Working class hero

I don't have a television. I'm not trying to be smug; I never say: 'Oh, I didn't see the Britain's Got Talent finale, I was reading Proust, nibbling on Madelaines, as I usually do of an evening.' But I do think I get more done, read more, write more. Yet I surf the net more, and when I go to pubs and friends' houses with the TV on I tend to stare slack-jawed and rapt, prepared to watch any old crap. Case in point, New Year's Day over at friend's, between a couple of Muppets movies (which you'll agree are genius) we managed to watch a marathon of Dog: The Bounty Hunter, a reality TV show which follows ex-con Duane "Dog" Chapman and his family of bounty hunters as they chase down Hawaiian crims, the point seemingly to lecture to the perps about how they should get their lives together after they are run to ground (Dog and family are born-agains, and it is all about redemption, blah, blah, blah).

Round about way to say that I am often unfamiliar with what is going on in telly-land. So I was more than a little surprised when I read in the paper to discover than Scottish Socialist Party founder Tommy Sheridan is currently in the Celebrity Big Brother house alongside C-listers and has-and-never-really-beens like Mini Me, Coolio and that Swedish woman who shagged Sven.

Tommy essentially spearheaded Scottish opposition to Thatcher's poll tax, got jailed a couple of times for protesting the nuclear sub base at Falsane, was elected to the new devolved Scottish Parliament in 1999 (a feat in then Labour dominated Scotland) and swept in with five other SSP MSPs in the next election. So an all around right-on socialist. I met him a couple of times in Scotland and he was charismatic and unquestionably committed to the cause, enough so that I voted SSP twice.

Then the fall: a scandal in which the News of the World claimed he had cheated on wife Gail led to a rupture of the SSP, with colleagues testifying against him in the libel trial after he sued NotW. The NotW's main case rested on witnesses saying Sheridan had group sex in Cupid's swingers club in Manchester. The women who were said to have shagged Tommy were all rather unattractive, wife Gail exceptionally pretty. I mention this because during the trail I was living in Glasgow and an old woman came up to me as I was standing at a bus stop and we had a wee blether as you do in Glasgow. 'Ya ken this Tommy Sheridan rubbish, son?' she asked. 'I dinnae believe it. Why go out for mince when ya have steak at hame?'

Anyway, Sheridan won the case - mainly on Gail's testimony that he "had more body hair than a gorilla" and none of his supposed paramours mentioned it. His exultant, tub-thumping speech outside of the courtroom about beating part of the Murdoch empire was brilliant.

And it saddens me that he is on Channel 4, being filmed 24/7, debasing himself, not back out there fighting for the workers' rights. Maybe he believes he can get his message out to a wider audience on CBB, but that doesn't work and he will end up looking like a fool. I mean, didn't he see George Galloway in that cat suit last time? He may need money - the NotW are appealing. But maybe it's more about being in the centre of things that politicians crave, that the old dictum that politics is show business for ugly people is true. Or, at least, show business for people with extremely hairy backs.