In 1963, a quarter of a million Americans voted with their feet by attending a rally at the Lincoln Memorial and helped beget the 1964 US Civil Rights Act. In 1994, South Africans used their first democratic elections to empower the ANC and abolished apartheid. And in 2007, Britons got their very own referendum on racism – albeit in the more frivolous form of television viewers voting against a reality TV star for bullying a rival contestant.

It might seem ridiculous to compare landmarks in mankind’s struggle for racial equality with the infamous racial bullying incident on Channel 4’s Celebrity Big Brother. But blanket media coverage, and the kind of mass public hysteria not seen since the death of Lady Diana, lent the affair a significance even the holier-than-highbrow cannot deny.

Reality TV contestants are expected to have bust-ups. That’s kind of the point. And bullying and bickering among Big Brother housemates is de rigueur. But when the squabbling took on racist tones, this decade’s social angsts came crashing together in one stroke: race relations and the challenges of multiculturalism; the obsession with celebrity; new media and entertainment formats that have made ordinary people instantly famous; the continued descent of the British press into witch-hunts and scorn orgies; and the triumph of entertainment over enlightenment. The Celebrity Big Brother affair even threw the social issues that dominated the Twentieth century into the mix: good old class conflict and the scars of imperialism.