I have to confess that I’m not much of a reality TV fan. I remember being glued to ‘I’m a Celeb’ back in about 2002 but these days, the whole genre tends to leave me cold. However, when I read reports that Vinnie Jones is said to be donating a percentage of his eye-wateringly high Big Brother appearance fee to charity, it got me thinking. Given that this is rumuoured to be one of the last outings of the over-cooked TV show, what would motivate a man like Jones to enter?
The obvious answer of course is cash! If you can believe everything you read, Jones is the highest paid celebrity in there. Just goes to show the lengths some companies will go to avoid z-listers 
Call me naive but surely a man of Vinnie Jones stature doesn’t really need to be doing Celebrity Big Brother? He was in Hollywood not so long ago!
Whether he needs the money or not is ours to only speculate. When you learn that he’s allegedly donating a proportion to Help for Heroes, does that change your perception of him? His teenage son is in the Armed Forces so it’s not an unreasonable descision. But is it a calcualted one? I for one would have more respect for the man if he openly admitted his reasons for participating in this gastly show and then quietly gave a donation when out of the limelight again.
photo credit: Alex E. Proimos
This leads me onto another train of thought … given that times are tough; non-profit organisations are feeling this as much as any other; should we be accepting money from whichever source sees fit to offer it to us? I’m not suggesting for even a nano-second that Big Brother is evil or even unlawful but what if a charity were offered money from a less reliable source?
Should a Christian charity accept money from National Lottery funding? The argument goes something like this … the lottery is gambling, we bible folk don’t gamble therefore we shouldn’t use money from lottery gambling to pay for our project. A more sophisticated argument might suggest that whilst money is money and God can use what He likes from whatever source He likes, for a Christian organisation to accept gambling money is tantamount to drinking tea in a brothel: the intentions might be honourable but it looks bad!
However, when I discussed this whole issue with the lovely Give A Brick treasurer, he reminded me of a story in the bible where some mean and nasty kings paid for a wall that was being built by God’s folk. He equated the mean and nasty kings with today’s lottery and said that maybe it was OK to go down that route. I can’t help but think that ‘maybe’ is a very loose word What do you think?
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