I said CULT.
Anyone who knows me (well, anyone who has been drinking with me) knows that my tablethumping rant topic of choice after a few shandies is The Cult of Celebrity. I climbed onto that particular highhorse about 10 years ago and I still don't want to get off. I love to wax lyrical about how 'Celebrity Culture' is ruining British Television, the film industry, the aspirations of our 10 year olds. It probably caused the hole in the ozone layer.
I try not to talk about current affairs too much on here, certainly not flash in the pan news scandals (Sachsgate anyone? Dull as f*ck), as they're bound to be old news in no time at all. Also, I'm a total narcissist and prefer to talk about myself.
Today's news topic of choice though, is poor old mad virginal 'Hairy Angel' - Susan Boyle. She's in The Priory apparently, driven to a breakdown by the pressure of being on Britain's Got Talent. Blogger after blogger is jumping on the "Poor Susan" bandwagon criticising the viewing public and our obsession with celebrity for building her up and then doing a classic British U-turn and cutting her down. Now don't get me wrong, I think the British public excels at a post-hype backlash, we hate to see anyone getting "too big for their boots" (well, actually we're seething with jealousy that it's not us being all popular and making money), so I'm not really sure why anyone's surprised that she's been turned on, and I guess I do feel a little sorry for her. However, there's one obvious (to me) point that no-one is making.
Susan Boyle put herself into Britain's Got Talent.
No-one forced her to go to the audition. She went along of her own accord. It's not even as if it was the first series of BGT and no-one knew what it was going to be like, we've had 2 years of this unmitigated shit to sit through. It's not even as if this is the first ever Reality TV show in the world, we know how they work (and if you don't, go and find a copy of 'Dead Famous' and 'Chart Throb' by Ben Elton straight away). She was presumably well aware of the Reality TV Machine when she tooled up and belted out the Les Mis song. So a little of this is her fault. True, no-one foresaw quite how extreme the attention on her was going to get, but the nation being surprised and outraged by it all is a tad rich, to say the least. Week after week we get our knickers in a twist about how cruel reality tv judges are - of course they are, it's what they're paid to do - but nobody forces the deluded, moronic contestants to take part, they know what they're letting themselves in for. It's an entertainment construct, about as close to 'reality' as my wedding to George Clooney this summer.
We're rapidly running out of culture in this country, as TV Stations fill their schedules with cheap entertainment and axe all their drama (which let's face it wasn't exactly highbrow in the first place), and we're turning into a bunch of rhesus monkeys who like to jump on whatever bandwagon of criticism is in vogue, be it Expense Scandals, Gordon Brown Is Probably A Bad Man, or Unibrowed Freaks From Scotland With A Good Set Of Pipes But A Fairly Tenuous Grip On Sanity. Our unhealthy obsession with The Cult of Celebrity is as poisonous as it ever was, but for god's sake do me a favour and don't turn the virgin into some kind of a martyred saint.
