article seems to be directed towards academics in cultural studies fields.

Dare I say, as much as it pains me to see, that programs like Big Brother etc have more cultural relevance to society today than Shakespeare?? How many children and parents alike get home from school/work and tuck into The Merchant of Venice every night?

Sure, there is an argument to be made that the classics of literature should receive greater priority in education, but as a previous poster said…we live in a capitalist society John. And the market decides what it wants to watch.

You can say what you like about the structure of text and its artistic merit, but unfortunately Shakespeare today has an ever diminishing cultural impact, while the Big Brothers and Survivors are actively shaping society in more profound and real ways.

I think that alone means they deserve to - and should be - looked at closely and critically.

Ever held a conversation with 'The Market' StabInTheDark? I DO like your pseudonym!
The article by Hookham and MacLennan is a fairly well-considered explication of contemporary 'reality' universities or pseudo-universities, IMHO. The only weakness in their article was to limit their focus of just who is responsible for this appalling and frightening situation to lower-order academic functionaries such as the candidate's supervisory team and the founding dean of the faculty.

Where are the august members of the 'university' Senate, the Chancellor, the Vice Chancellor and other such 'executive managers' of the institute in their oversight role, applying their years of academic and worldly experience and reflection regarding the role of the university in (modern?)society? Or over at the School of Busy-ness, Economics and Financial Accounting checking on their investment portfolios?

Matilda's comments prompt me to urge some progress from the tired PM Howard-style comparison between Shakespeare and BB, etc., instead to a comparison between Borat and the usual lot of such 'high' and 'bogan' culture we're apparently supposed to regard as our binary-opposite ideological paradigms. An equally important issue here is that more ethical matter of 'cruelty', useful for comparison in all these examples.

The problem with much established blue-chip 'Culture' a la Shakespeare is its often pompous claim to truth. 'Macbeth', for example, has been demolished by historians proving The Bard's work there as opportunistic fiction suiting his English king and patron, while demonizing a locally popular and patriotic Scot killed off by other opportunism sponsored from the expansionist south. No shortage of cruelty in Macbeth: a history written truly for the victors, but no victory for historical truth.

Thus we have Big Brother, a contrived or fake opposition for the postmodern sensibility conscious of the pretensions of such past grand narrative. But here the media bosses have made a history not written by the losers but one by the winners at the gratuitous expense of losers. Whatever payment and fame BB-ers get, their achievement is a larger-scale version of our dehumanized workforce made into 'celebrity' exhibits. Voyeurism by BB's many cameras resembles closely the surveillance culture in our workplaces and its compatible nastiness of divisiveness, deceit and insecurity: "finding the winner!". I agree that cruelty here is distasteful, but it too only matches its oppressive surroundings of dishonest and cynical exploitation.

Borat, by contrast, invades the conceits found in this culture's very foundations. Whether prole or upper-middle, academic or white trash, overtly racist or self-consciously 'tolerant, multicultural', etc., Cohen's Borat cruels his targets by exposing their own prejudice, arrogance and hypocrisy.

The mainstream success of Borat apparently owes much to Cohen's clever use of satire in several layers. But under the gags and slapstick, the real joke is on anyone who believes Cohen's caricature of the other as a necessarily uneducated, sexist, racist and homophobic boor. I fear that Matilda may be another of Cohen's unwitting victims.

As someone who experienced the rise and rise of postmodernism/poststructuralism from within a Social Sciences faculty at an Australian university, I can only concur with the thrust of Hookham and MacLennan's article. I will add to it my observation that the most fervent proponents of this excuse for 'theory' seemed to be mostly female, 'mature-aged' postgraduate students in such disciplines as Education, Anthropology, Psychology and Sociology, who couldn't cope with quantitative methodology.

Much of the tripe that is dished up in so-called 'Cultural Studies' is a direct product of the replacement of methodological and epistemological rigour with convoluted and self-referential 'pomo-babble' designed to obscure the intellectual limitations of its practitioners. Unfortunately, this process has only provided ammunition for 'neo-conservative' elements who can easily take pot-shots at what now passes for academic writing.