Feminist Greer quits Big Brother

LONDON - Feisty feminist icon Germaine Greer has walked out of the UK Big Brother House after just four days of being cooped up with a bunch of B-list celebrities in the popular reality television show.

Greer said on Tuesday "I'm leaving over specific issues but best for everyone if I don't discuss them" before packing her bags and saying farewell to her housemates who range from Sylvester Stallone's mother to fashion model Caprice.

Her decision to appear in the Channel 4 show caused huge surprise as the 65-year-old Australian had in the past made no secret of her scorn for the rash of reality TV shows that have proved such ratings winners on British television.

She once said watching Big Brother "is about as dignified as looking through the keyhole in your teenage child's bedroom door."

"Reality television is not the end of civilisation as we know it; it is civilisation as we know it. It is popular culture at its most popular, soap opera come to life," she said of the shows seen by up to 10 million viewers a week.

But the author of "The Female Eunuch" clearly felt like outspoken Janet Street-Porter in "I'm A Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here," that it was worth the risk of exposure and ridicule.

Street-Porter sprang to Greer's defence, saying: "I'm flattered Germaine Greer has followed my lead and decided that reality television is something to be embraced, not derided."

She said that Greer, surrounded by showbiz celebrities who certainly could not match her brainpower, had confounded her critics by being "dignified, not too bossy, keeping her thoughts on politics to bite-size easily digested chunks."

In Big Brother, brainchild of Dutch media tycoon John de Mol, the contestants are voted out one-by-one by television viewers who get to dissect their every foible through 24-hour surveillance.

Greer, billed as the oldest person ever to have appeared in a British TV reality show, has said she had no regrets, brushing off critics who accused the outspoken academic of dumbing down.

The blunt-spoken Greer, who took a spice box, earplugs and a sleep mask into the Big Brother House as her three most essential ingredients, said: "I am 65-years-old and supposed to be a pensioner. I've got to strike a blow for the old ladies."

But after four days watching horse racing pundit John McCririck sulking over the lack of Diet Cola and trying to untangle the tortured syntax of Bez from the band Happy Mondays, she clearly decided life on the outside was the saner option.

- REUTERS