Goading them on

I’m getting sick of celebrities. I refuse to take Pete Doherty’s music seriously because he’s such a fraction of a human being. Michael Jackson made a ‘comeback’ performance this week which consisted of someone else singing his songs while he looked on in stony-faced adoration.

Then there’s the bottom of the barrel from which Lindsay Lohan and the like are scraped from. Not getting your face in the papers recently, love? Then why not ‘lose’ your knickers a few times? And there’s the ludicrous Mills-McCartney circus which is Britain’s finest ever example of two bitchy people briefing the same journalists about how spiteful the other one is. Brilliant.

I’m reading Piers Morgan’s book The Insider at the moment, and it’s hilarious how celebrities play up to the media. Princess Diana was apparently one of the few who knew how to play the journalists at their own game. But she was in the unusual position of having the tabloid editors need her. For many of today’s celebs, it’s the other way round.

Lohan is only news if she gets her knickers in a twist or invites some eejit into them. Doherty is never in the news because he has a new album out. And McCartney’s music career isn’t the reason he’s on the front page of papers 40 years after he was any good. They know this, and play up to it. In what was one of the most vomit-inducing pieces of journalism I’ve ever read, I found Richard Madeley using his sex-life to promote the You Say, We Pay DVD Game in today’s Observer. Puh-lease.

The newspapers know what people want. Stick ‘celebs’ on the front page and circulation goes up. Stick ‘news’ on the front and you’ll be collecting your P45.

Which makes you wonder… Why do we want to read this shit about nobodies, who seem only to be famous because our reading habits make them so?

: 19 Nov 2006 19:48 |  Tags: Celebrity News Newspapers Tabloids |  Comments (1) |  Report a problem