On turning down Big Brother

This morning could have been so very different. I could have been waking in a room of sleeping pseudo-clebs and instead of writing a blog post I could have been called to the diary room.

The funniest telephone call I’ve taken in the last year was from an agent looking for candidates for the Big Brother House who was ringing to ask whether I would be interested in auditioning for Celebrity Big Brother. I didn’t stop laughing for days. It didn’t need a moment’s thought to know that the BB House was not the place for me.

I have to say that my first thought was that I wasn’t a celebrity but then looking down the list of those who have actually made it into the house, I’m not sure that should have been a worry.

I was never entirely sure why I got that call. The only thing I can think of is that they were going down the Pink List that the Independent kindly publish every year and asking everyone on it whether they might be interested. (The fact that they got to me would indicate that rather a lot of people turned them down before I got the chance to say no). Maybe this blog was a plus point in their minds too.

But how our lives have changed over the years that Big Brother has been in existence on our television screens. The blurring of the public and the private is one of the major themes of modern Western life and one that I think we still don’t quite understand. And the profusion of cameras in our lives is something that I didn’t see coming. I have a little one on top of my computer screen waiting for any moment when I want to make a video call or for when online evening prayer starts up again. As I walk to work, I’ve no idea how many cameras will record my movements nor who will look at the images.

And the idea of confessional diaries that all the world can read – well, blogging has become unremarkable now.

My hunch is that many of the people who started blogs have fallen by the wayside. Perhaps they’ve got bored, perhaps they have been bitten on the behind as things they have written have come back to haunt them and perhaps they just didn’t get the celebrity that they were hoping for. How painful to be a celebrity in your heart that no-one pays any attention to at all.

There’s still mileage in blogging but it is changing. We are seeing fewer bloggers stick it out but I think many of those who are keeping going for the long-term are learning how to do it successfully. The increasing ubiquity of social media means that it is hard to be a successful blogger without knowing one’s way around some of those platforms too.

But people still read blogs. The thousands of people who read my post last week about the offense caused to many by the Director of Communications of the Church of England in one little tweet, were clearly interested in a perspective that they wouldn’t find in the mainstream media.

Very happy to have turned down Big Brother. Very happy to still be on here.