The cult of celebrity – get me out of here!
I’m sorry but I just don’t get it.
I’m well aware that it is probably just me and no doubt it is a genetic flaw in my personality – but is there anyone else out there who, like me, just doesn’t get the cult of celebrity?
You see I just don’t understand why so many people are fixated by so many dreary and untalented individuals just because they appear on TV. Now I have to confess at this point that I have never invested my hard earned money in magazines like Hello and Heat – and the reason is simple. It is because I have absolutely no interest in what so-called celebrities might be doing and even less interest in staring at airbrushed photographs of them at incestuous garden parties.
Now don’t get me wrong – I have no problem with people who are famous for very legitimate reasons (though I still have no desire to look at pictures of them in trendy magazines) but I do have problem with people who have been labelled celebrities just because they happen to have appeared in tiresome and odious reality TV series like ‘Big Brother’ or ‘I’m a celebrity – get me out of here’. For some unfathomable reason, far too complex for my simple brain to understand, these individuals seem to believe that just because their faces have appeared somewhere in the media that they have somehow miraculously acquired overnight celebrity status. In short, they tend to believe they are suddenly ‘more important’ than the rest of us.
When I was at secondary school and thinking about careers one of my best friends decided that he wanted to become an Actor and to his credit worked his way through acting school. After a lot of trudging around London he started to get small bit parts in plays and a few low-key TV appearances. As far as he, and I, was concerned he was an accomplished Actor but nothing more. Today just by virtue of a few TV appearances he would be called a “Star”-but what does ‘Star’ really mean? Is it just a fancy name for what we used to call an Actor or Musician?
My complete bewilderment about celebrity status doesn’t just stop at a mind numbingly boring magazines however. I have to confess that even if the Queen, Brad Pitt and Robbie Williams decided on a whim to come and visit my street I probably couldn’t be bothered to even venture out of my front door. This is not because of any rudeness or disrespect on my part, it is simply because I would be tempted to treat them with the same level of civility as if they were the postman or the guy at the chip shop.
I know that a lot of people might find my attitude to celebrity a bit weird but I guess that’s just the way I am. If you were to ask me to name those people that I look up to and admire then I suppose that my definition of celebrity would be people like the nurses who do an amazing job for very little pay, the soldiers fighting the roots of terrorism in Afghanistan, the unsung heroes who every day risk their lives to help others and other individuals who work for the benefit of humanity without the need to label themselves as ‘stars’ as far too many vain ‘celebrities’ do.
So I’m sorry to all you wannabe pseudo-celebrities desperate for a place in the next series of X factor or Big Brother, and I’m sorry to all the wannabe rap artists desperate for us to decipher their garbled and unintelligible lyrics but I really don’t want your autograph and I don’t really care about what you might want to say to the media about your astonishing rise to fame.
For me, fame and recognition have to be earned and until you are featured in Heat magazine for doing something that has made the world a better place then I think I’ll just stick with The Beano.
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