Jo: I'm not racist, honest

Unsurprisingly, during her eviction from Big Brother last night, Jo O'Meara insisted that, you know, she's not racist at all:

After being shown TV headlines about the furore and clips of her behaviour, O'Meara admitted: "It does look very bad, it does."

But she told host Davina McCall the edited version of events distorted what really went on.

"Looking at it like that, it looks absolutely terrible and it didn't feel terrible in there," she said.

"I'm not a racist person at all. My cousin is married to an Indian man for one, and my cousins are half-Indian and their family is with me all the time."

We're not entirely sure why your cousin having chosen to marry an Indian bloke would somehow "prove" you're not racist, any more than if you had a cousin who was a Neo-Nazi would mean that you would be a flag-waving fascist. Being able to demonstrate that you spend time with one person of a different background isn't proof of anything. Paul Dacre's Daily Mail managed to run a decent campaign calling for justice for Steven Lawrence, but even Dacre wouldn't try and suggest that this somehow cancels out the newspaper's usual xenophobic stance.

Pushed - as much as Davina McCall can push - over the way she treated Shilpa Shetty, Jo tried to demonstrate how much she loves Indians:

"I'm not going to deny that Shilpa did aggravate me a lot - I don't know why. You can't click with everybody you meet.

"It's not because I'm racist at all. I think she's a very beautiful, very elegant woman."

Davina asked Jo why she sat there cackling during what Channel 4 seem now intent on describing as an "argument" between Shilpa and Jade Goody (Goody's diatribe, more honestly) rather than trying to calm the situation down - O'Meara suggested, somewhat lamely, that she giggles when bad things happen.

Oddly, she wasn't giggling when she was shown the newsreel of global reaction to her behaviour.

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