I’m a celebrity, kill me now!
July 2009
I remember a couple of years ago sitting outside the local café with my boss during one of our extended Friday afternoon Cappuccino fuelled lunches. The topic of conversation was of the demise of one of the most influential pop icons of the 20th Century: Michael Jackson.The once legendary King of Pop was being hauled up for the second time for child molestation charges, he was apparently on the verge of bankruptcy, stories about his strangeness were becoming more bizarre, he was dangling babies from balconies and his face wasn’t even funny any more. He had literally transformed himself from a relatively normal African American male into a pasty faced middle-aged white woman. Basically he had become the King of Poop.
I remember saying to my boss (who is something of a rock god himself don’t you know) ‘That bloke will never die an old man. He will either commit suicide or be murdered.’ To which my boss replied ‘Or he’ll have a heart attack’ sighting his unnaturally frail and mangled form not being able to cope with the constant stress as a reason.
Here we are then little over two years later and he has either committed suicide or been murdered. Either way the end result was a heart attack. I wish I had put a wager down (I don’t wish to appear insensitive but I just am so that is how it comes across).
This tragic news came a few weeks after the UK lost one of its most treasured celebrities: Jade Goody. And this brings me to my gripe this month: Why do we care so much?
Let’s face it; Michael Jackson produced some brilliant songs during the seventies and eighties but spent the last twenty years of his life only really getting any sort of credible publicity for doing weird and controversial things. Let’s look at the list: He bought the bones to the elephant man, he built a shrine to Liz Taylor, he slept in an oxygen chamber, he adopted a Monkey, he paid Brooke Shields to go out with him, he married (and very quickly divorced) Elvis Presley’s daughter, he claimed to be Peter Pan, he invited young boys to sleep at his house, he had three children who were all white, his own skin colour changed, he had enough plastic surgery to enable him to be melted down and recycled into a Madam Tussauds replica of himself, I mean the list just goes on.
Now I know that the majority of these facts are probably made up, most likely by him, but this just goes to emphasise my point. You don’t need to be a pop star or sports person to earn hero worshiping status any more. People just like controversy.
Jade Goody was much the same (although not to quite the same level of insanity as Michael Jackson). She became famous for appearing on something called ‘Big Brother’ which basically involves a bunch of attention seeking morons sitting in a house for a couple of months and embarrassing themselves in front of the whole country. Quite simply, she became famous and ultimately became a millionaire by being stupid and annoying!
How did she earn her living then? As far as I can tell, she would wake up in the morning and spout the first insane thought that popped into her pea-sized brain and then sell her story to The Sun, Hello or some other god awful magazine that is only read by people with an IQ of a cheese sandwich.
And another thing: What is it with this reality TV craze? I never saw the point of it in the first place but it has been done to death now and is just annoying. What with Big Brother’s Got Talent, Strictly Come the X Factor on Ice and I’m a Has Been Put Me On Telly we are just creating more opportunities to demonstrate how pathetically low the average person is, whilst simultaneously making the rest of us dumber as a nation by being forced to watch such rubbish.
Personally, I would find much more entertainment in watching, say, a return to public hangings and burning witches at the stake. Authorities would have a field day with the crop of celebrities running amock. I know I would tune in to watch Kerry Katona being flogged.
What is it with this celebrity culture and why is the country so fascinated by these insane and talent less people? Why do we care if Katie Price and Peter Andre are getting a divorce? What’s the big deal about Madonna mail ordering her children? Why are we even surprised that Britney Spears is flashing her gash to the paparazzi? And please, for the love of god, tell me, what is the point of Paris Hilton? Seriously, there are more important things going on with the world.
Even their deaths are guaranteed to draw in the gormless. You can be sure that the conspiracy theorists will start claiming that Michael Jackson faked his own death and is living the high life in the Bahamas somewhere ala Elvis (And I’m sorry to all you Elvis freaks out there but seriously, if Elvis had really faked his own death don’t you think he would have faked something better than a hamburger related toilet accident?).
Jade Goody’s death was tragic, no doubt about that but MJ had the right idea: Keep an air of mystery about it. Was it murder, suicide or an accident? Look at some of the other examples of celebrities who have profited from their own deaths: Kurt Cobain; was it suicide or was Courtney Love just that good? Michael Hutchence; did he hang himself or was it an S&M masturbation accident that went wrong? John Lennon; Mark David Chapman the crazed fan or Yoko Ono the money grabbing Beatle killer? Who knows? The only thing I know is that the world would be a better and more intellectual place to live if these half-wits weren’t clogging up our airwaves but then of course we would have fewer things to make fun of and I would have had less to write about this month.
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