Listen
to Alan Franks talk about interviewing the famous
You can always tell when a fashion is entrenched because reports of its
passing begin to circulate. It has happened with everything from hairlines
to hip-hop, and now it has happened with fame itself. Except that it hasn’t,
not really. It has happened with celebrity, which has been passing itself
off as fame these past fifteen years and almost got away with it.
When these pendulums swing, they do so with the vigour of a wrecking ball, so
that the four-syllable word denoting something to be feted is trashed down
into the abusive sounding four-letter one, Sleb. To drop a name straight
away, it was Lenny Henry who drew my attention to this. No-one, he said,
wants to be famous any more just for being famous. Well, people like Henry
and his wife Dawn French would say that. They’ve worked hard and marketed
their skills very effectively to become household faces. You could hardly
blame them if they wanted to confirm the distinction between their sort of
fame and the sort which you can get just by hanging out in a Big Brother
house or a get-me-out-of-here show.
Of course it’s official now, the End of Celebrity, and its death surely raises
some questions about the future of fame itself. It was a very famous, if
non-celebrity politician, Gordon Brown, who pronounced the body cold. He may
not be a comedian, at least not intentionally, but he too had his
self-interested reasons for decrying easy eminence. It was April this year,
he was still Chancellor, still gagging for the top job after a decade in
waiting, still second fiddle to the ultimate celebrity premier and first
rock ‘n’roll PM. To downgrade the commodity which Blair had in abundance was
to advance the overlooked claims of the homme serieux - himself. Courting
danger in a way he could not have foreseen, he said: “I think you can see
that, in other countries too, people are moving away from that (celebrity)
to what lies behind the character and the personality. ”
Unfortunately for Brown, we took him at his word and found that behind his
clunking-fist exterior was a vain but surprisingly small, humourless
presence that made tough old sketch-writers wince to see him ridiculed as a
Mr. Bean figure – famous for being farcical - and by the acting leader of
the Lib Dems. The Old Labour tendency, typified by Tony Benn, have always
had a vital point when they call for proper attention to Issues rather than
personalities. It has been a plea, and a very welcome one, for an end to the
tyranny of frippery – the obscuring of thoughtful argument by the wittering
of fatuous determinants: Coldplay or Arctic Monkeys; Arsenal or Chelsea;
boxer or Y-front. But it has missed the point in the process: the
personality is the issue, or at least a big part of the issue. After six
beige years of John Major, who could blame the electorate, or the Labour
Party, for going with the plausible young looker with the flashing teeth? It
was the physiognomy, stupid. The fact that he didn’t look like Robin Cook,
that he had a family, unlike Gordon Brown; that he did not seem weird or
waspish, like Peter Mandelson. Here at last was normality, or at least a
very good impression of it, after decades of hectoring, or pomposity, or
elocuted diction. So successful was the ploy that now all three major
parties, with the exception of Blair’s own, have a leader made in his image.
The high noon of talent-free celebrity arrived with Jade Goody, who reportedly
made £4 million from her appearances on the Big Brother reality TV shows
between 2002 and 2007. By the end of this period a poll in the magazine Heat
ranked her as the twenty-fifth most influential person in the world. She had
after all been watched by a nightly audience of seven million as she and her
family took up residence and were waited on by a bizarre “staff” that
included Michael Jackson’s brother Jermaine, the truculent old film-maker
Ken Russell, whom no-one seemed to know, and Bollywood starlet Shilpa
Shetty. It was Goody’s relationship with the last of these, and her
allegedly racist slurs, that made them both take up residence on the tabloid
front pages. Goody may eventually have become famous for being famous, but
from the outset it was clear that she was bringing nothing to the party in
the way of gifts, charms, looks or brains. She seemed self-obsessed and
uninformed, shamelessly so. She thought that Cambridge was in London; that
East Anglia, or “East Angular” was abroad; that Saddam Hussein was a boxer.
She was there to be derided, dissapproved of, identified with your worst
friends, ultimately voted out of the house, but not before she had become
some sort of star in spite of herself – an anti-star. She was easy to mock.
What couldn’t be denied was that out of the forced cohabitations of the
house came crises, flare-ups, walk-outs, break-downs that were more
compelling than a lot of TV so-called drama.
Two years ago a survey of one thousand girls showed that while almost a half
saw TV presenter Abi Titmuss as a role model, and one third the artificially
endowed Jordan, only four per cent wanted to be like Germaine Greer, seven
per cent Anita Roddick and nine per cent J.K. Rowling. The killer statistic
was that just 11 per cent said they would be happy with unrecognised
achievement, with 89 per cent favouring the option of being famous for being
a celebrity.
How did it ever come to be like this? One possibility is that the consumer was
gaining power as never before. Freedom of choice was the ideal at the heart
of the settlement, and the customer was more right than he and she had ever
been. It was clearly visible in the political process too, with a less
tribal, more biddable electorate summarily wiping out Blair’s lead in the
polls over the single issue of the petrol tax protests in the summer of
2000. And it became just as discernible in the trading of celebrity. The
thing had become commodified, manufactured in industrial quantities. And if
it could be acquired by someone who couldn’t sing, dance, play an
instrument, write, paint, make jokes or look nice, then a very long queue
was going to form at its outlets. It was a peculiarly democratic
development; fame was no longer the sole prerogative of the famous.
America, naturally, has been trading in the commodity for years. If your life
is not visible state-wide for at least the Warholian fifteen minutes on a
daytime confessional show about eating/dieting, drinking/drying,
marrying/divorcing, kissing/telling, then frankly my dear. Such
confrontational drama has been packaged still further with the growth of
courtroom shows as Judge Judy, People’s Court, Divorce Court, in which
actual people take their actual grievances before the bench – and the
viewers at home. Who needs name actors when the beak is played by herself –
Judith Sheindlin is a distinguished former family court judge – and the
parties in dispute are played by the parties in dispute?
The US is still ahead of us. While our Royals can be considered the ultimate
celebrity family by having a profile more pronounced than its attainments,
the Americans effectively elect their princes and princesses through the box
office. They may lack statutory authority, but when Oprah Winfrey can turn
Barack Obama’s Iowa poll deficit into a lead over his Democrat rival Hillary
Clinton by declaring her support for him at a rally in Des Moines, who needs
statutory authority? As she herself said, it wasn’t as if she was a
political activist, and this was the first time she had thrown her weight
behind a political candidate in this way. If that influence were to be
repeated at the next primaries, despite the reverse in New Hampshire, it could
be feasible to say, at the end of the year, that a TV celebrity – a massive
one admittedly - was largely responsible for the making of the president.
So strong has been the lure of the four-syllable c-word that it has been easy
to ignore the fact that those who have it might just have earned it in the
most brilliant, brave spectacular manner. They were famous for being
outstanding at what they did and, as a result of that fame, they were
corralled into the crude enclosure of celebrity. To call Ian McKellen, or
John Mortimer or Darcey Bussell a celebrity is not so much to damn them with
faint praise as to upstage their acting, writing, dancing prowess by the
popularity these have brought them. The overlapping of celebrity with earned
renown has been increased by the willingness of some – eagerness even – to
act like celebs. It happens in all the walks; in politics, for example.
Blair leaves Downing Street in the teeth of a deeply unpopular war yet goes
on the road for a three-month gladhanding binge like an actor manager
bidding farewell to the regional reps that loved him. Hard to imagine his
recent predecessors doing the same, mired in failure or compromise as most
of them were. Perhaps Mrs. Thatcher would have done, but her party never
gave her the time. For Blair however, by the end resembling his own tribute
band (even though he had gone solo), it had to be a blaze of publicity
rather than the coming of sunset.
You could add the names of Boris Johnson, Lembit Opick and William Hague,
though less so now. None could resist the lure of the TV quizz show Have I
Got News For You, with its openings for quick repartee, even genuine wit,
and obscenely larger viewing figures than Parliament. Johnson’s celebrity is
a potential problem for him in his struggle to wrest the London Mayoralty
from Ken Livingstone. Those people who have fallen for his affectation of
bumbling toff might lose interest when he has to do solemnity.
