FRIENDLY REMINDER: celeb lives matter (honest)
the old days
celebs enjoying themselves at a celeb event… for celebs
Okay, got you there. Of course they don’t matter. Celebs – you remember them… those attractive or vaguely talented or gobby types who would commandeer screens, airwaves and print media, sometimes for the purpose of promoting ‘the next big thing’, yet more often appearing for no greater reason than to thrust a product in your face, ask you to dip into your pocket to support a campaign, or just to virtue signal for the hell of it.
We (that’s the collective ‘we’ for us, as a society, but actually a better definition of ‘we’, here, is ‘they’, as in ‘they, the broadcast media’) made celebrities out of all sorts of hopeless cases. Fat people, thin people; the super-smart, the dynamically dense; singers and swingers, chefs and refs. There were celebs who were sportspeople, who when they stopped being sportspeople, we made even more famous by getting them to talk about other sportspeople! And then the actors… oh wow, how we fawned at the bevy of stars who essentially made a career out of some rather peculiar game of ‘let’s pretend’.
“If she’d had the misfortunate of tuning into hospital radio that morning as the needle went down on that slice of sycophantic nonsense, it may well have hastened the old girl’s demise.”
However, this was before Covid-19 swept through the PR world with all the appeal of a fart in a bath. Almost overnight, we realised that watching Nish Kumar on another vitriolic late-night rant about Boris Johnson’s midrift didn’t didn’t pay the electricity bill. We discovered that witnessing Gal Gadot and her pals warble through an excruciating rendition of John Lennon’s Imagine wasn’t actually speeding up Aunty Ethel’s return home from hospital… in fact so turgid was the three minutes of misplaced meandering around the belligerent beacon of virtue-signalling that, if she’d had the misfortunate of tuning into hospital radio as the needle went down on that slice of sycophantic nonsense, it may well have hastened the old girl’s demise.
And the sight of Sam Smith struggling desperately to cope with the narcissistic nothingness of lockdown reminded us all that celebrities, influencers… whatever you want to call them… were just normal, pretty banal, reassuringly dull people.
In the weeks that have passed since we’ve ditched all reference to celebrities (although most of us are happy to reconnect for the occasional Roy Keane rant). We live much simpler lives now – we forage largely on the opinions of actual people we know, although we’ll also happily have it out with a no-mark on Twitter who isn’t being paid to trot out some soundbite about global warming, or BLM, or those Choco Leibniz biscuits you can’t walk past without succumbing to temptation.
The era of celebrity officially ended in the spring of 2020. The next film you watch at the cinema will star your mate Jason from The Red Lion; Lindsay, the lass who owns the nail salon, will exceed even Romesh Ranganathan levels of appearing on every blessed panel show going; and next year’s Premier League top goalscorer is Dodgy Dean, that ex-school mate you can’t shake off on Facebook. The celebs are no more – don’t need them, don’t want them. Done. Over. Forgotten.
…
Second thoughts, Jason is a nightmare on the fine ales… get the celebs back.
In fact, more than that, get the celebs back for the good they do. Okay yes, the arrogance, the ‘bubble’, the showmanship, the stupidity… let’s be honest too, the way they make us feel about our own inadequacies – those bits aren’t great. But consider the entertainment, the glamour, the distraction we all need in our lives and, perhaps more than even that, the aspiration.
The reason we invest in the world of others in popular culture is the same reason girls play with princesses and boys want to be Biggles. Escapism is a concept that enriches and informs the soul - it stretches the elastic and makes us believe there’s a different day ahead tomorrow. The world of entertainment and, more pertinently, the celebrities who occupy it, are in essence the fuel that pushes our imagination and our optimism.
“We should continue to allow these influencers to influence us… because at the end of the day, they are good for us”
What Coronavirus has taught us about celebrities is that they’re not quite the holy grail of the human race we painted them out to be. For the most part they’re a bunch of plonkers desperately grappling their way through the mist in much the same way we are; yet in what they do, they offer us an elevation onto another emotional, psychological and sometimes physical plain; one that motivates, energises and inspires our own lives. It is for this reason we keep coming back to the well, and it’s for this purpose that we should continue to allow these influencers to influence us… because at the end of the day, they are good for us.
Up to launching 24kilos, I’ve run three businesses that have regularly engaged ‘talent’ . Experiences have included emergency trips to buy quail eggs for a former member of S Club 7, shelling out several thousand pounds on a series of banal tweets from a reality star on the merits of household insurance, and driving the length of the country to deliver an overnight bag to a cast member of New Tricks… who didn’t say ‘thanks’. All rather demeaning, all genuinely pointless in the grand scheme… and yet all, in very small, very silly ways, feeding the beast that gives our consumption of entertainment relevance and reflection.
We bemoan the cult of celebrity – but we’d be desperately lost without it. Now who’s got John Barrowman’s number?