In sport, look no further than David Beckham, who loves his global adulation.
Again, to call him a celebrity is to bypass his claims to being a great and
determined soccer player and probably the best crosser of the ball that the
English game has ever seen. But why, as a celebrity, has he been quite so
big? The answer is to be found in the death of an even bigger one, perhaps
the ultimate one of her day, Princess Diana. In 1997, when her car crashed
in the Alma Tunnel in Paris, killing her and her boyfriend Dodi Fayed, it
looked to some as if the paparazzi pursuing her were responsible; speaking
at her funeral in Westminster Abbey her brother Charles Spencer noted the
tragic irony of the namesake of the Roman goddess of the hunt being hounded
to her own death. For the partisan public she was the greatest ever martyr
to celebrity, killed not by her own hand but by the agents of that
celebrity, the forces that lived by capturing and re-selling her image.
Her sons, next in line for the attention of the lenses, were too young, and
were to be protected from such close scrutiny until they had turned 21. It
left a mighty hole in the heart of the Royal soap opera; in fact it removed
its lead player at a stroke. It also gave the tabloids a serious headache;
whenever Di had been on the front pages – when had she not? – it put tens of
thousands onto the readership figures. The loss could never be salvaged from
the talent available – Margaret was a spent force, though wonderfully
colourful in her day; Fergie was virtually off the scene, Sophie Wessex was
oddly colourless, and the princes’ cousins were likewise too young. Yet hope
was at hand, and it was to be found in the form of a young and prodigiously
gifted footballer. He came from the starriest of all clubs, Manchester
United, the one that had given us the first true media superstar of sport
and Fifth Beatle, George Best. Better still, he was married to a pop star.
No matter that they were at the far end of the social spectrum from that
lovely, messed-up, tragic aristo girl (so brilliantly, so opportunistically
dubbed The People’s Princess by Blair); no matter that Posh Spice was the
unspecial confection of her own industry, the pair were new, rich, popular,
game, and extravagantly vulgar. They’d do. They would slake the now huge
appetite for celebrity. Becks even obliged by playing away with a text ‘n’
tell girl. It couldn’t have been scripted better.
In public life, in sport, in music and the arts, serious practitioners were
encouraged to be celebrities as well; that is, to flaunt their own fame, not
just for the manner in which it had been earned, but for its own sake. It
meant, for instance that a classical actor like McKellen could be
red-carpetted and chat-showed more lavishly than would have been the case a
generation earlier. There was a cost, naturally. The press felt more
licensed to write about their private lives; regardless of the parts they
played on the stage or the screen, they were now being excpected to enact
the role of themselves more fully and engagingly than ever. In McKellen’s
case, it meant that once he had outed himself and felt comfortable with that
position, he could command an enormous audience for his demands for
tolerance towards gay men and women. Others felt less emancipated, cowed by
Hollywood’s insistence that there shouldn’t be a contradiction between the
sexuality of the actor and the parts he played. That’s how important the
private narrative of the public individual had become, how tangled up with
notions of public acceptance of his work. If you want to play straight
roles, was the message, don’t be gay. Where this leaves the question of
pretence as part of the actor’s craft was another matter.
As Lenny Henry says, even as he discusses his life and his family, it was
never like this in the old days; no-one knew much about the lives of Ken
Dodd, or Tommy Cooper, or Arthur Askey. So too with sport. Back in the
fifties England soccer captain Billy Wright did a Beckham and married Joy of
the singing Beverley Sisters. It was front page news all right, but it was
never just the next installment in an Archers of hotel romps and leaked
texts. Politics too. Imagine what coverage there would now be of a Prime
Minister being cuckolded - for thirty years – by a bisexual Parliamentary
colleague who took to drink when his lover died. Few beyond Westminster knew
about precisely such a triangle made up of Harold Macmillan, his wife
Dorothy, and Robert Boothby, Churchill’s former parliamentary private
secretary. Imagine too the press treatment of a handsome young U.S.
president from a great political dynasty (Kennedy), whose behaviour was so
priapic that he would have made Clinton look celibate.
Some, perhaps most practitioners in the arts, sports and public life, would
like to find fame, and they live in sadness that they have not done so,
particularly at a time when it seems so ubiquitous and so stimulated by the
internet. Others, the minority, find it and are grateful to it for its
self-fulfilling and lucrative properties. Within that minority there is yet
another that hates the attention it brings and would like to back out. Not
to anonymity perhaps but to some lost state of relative obscurity. There is
something of these impulses in the rise and faltering of our
End-Of-Celebrity Prime Minister. He was jealous of the light that shone for
so long on the man in whose shadow he stood. For most of Blair’s tenure,
certainly until the Iraq war, there was a kind of effulgence about St.
Anthony. It sickened his enemies, but he himself was sufficiently blinded by
it not to notice them. When Brown took his place, the rays turned into an
unforgiving spotlight in which he came more and more to resemble the
sweating, awkward Nixon to Blair’s departed Kennedy, a martyr to the forces
that hastened his exit. Such are the liabilities of high office and the
double-edged nature of fame. Ask Steve McLaren, the disgraced former England
soccer manager.
Brown’s demand for seriousness assumes that such a thing cannot live alongside
a celebrity culture. When he cites the flourishing of literary festivals as
evidence of a desire for higher mindedness, he overlooks the part that
celebrity appearances have played in that popularity. And when seeks to
cancel the ardour for celebrity by declaring it dead, he is forgetting that
he himself has been a beneficiary of it, whether he likes it or not.
Politics may have become dull, even marginalised, in the ascendancy of the
consumer, yet Brown – dour, son-of-the manse, fiscally prudent, morally
compassed Brown – was at the heart of the most compelling human story of
modern British politics. His gravity, his air of authority, his credibility
were vital underpinnings to the tacky glamour of Cool Britannia. At the same
time Blair’s showmanship and charisma lent lustre, for a while, to the
government which he led. The two men required each other absolutely, yet
loathed the fact of their own dependence. They were as bound to each other
as much as Iago and Othello, as much as long-term lovers waging a war
between themselves, forever disputing the terms of some pact they may or may
not have made one rash evening in an Islington restaurant. Now that one of
them has left the relationship, or been forced out of it, (it depends whom
you believe), Brown has no Blair. As a result of this, he also has no Brown,
only Alistair Darling, and the fact is, it’s just not the same.
