You are watching Big Brother

If you look closely at your television set you will find that somewhere, usually down in the bottom right hand corner, is a button marked "off". If you push this button it will deactivate your TV set. Alternatively, if a TV programme is not to your taste, you can switch to another channel.

But, for reasons I can understand (as a Daily Telegraph reader who hates its "little Englander" image while drawing some guilty nourishment from its understated voyeurism), thousands of people who perhaps should know better, do not press the "off" button when watching "Big Brother".

I do not watch the programme but I have hovered there a minute or so occasionally when flicking between channels. That's all you need - that and the acres of newspaper coverage it receives - to know what is going on.

There is no doubting that this kind of television stirs opinions. Even David Cameron, leader of the Conservative Party, has something to say about it.

British diplomats need to have an opinion too because rioters in India are burning effigies of Big Brother producers. Thousands of people who did not press the "off" button want the programme banned. Why? Because they regard aggressive comments made by some of the people in the house as offensive and racist.

I regard them as offensive too. But this is reality TV. It is not an episode of Eastenders or the Archers, the kind of dramas that present the acceptable face of multicultural Britain. Big Brother presents another reality: the dark underbelly of society.

Jade Goody, the protagonist in this latest row, displays the kind of brutal demeanour that can emerge from social deprivation in childhood. Her confrontational behaviour is typical of that portrayed every day on the Trisha or Jeremy Kyle daytime TV shows.

In America Goody would probably be dismissed as "trailer trash". In the UK , for no other reason than she has appeared on TV, she has acquired celebrity status, a source of abiding irritation for the Telegraph readers of Tunbridge Wells.

Goody is the reason that the middle classes send their children to private schools. There are thousands like her. Most of us, however, can feel smugly secure in our superior intellects and standards. This is a woman who thought the Mona Lisa was painted by someone called Pistachio. On the ABC social auditing scale, she would probably slip off the register.

But Jade Goody is not only part of reality TV, she is reality. Moreover, her xenophobia - and this is the big ugly secret that most of us would rather not share - is not confined to a single lower class. It exists at all levels.

Remember Alan Clark and his suggestion that immigrants should be sent back to "Bongo Bongo land" and the Duke of Edinburgh's comments about the "slitty eyes" of the Chinese?

You don't hear such comments in trendy London bars where people of all ethnic backgrounds mix freely in a spirit of intellectual liberalism. But racist language, and the attitudes that inform it, remain as a persistent stain on our national character.

There are those who will highlight racial differences in most societies. For those who support multiculturalism, who have struggled to close the racial divide, who try to understand, even celebrate, cultural and ethnic differences, to be reminded of such undercurrents is painful, hence the thousands of complaints against Big Brother.

But how can you complain against reality? If Big Brother does one good thing, it is to reveal the grubbier side of life that we prefer to sweep under the carpet. It strips away pretension to expose the squalor of ignorance that no amount of celebrity can conceal. The bad thing about Big Brother is that it invites us to wallow in its social meddling in the name of entertainment.

So what is Big Brother? Social window or trash TV? Both, I would say. In the meantime Big Brother exists and will continue to do so just as long as we continue to watch.

See a judge's opinion.