Celebrity And Reality Game Shows

The very depiction of how far society has fallen. I have more contempt for people who religiously watch this drivel than I do for those who watch soap operas (and that means it’s a lot, by the way). I’m sure you’re aware of the sort of programs I mean; the likes of ‘Big Brother’ and ‘I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here’. There are likely to be more but it’s too painful to do the research if I’m honest.

What, exactly, is a celebrity? A quick definition to get us started: “A celebrity is a person who is easily recognised in a society or culture.”

That creates a fairly broad brush picture which captures a variety of people from sport, business, royalty, music, film etc. What you’re talking about is someone who’s ‘famous’ for participating in a pastime or career which places them in the public eye. That is all. So why are they supposed to be fantastic role models? Someone explain that to me please. I don’t care how many records Wayne Rooney has broken and I care even less about how many bedrooms his house has or what shade of red his Ferrari is. The ability to kick a ball with unusual accuracy doesn’t suddenly transform him into a paragon of virtue. In the real world it is less impressive than the correct use of grammar (which is a skill I imagine he’s yet to master). However, it’s entertaining to some and so he is paid handsomely and is thrust in front of school children as an example of what can be achieved with one’s life...

Except, of course, he shouldn’t be. It’s not his fault. He started young, like most prodigious talents, and very quickly had everything he needed handed to him. Having personal assistants is all very well when you’ve spent twenty years building a business empire but when you’re a teenage footballer, suddenly earning more money a week than most people do a year, it’s a little different. Reality, I’m sure, can become warped.

Again, I don’t mean to pick on Rooney; the same is true of many ‘celebrities’. You only have to look at Lindsay Lohan for someone who had the start of a career people would kill for, before she flushed it all down the toilet. Drink, drugs, more drink, mixed with drugs (probably), multiple prison sentences and trips to rehab pretty much ensure she doesn’t see much work anymore. Of course actors have recovered before, but I can’t really see Lohan performing a phoenix from the flames resurrection in the same way Robert Downey Jnr did.

‘I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here’ (from the snippets I’ve had the misfortune to see) really ought to be called ‘I Once Was Once On Page Six Of The Sun For Sleeping With A Footballer, Please Make Me Famous!’. Looking back at the ‘celebrities’ who have been involved in the past it seems a sad mixture of those who were famous (ten years previously) wanting to recapture some limelight and those who seem to have reached a plateau at ‘z list’ celebrity status and think a couple of weeks eating worms on the TV will boost them up a few levels. It’s this abominable excuse for entertainment that we have to thank for thrusting Kerry Katona and Katie Price back in front of the media. Thanks a bunch. All we needed was a bout of Katie (a.k.a. Jordan) Price banging on about her fake tits and how much she loves her kids while remaining under the illusion that she’s a supermodel. Most shocking, I’ve learned, is that viewing for this show peaked at almost 25% of the UK population. Words fail me, except to say I’m in favour of mass genocide if it means purifying the gene pool.

Back to ‘Big Brother’ then, which is not even about celebrities (however loosely you define the word). It’s about ordinary, every day people. For crying out loud. At least, I imagine, on ‘I’m A Celebrity…’ you could have fantasised about Jordan falling into a pit of alligators. No, on ‘Big Brother’ everyone is unknown and they’re in a house (not a jungle), which provides all the ingredients necessary to create possibly the dullest program ever. It’s ‘reality’ TV apparently. Reality? I often move into a strange house with a group of people I’ve never met before, all of us from disparate backgrounds. It happens all the time for weeks on end and is completely normal! Is it bollocks. Who cares who’s going to do the cooking or whether Dave thinks Carly’s fit but Jennifer thinks she’s a racist bitch? Yes, I know; loads of people apparently care. Only this time it’s not just the UK population which needs sterilising because this format has gone out world wide, creating Big Brother shows in dozens of countries. Apparently the Dutch version came first, which makes sense (if you’re sitting in a stoned high) but it doesn’t offer the rest of the world excuse.

I remember when the first series started in the UK, in 2000. I was twenty five and couldn’t understand why people my own age were obsessed with it (“tune in later to watch Alice brush her hair for twenty minutes!”). I was at my peak going-to-the-pub-and-falling-over age and everyone was acting like they were pensioners, devoid of any motivation to leave their sofa. This show ran for anything up to ninety four days at a time too – that’s three bloody months. Were people rushing home to spend a quarter of their free lives watching other people purposely doing nothing with their’s?

It would be slightly more interesting if there was the chance of Al Pacino coming to blows with Eminem over the evening’s meal allocation because they’re actual celebrities, but why does anyone care what these nobodies are doing? Big Brother just seems to be a stepping stone for moderately attractive, unknown girls to prance about wearing next to nothing knowing full well that desperate teenage boys will be wanking themselves into a frenzy and they’ll be a deal for a couple of photo shoots with FHM or Nuts at the end of the show. These girls will pop up in the paper for a while and then disappear without trace. How many pictures does The Mirror need of a drunken girl falling out of a nightclub, high on coke? There are enough genuinely famous people doing that to satisfy the demand, surely?

It all goes hand in hand with society’s fascination with so-called celebrities and what they’re doing at every waking moment. Glossy magazine exist to satisfy that very curiosity so that desperate consumers can see what dress Keira Knightley wore to the Oscars and whether the resident fashion ‘expert’ thinks she made a good choice. You can learn the nationality of Angelina Jolie’s next proposed adoption and whether Madonna will try and beat her to it. So what? Why should anyone care? You shouldn’t, but that doesn’t mean you can get away from it. It’s plastered all over the news stands, the TV and the internet. I do my best to ignore it but that doesn’t stop random people who I’ve never seen before being thrust before my eyes because they’re pregnant or they’ve had an affair. I just don’t care. At least in this day and age I can choose one of the three million other channels on TV or close the web browser and do something more worthy of my attention.