Reality television is debasing Britain's youth.

Almost every week, it seems, we are inundated with a plethora of new reality television programmes, showcasing the very worst humanity has to offer and lionizing those who are famous solely for their ignorance and stupidity.

We've recently witnessed the meteoric rise of The Only Way Is Essex, as well as it's 'classier' counterpart, Made In Chelsea. Both shows follow a bunch of well-groomed and loose-moralled half-wits around their respective home towns where they drink, have sex, vomit, drink some more, and then fight in the streets until the early hours.

Then there's the X Factor and Britain's Got Talent, our yearly Victorian freak-shows where brave people pluck up the courage to sing and dance on stage in front of a baying, brutish crowd who are only there, as far as I can gather, because the Dole Office is closed.

Even Big Brother, the Daddy of British reality television and the show where a group of stereotyped fame-junkies are locked up and set on each other for an entire summer, looks set to return to our screens this year after a brief hiatus.

This may come as welcome news to the more easily entertained and sadistic among us, or to those whose idea of a Saturday night constitutes heckling people with a dream and a drive to succeed, but there's a very real danger forming in Britain's youth culture today, and the aforementioned shows are largely to blame - our children are being taught how to bully, victimize and single-out.

Cast your minds back to when Susan Boyle emerged on to the Britain's Got Talent stage a few years ago. The crowd positively roared with laughter and indignation the very second they clapped eyes on her tangled barnet and frumpy beige dress, as if they were judging some kind of beauty contest.

Even Simon Cowell, Amanda Holden and Piers Morgan struggled to keep a straight face as she simply stood there, oblivious and child-like, and took the abuse from a 1,000-strong crowd of single mothers, unemployed men and image-obsessed teenagers - those in society who are in no position to judge but who are often given the most platforms to do so.

When she told judge Amanda Holden that her dream was to become as big as Elaine Paige, the camera cut to the audience and the hundreds of cynical rolling-eyes that all suggested the same thing - go home, dear, you're not 'one of us'.

All that changed, however, when she opened her mouth and blew the crowd away with her soaring operatic voice. During her impressive performance, the camera kept panning over the crowd, and those same people who had ridiculed her for absolutely no good reason five minutes previous were now cheering at the top of their lungs and clapping enthusiastically. Some were even standing. It was as if she'd 'earned' their approval, like a lowly dog learning to sit for it's cantankerous owners and being fed an obligatory treat.

Now consider the atrocious treatment meted out to TV personality Gillian McKeath on I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here! Despite her age and fragility the viewing public consistently - and ruthlessly - voted to put her through a series of grueling challenges involving alligators, spiders, insects and rats.

So hard did the public push her that she ended up fainting on live television - with her two young daughters watching - when it was revealed that she had been nominated for yet another challenge that would doubtless push her to brink of her phobias once again. The reaction at home was anything but sympathetic.

Facebook groups were set up to ridicule her further, with many teenage social net-workers claiming that the faint was simply a publicity stunt and a plea for attention. She was called a 'sour-faced bitch', an 'ugly old whore', and a 'geriatric freak'. Her crime - staying true to herself and refusing to engage in the camp's backbiting and cock-teasing.

For her honest display of reserve and respectability, the public held her in the highest contempt. They wanted to break her down; to watch her snap; to teach her that most pernicious of modern lessons - that if you're a relatively ordinary, well-behaved human being, you are deserving of utter vilification.

Sadly, such a reaction is now pandemic in British youth culture. Indeed, the overwhelming majority of those watching and commenting on these shows are barely out of school uniform.

What's more frightening is that shows such as Britain's Got Talent are marketed as wholesome family viewing, whereas in reality they're anything but.

The message the broadcasting companies seem to be sending out is one of decidedly antiquated proportions - that picking out differences and mocking the many and varied contestants 'on offer' is an acceptable family pass-time, designed to provide a welcome release from the troubles of everyday life - and, let's face it, what are shows such as these for if not the enjoyment gained from putting down the utterly hopeless?

'Well at least I'm not as bad as her!' seems to be the cat-call of the age, as our shameless fascination with the kitchen-sink dramas of others seems to be growing at a frenetic pace. We appear to be a nation intent on exploiting the shortcomings of others in order to garner some sort of validity for our own, and this does, in part, explain the greater need for shows such as Big Brother and the X Factor. It's like a giant national inferiority complex, and is something we should all be utterly ashamed of.

Many years ago, British people were proud, stable and stoic. We were revered the world over for the excellent quality of our education system, and national heroes such as Fred Housego - the taxi driver who won Mastermind in 1980 - proved to people just how valuable and commendable an asset intelligence actually was.

Yet in the appropriately titled 'Naughties', things couldn't have been any more different. Gone were the days of intellectual pride and attainment - such qualities are seen as utterly deplorable now.

Britain is instead the proud home of the vacuous, the vapid and the talentless, lauding the stupid simply for being stupid and lampooning the clever and the hard-working for being 'uptight' and 'snobby'.

We are, after all, the nation that elevated the rather unremarkable Cheryl Cole to the dizzying (and utterly meaningless) heights of 'People's Sweetheart', even after she beat up a black toilet attendant at a nightclub.

We are also the nation responsible for the very public character assassination of Gail Trimble, the beautiful Cambridge University student who got more questions right on University Challenge than any other single contender, and who was dragged through the dirt by internet bloggers solely because of this amazing achievement.

There is one person, however, who illustrates this drastic shift in attitude with all the crystal-clear clarity of a heart attack - Jade Goody. In 2002, she took the whole nation by storm almost overnight with her quirky catchphrases and unflinching stupidity.

Indeed, for the young girl from Bermondsey who didn't even know where 'East Angula' was, all her birthdays seemed to have come at once. She was cited as an inspiration for many of those from working-class backgrounds who wanted to achieve their dreams of stardom and, despite not finishing first, went on to become one of Britain's biggest and most sought-after celebrities, with her own perfume and salon.

In today's baseless Britain, where reality TV is actively teaching children to point out and mock the differences in others, it is perhaps easy to see why Jade Goody was taken as a role model over the intellectual-powerhouse that is Gail Trimble.

'If you know nothing, and see someone getting rich and famous precisely for that reason, you are instantly validated. You, too, could become the next poster girl for ignorance,' says the Mail On Sunday.

Melanie Phillips similarly writes that 'people would much rather see someone who is broken, flawed, a wreck, one of life's victims... because they themselves feel like that', and that 'intellectual superiority must be concealed since, if not everyone can have it, no-one must have it.'

This has a slick plausibility today, where children are groomed in to following the likes of Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton, solely because their particular caliber of fame is easily attainable and involves no real work or ambition. You only need to be beautiful, ignorant and obliging in the stupidity you expose on camera.

As a result of these decidedly low expectations, children are now emulating what they read in the glossy magazines and what they see on the television. They vilify modesty and achievement and idolize vulgarity and debauchery.

When they go to school they belittle those with reserve and intelligence, those who can work hard and get on in the world with a drive to succeed at everything they do. They look to people such as Cheryl Cole and Jade Goody as a fail-safe incentive to be as downright lazy and vain as they wish, and heaven help the poor kid who doesn't have the latest set of Girls Aloud fake eyelashes or a flawless spray tan.

The decent thing to tell the countless children who do aspire to greatness - perhaps the only thing we can tell them - is that justice will eventually run it's course and that those who learn to single-out and degrade from the trashy television shows they watch will surely suffer in the long run.

'Don't worry', we often say to the dispossessed classroom mule, the butt of everyone's cruel jokes. 'They'll end up jobless and worthless while you go on to achieve great things'. Sadly, in this day and age, the reverse is true. For while you work hard at achieving a first-class education, the baying mob from your old highschool will doubtless have been handed a televised platform to earn vast amounts of money for showcasing the same behaviour that made your life a living Hell, and the entire vicious cycle continues unchecked and unchallenged.

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