Miss-Delectable
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Downside of heading into the TV jungle - Opinion - News - Belfast Telegraph
I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here continues to attract huge audiences, despite the incessant media criticism that relegates the stars to C class status. The jungle backdrop obviously plays only a minor part in the interplay of character that decides the winner and I'm continually enthralled by the idea of how a deaf person would cope with the isolation and clash of personalities.
The subject came up one morning during a GCSE English lesson from The Lake Isle of Innisfree, the Yeats poem about a man who went to live in a small cabin beside a lake in the west of Ireland and found the peace that " comes dropping slow".
The deaf students were horrified at the idea of spending time in such a situation and told me the isolation would be intolerable and a portable TV would be a must! The sounds mentioned in the poem: the bee-loud glade, the cricket singing, the swish of the linnet's wings, meant absolutely nothing to them; and, as for the wonderful assonance and consonance in the line 'I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore', it was beyond their comprehension.
So even if we could find a deaf person famous enough to pass the criteria of selection and adaptable and self-sufficient enough to overcome the loneliness, how would he or she cope when communication problems are exacerbated by early tropical darkness and as well as missing out on the sounds of nature we are cut off from the casual chat and banter of everyday life.
Then there are the rigorous physical tests required of the contestants, which many deaf people would find next to impossible. The nerve of balance is situated in the ear and those of us who lost our hearing in later life have great difficulty in keeping upright in some situations. I became deaf after fever as a boy of 11 and years later I still have great difficulty walking in the dark or on rough ground and occasionally stagger like a drunken man! Deafened folk like me have to learn to balance all over again by eyesight and it's never the same. A friend once told me how she managed to get over the rope bridge at Carrick-a-Rede but found the experience so nerve-wrecking she was unable to face the return journey and a boat had to be ordered to bring her back.
Deaf people would be repulsed just as much as the hearing by the disgusting foods they have to eat in some of the trials, but the more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that material things were not the decisive factor in disqualifying deaf people from participating in the contest. It all boiled down to attractiveness of character and our deafness puts too many barriers in the way of getting to know the other contestants well enough in those conditions for our personality to shine through.
I read once that loneliness is the pain of being alone whereas solitude is the joy of being alone and I think this philosophy applies to the contest in the jungle as well as the man in his cabin at Innisfree. Helen Keller hit the nail on the head when she said that deafness is worse than blindness because blindness cuts you off from things but deafness cuts you off from people.
Helen's courage and perception is all the more remarkable as she was both deaf and blind and lived in the age before the many electronic advancements such as subtitles and text phones that are helping to make our lives so much richer and happier. It makes you wonder if it's personality or character that makes one a winner on I'm a Celebrity ?
I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here continues to attract huge audiences, despite the incessant media criticism that relegates the stars to C class status. The jungle backdrop obviously plays only a minor part in the interplay of character that decides the winner and I'm continually enthralled by the idea of how a deaf person would cope with the isolation and clash of personalities.
The subject came up one morning during a GCSE English lesson from The Lake Isle of Innisfree, the Yeats poem about a man who went to live in a small cabin beside a lake in the west of Ireland and found the peace that " comes dropping slow".
The deaf students were horrified at the idea of spending time in such a situation and told me the isolation would be intolerable and a portable TV would be a must! The sounds mentioned in the poem: the bee-loud glade, the cricket singing, the swish of the linnet's wings, meant absolutely nothing to them; and, as for the wonderful assonance and consonance in the line 'I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore', it was beyond their comprehension.
So even if we could find a deaf person famous enough to pass the criteria of selection and adaptable and self-sufficient enough to overcome the loneliness, how would he or she cope when communication problems are exacerbated by early tropical darkness and as well as missing out on the sounds of nature we are cut off from the casual chat and banter of everyday life.
Then there are the rigorous physical tests required of the contestants, which many deaf people would find next to impossible. The nerve of balance is situated in the ear and those of us who lost our hearing in later life have great difficulty in keeping upright in some situations. I became deaf after fever as a boy of 11 and years later I still have great difficulty walking in the dark or on rough ground and occasionally stagger like a drunken man! Deafened folk like me have to learn to balance all over again by eyesight and it's never the same. A friend once told me how she managed to get over the rope bridge at Carrick-a-Rede but found the experience so nerve-wrecking she was unable to face the return journey and a boat had to be ordered to bring her back.
Deaf people would be repulsed just as much as the hearing by the disgusting foods they have to eat in some of the trials, but the more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that material things were not the decisive factor in disqualifying deaf people from participating in the contest. It all boiled down to attractiveness of character and our deafness puts too many barriers in the way of getting to know the other contestants well enough in those conditions for our personality to shine through.
I read once that loneliness is the pain of being alone whereas solitude is the joy of being alone and I think this philosophy applies to the contest in the jungle as well as the man in his cabin at Innisfree. Helen Keller hit the nail on the head when she said that deafness is worse than blindness because blindness cuts you off from things but deafness cuts you off from people.
Helen's courage and perception is all the more remarkable as she was both deaf and blind and lived in the age before the many electronic advancements such as subtitles and text phones that are helping to make our lives so much richer and happier. It makes you wonder if it's personality or character that makes one a winner on I'm a Celebrity ?