IS BIG BROTHER THE BEST SHOT AT REDEMPTION – CAN WE BE FRANK?

"Big Brother House… this is Brian (because Davina’s jumped ship).  Please do not swear".

It’s a bit late not to swear, in all honesty.  Many have come the cry - why the hell is Frankie Dettori dignifying Celebrity Big Brother with his presence for what could amount to the next three weeks?

Celebrity Big Brother, for heaven's sake.  That well-known temporary repository for non-celebrities.  That one, yes?  You know it?  You ever heard of many of the others on there this time either?

Actually, let’s put to one side for a moment the most well-worn wisecrack aimed at this long-running franchise, as it's not helpful.  After all, whilst the likes of X-Factor competitor Rylan Clark (already busily re-christening the jockey as "Frank" on launch night), former Eastender Gillian Taylforth, Ryan “Toadfish” Moloney, one-time soccer hard-man Neil Ruddock, Tricia Penrose from Heartbeat and Steps frontwoman Claire Richards may all stretch some people’s definition of “celebrity” to breaking point, the majority of them will at one time or another have performed their respective day jobs in front of regular terrestrial television audiences greater than any to have watched Dettori go about his. 

In comparison the Derby has typically played out to between two and three million viewers on the BBC in recent years (though peaking at 3.3m during its Frankie-less 2012).  At the highest end of that range, that’s still less than a third of those regularly tuning in for X-Factor 2012 in what’s been generally accepted as a bad year ratings-wise for ITV1’s cash cow (or cash Cowell, even).  Compared to many he’s sharing his newly found incarceration with, Dettori’s celebrity - if equated simply as being one and the same as drawing a sit-at-home audience - thus falls short.

But that’s not a major concern in and of itself.  A wider future mainstream celebrity, ubiquity, recognition, call it what you wish, can be attained regardless of the level of pre-existing public profile if a tenure in the house goes especially well.  It's on such a platform that champions in the regular, non-celebrity incarnation of Big Brother have founded subsequent careers – none more successfully so than current host Brian Dowling, rarely too far between engagements on stage or screen since himself landing series two of Channel 4’s run of the reality show in summer 2001 as a hitherto unknown air steward. 

There’s time enough for Frankie to be elevated to previously uncharted levels of mainstream star status, if viewers take to him, but that’s if viewers are able to take to him on the evidence of what they see.  The Frankie Dettori now being beamed out from behind the fifth telly button is no more certain to be as well-rounded, accurate, fulsome and flattering a representation of him as equivalent depictions of other celebrities in many similar British reality shows over the last decade and a half now.  If he didn’t know that before, he ought to have; or at least someone ought to have advised, citing examples that are hardly tricky to call to memory.

As recently as this end of year just gone, Nadine Dorries’s rationale for deserting her Mid-Bedfordshire constituency for I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! was to reach out to the voting populace to a degree that no other popular media outlet or political organ would ever afford her.  George Galloway’s participation in Celebrity Big Brother almost exactly seven years ago was similarly predicated on the belief in politicians using any available opportunity to communicate with people. 

The former never really got the chance, being drummed off the show by the voting public at the earliest opportunity, whereas the most meritworthy oratory highlights of the latter during his own (and longer) reality-show tenure were largely thrown to the cutting room floor whilst his notorious cat impersonation and savaging of Michael Barrymore’s drinking demons were retained.

Both Members of Parliament would have wanted – and maybe if especially naïve, expected – a free window during their respective incarcerations within which they could make their points, and their capital, reasonably unopposed and taking up as much time as they required.  As if that was ever going to happen.  Party political broadcasts were never going to be allowed to fill the airtime, regardless of how much there was to fill - Dorries’s and Galloway’s political agenda carried insufficient weight set against the editorial agenda (in short: "to entertain") of their shows’ producers and editors.

Dettori alone, meanwhile, will know whether he intends to pick a time during his stay to explain in detail what prohibited substance he tested for at Longchamp in September, what prompted him to take it, what remorse he feels and how he intends to bounce back.  He may have set his stall out to tell the lot on-air, and with a drug infringement more inherently interesting to a tabloid broadcaster (as it's probably not too unfair to label Channel 5) than political dry bread, he may stand more chance of his doing so appearing precisely as he desires. 

A fair trial-by-television is nothing to be certain of receiving, however, and Dettori’s public perception going forward – and indeed his public rehabilitation, with the Daily Mail website's more excitable posters already regarding him as heinous a miscreant as Lance Armstrong – could largely live or perish on how kindly he is edited by the Endemol backroom team.  That’s a big, uncontrollable thing to have to put one’s trust in, and “edit” really is the word here, as a quick check of Channel 5’s schedules suggests coverage of Celebrity Big Brother this year errs more towards fast-moving one-hour bursts rather than continuous, interminable live streaming.

What doesn’t want to be making the cut in those edited highlights packages are Dettori rants and fall-outs.  It's already as much as the sport of racing can bear to have one of its two most recognisable personalities tarred as a bad-tempered, unsympathetic piece of work, largely as a result of his own Celebrity Big Brother experience eight years previously.  It doesn't need another.

But reality show makers love conflict, and on the assumption that at least some of every year’s contestants are chosen on the grounds of their likely ideological, ethical, temperamental or intellectual incompatibility with each other, some ugly and heated exchanges of views may well prove to be in the offing once again this time.

If there’s bait to be taken and a fiery temper to lose, Dettori is no less likely than any to do so.  On entering the celebrity house this evening there came the tacit admission to Dowling that his being “very Latin” could prove his undoing, something which chimes with wife Catherine’s newspaper interview description in 2008 of the 42-year-old’s mercurial temper (“he’s up and down all the time… and can get in a bad mood every five seconds”).

Much will be determined by how, if at all, he reacts when the tiger’s tail has been tweaked once too often by the inanity of the tasks set the housemates, by the demands of entertaining an unnaturally small immediate audience around him for longer than usual (even Wolverhampton's meetings get more than 12 spectators and finish after 15 or fewer races), or by one of that number’s interest in the drugs offence proving too intrusive.

Our man should never have left himself open to such provocation in the name of entertainment as faces him in the bizarre hyperreality of the Celebrity Big Brother house.  Having done so, though, escaping the show however many days from now with dignity intact - if he does - would be a feat to rival the overwhelming majority of any of those which he's ever achieved on horseback.  

Good luck, "Frank".