fame

A friend told me a few years back that they had heard about a survey done on a class of 30 young girls, aged 15. When asked what they wanted to do when they left school, a staggering 27 answered: “I want to be famous”.

They did not outline what they wanted to be famous for, or mention wealth, just famous was enough. As Erma Bombeck put it so well, many people confuse fame for success, but “Madonna is one; Helen Keller is the other.”

Since the pandemic success of TV shows like Big Brother and X factor, people are clamouring in droves to be sprung from the anonymity of the masses, even if it is just for five minutes.  As Neal Gabler pointed out in his book Life: The Movie, “once we sat in movie theatres dreaming of stardom, now we live in a movie dreaming of celebrity.”

20 years ago the only people who knew the names of Michelin star rated chefs were the people who could afford to eat at their restaurants. Nowadays, everyone has a favourite TV chef (mine is still Keith Floyd – R.I.P), as television has now given the power to them to transform kitchens (as well as demand premium dollar at their own) and train stars to cook in front of the nation.

Of course this pisses off the elitists out there more than the Cornetto re writing of O Sole Mio, but it has not been the first time art and entertainment have clashed, in fact, never the twain are likely to meet. Back in the 1920’s Jose Ortega desperately wrote. “The characteristic note of our time is the dire truth that the mediocre soul, the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be mediocre, has the gall to assert its right to mediocrity, and goes on to impose itself where it can.”

We are living today in Ortega’s worse case scenario, where hairdressers, hotel inspectors, interior designers and just about every profession has been dragged into the limelight over the last ten years, and is now trading as entertainment.

And there are always those who are prepared to do anything to get in front of the lens, like agree to appear on the Jeremy Kyle or Jerry Springer show. While others are satisfied to sit in the “live audience” like roman hecklers in a theatre, provoking the players to go further into debauchery. Is it really religion, or entertainment, that is the opiate of the masses?

Even television news is now a form of entertainment. Whereas I can remember a time when the news was a half-hour slot at nine, now it has it’s own channel, with handsome presenters piping information out from warzones, premiers and the global life opera on continuous stream.

When the 9/11 events took place in America, many close to me commented that it was like watching a film, albeit a terrible tragedy.  As the horrific details unfolded, news teams worked around the clock to keep you gripped, bringing in new heroes and villains as each hour peeled back, flooding the screens with horrific images to repulse and engross the viewer. (Conspiracy theorists have gone one step further, by re-viewing the images and asking us to see all in a different light. The plot thickens still, and captivates all.)

As with coverage of the death of Diana, or the OJ Simpson trial, news coverage applies the techniques of theatre to supply its demand. Neal Gabler outlines this by saying “religion, education, literature, commerce, warfare, crime, everything, has converted into branches of show business, where the over riding objective is getting and satisfying an audience.”

Thousands of buildings have been destroyed in Iraq since 9/11; hundreds upon thousands of people have lost their lives in wars all over the world. The only reason we do not see it broadcast with quite the intensity as we did 9/11, must be because broadcasters don’t think we can identify with humans there as well as we can with humans in the West.  It still seems significant to say how many English people die in a tragedy, as if where these people were born made a difference overall.

But bottom line, newspapers need to sell newspapers. TV news companies need viewers. And as with all other forms of entertainment, audiences need some point of identification if the news show is really going to engross them.

Asides from watching the news, there is nothing I find more soul destroying than being in the company of Eastenders. I find the characters representative of the most depressing outlooks on life imaginable, and the storylines contrived by writers who make macabre look optimistic.

Yet, an estimated 9.6 million people tune into every episode, most confessing to be addicted to the storylines. People talk about characters as if they are in their own families, and incidents within “the square” as if they have happened in their own backyard.  

I once asked someone why she liked watching this absolutely depressing fiction, and she answered, “it makes me feel better about my life.”

“What life?” I replied in my head.

An average of 15.6 million viewers tuned into every episode of X factor, and the opening series to Big Brother captivated 7.2 million in its first programme. However, viewing figures dropped so low that producers finally axed the show in 2011. Have we grown tired of channel CCTV?

Perhaps so, but as Lord Byron said in his day, “fame is the thirst of youth”, and not one easily quenched these days. He went on defining fame as, “the advantage of being known by people of whom you yourself know nothing, and for whom you care as little.”

Perhaps we should teach more Byron in schools.