Repulsive

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Once upon a time, celebrities who were shown to have acted repulsively in public retired from the scene. Sometimes, legend says, they shot themselves; more often they went abroad. Anyway, a man who had embezzled funds or, like Byron, had sex with his own half-sister, was certainly never welcome in his country again

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Not just in your country. Reality shows, which were invented in the Netherlands (one of a million reasons why I am racist about that country), are a pestilence and a plague all over the world. I gather there is one even in Iran. I only ever watched half of one episode, in Italy, because it happened to feature the showgirl Pamela Prati, whom I find stunning; and I was revolted by what I saw. It did not help that all the other participants were clearly ganging up on Prati, nor that, from what I could see, she was behaving nicely and decently and had given them no reason at all to torment her. But what seemed clear to me is that the whole revolting display was designed to make participants turn on each other, dog eat dog, and rewarded the kind of behaviour which would, in real life, have been the most disastrous. Perhaps they had turned on Prati exactly because she was nice and decent; or perhaps because her astonishing beauty and towering height (six foot in her bare feet) made someone feel inadequate. Anyway, I was sick, and I never watched anything else of the kind again.

Even so, there is sometimes some kind of sardonic justice about the proceedings, which can provide you, if not with a laff, at least with a grim smile. Do you know who is taking part in one such show in Britain right now, with all the attendant humiliations? None other than David Gest, Liza Minnelli's two-minute husband! Talk about reaching your natural level.