The Next Celebrity Death

I’ve always being fairly celebrity-blind. I don’t forget faces but names are fleeting at best. Last year I spent a train journey chatting to (the charming) Kevin from Grand Designs on Channel 4 and it wasn’t until Doncaster that the penny dropped that he was a star and by then he’d shared his plans for a new series and Fizzy Pigs with me.

I think it’s time this strange celebrity blind spot or as I like to think of it, “blessing”, of mine should be made more widely available. It’s time for the death of celebrity as a concept – we don’t need really don’t need it and without it my life will be that bit easier… won’t it?

So, who is it exactly that needs celebrities? Well, the music industry for one and the vast amount of profits they cream off, supposedly to find and develop new talent as if talent needs funding. The problem is, talent is doing it for itself. Listen to Tom Robinson’s show for a night (or subscribe to his podcast), cruise MySpace or listen to BBC6 and you’ll hear what I mean. Contrary to the X-Factor evidence, there’s loads of actual talent out there.

The press and fashion industries both seem a shade too comfortable with celebrities. And it seems to me that at the opposite end of celebrity-love is blatant contempt for you and me. Us plebs. The fashion industry’s love of re-touching photos is actively harming your and my daughters, projecting a body image that simply doesn’t exist onto every screen and magazine cover and surface that can be bought. Ralph Lauren (and his kind) are evil misogynist prats, but you knew that already.

The simple fact is this. We don’t need celebrities any more. In the olden days  their “output” could be carefully crafted, manipulated, pumped out and charged for – but nowadays, they are on twitter, facebook and their blogs… And you know what, they’re nasty, thick (and often racist)  talentless twits.

The celebrity spell has been broken.. you really wouldn’t want to hang around them – and don’t. Even Stephen Fry, surely a contender for most affable and interesting bloke this side of the grave, shows himself up to be a bit lacking and, well, human, like us and nothing like the Wildean version of him that celebrity confers (Even just mentioning Stephen Fry increased my likelihood of using a word like “confer” by 200%). In “real life” he’s a let down…. And should be, thank god.

And not only do we not need celebrity, they don’t need to be that ridiculously rich. Even Radiohead (a band who, in my opinion have avoided that crap album syndrome, apart from Kid A) don’t need THAT much money, because nobody does. Just because you’ve ended up with that much money doesn’t mean you earned it (or that you should keep it).

You might say that there are “useful” celebs, that act as a figureheads, like that dumbo Jamie Oliver and that School Dinners campaign, except, thinking about it, common sense should have sorted that one out really. Feeding kids saturated fat and sugar was always a crazy scam, I mean, that’s what an inreasingly litigious society is for -where were the Kids Fed Fat and Sugar Scam headlines? They were on page 23 after the Katie Price coverage.

There has to be enough twenty-something chubbies with diabetes and heart problems to bankrupt the entire primary and secondary education system by now. Schools would change quick sharp to healthy school dinner diets after a few stinging compensation court cases. So, really, thinking about it, we should be ashamed to have needed Jamie Oliver.

There does seem to be a difference between stars and celebs. Stars are like rye-bread where Celebs are white sliced… and, like rye-bread, you don’t ever really fancy it, it just does the job.

But at the end of the day, celebrities aren’t sustainable. In order to be a celeb, you’ve pretty much got to have at least five massive fuck off cars and spend half your time in an aeroplane snorting coke. And then, record companies, having to cover expenses like getting your hat flown first class to New York have too invent lunacy like the “Home Taping is Killing Music” campaign and Lily Allen to pay for it.

I think that we might still need figureheads though, but like carrots, your figureheads should be locally sourced (say within a 20 miles radius of the required figure-heading activity)… And you definitely can’t import them.

So How Do We Lead A Celebrity Free Life Tom?

I haven’t a clue.. You could try to boycot anything that is remotely celeb-driven. I do, but that’s not deliberate.

We should all relentlessly push for transparency and the publication of celebrity wages, particularly of talent at the BBC . For example, Jonathan Ross is quite funny but not a million pounds funny… He’s about £50,000 funny.

And how about maybe….

• Let’s all agree not make new celebrities… let’s make friends instead. Only go to see live acts that would return the favour.
• Go to a gig, buy a CD at the end… let’s all reward the creative process but not the creative industry
• Buy a book written by someone you know
• Go to the Library, I’m not sure why, but go anyway
• Go to a comedy club … invite the comedian home…
• Find B Movies and watch them. Don’t watch any film with anyone you know in it.
• If you see a celebrity in the street, take a picture of the person next to them and ask them for their autograph.
• Buy a slightly over-priced handmade mug
• Use software recommendation engines such as Last.fm rather than endlessly brain-washing yourself with stuff you’ve heard before
• Scour your local gig listings for something worth going to see. If you can’t find anything – TAKE A RISK!

Instead of worshiping celebrities, we should celebrate small fish in smaller ponds – it’s simply more humane, I mean, most celebs whinge about a celebrity life anyway, let’s save both them and us the pain.

And lastly, in this war on celebrity, we should all maybe stop wanting to be one and grow up.