Celebrity

Here's something you're going to notice before too long.

We've become obsessed out here with something called celebrity. No, that's not quite right. We've become obsessed with people called celebrities. In fact, it seems to be have been forgotten altogether that the word celebrity was ever just an abstract noun.

(We'll come back to those when you're eleven. No, when you're eight. Okay, when you're ten.

Actually, your mother says I'm to stop bothering you about abstract nouns.)

In the old days, longer ago than you can yet imagine, over fifteen years ago in fact, people still became famous (or attained celebrity) much as they had done for thousands of years: by doing something worthy of other people's attention. Famous people, usually, were famous for doing something the rest of the people thought was artful, or funny, or moving, or beautiful, or courageous, or patriotic. And so on.

The British MP George Galloway,
who we'll come back to in a moment.

Generally, a famous person was famous for doing something of this kind in a way that was considered exemplary or extraordinary. Thus, you might have expected to become famous for being, for instance, a very gifted composer (like, say, George Gershwin) or for making important discoveries in physics, like Albert Einstein.

On the other hand, it was perfectly possible to achieve fame by doing something that people enjoyed, like acting in films, in a way that was merely passable, like Humphrey Bogart, as long as you stuck at it. There was nothing wrong with this. Humphrey Bogart, people acknowledged, was a famous film actor (or movie star). This didn't necessarily imply greatness of any kind, merely that acting in films was what he was famour for.

There was even an entire category, called infamy, for those who gained notoriety by doing bad things. Sometimes, these really were evil things (Adolf Hitler would at one time have been called infamous). Perhaps more commonly, though, infamy came to those who did things that were technically illegal, or at least morally reprehensible, but which people secretly found exciting, like aristocratic murderers. The point is that people made distinctions.

There was never any need for fame, of course. It must always have made people feel a little bit better, or they wouldn't have bothered with it, but nobody needed it. It used to at least make sense, though. It was exclusive, because it recognised that without exclusivity, it had no meaning. And it had a kind of order that ensured it was proportionate. It was proportionate, I think, to the universality, if you know what I mean, of what a person was famous for; a designer of gardens might become somewhat famous, but only to other garden designers and those who could afford to employ them.

I'm afraid this has all changed.

We still have movie stars, of course. We still have great composers too, but they are not often famous. There are human beings in space right now, but almost no one knows what their names are.

What we have now are celebrities, and they are everywhere.

Well, the celebrities themselves are in one place at any given time, like the rest of us, but their images, moving and still, are everywhere. This is because everywhere the celebrities go, they are pursued and surrounded by cameras. (This is something called metonymy, or possibly synechdoche, which we'll return to some time in your mid-teens. Of course, they're really pursued by people carrying cameras.)

The people following the celebrities and carrying the cameras are called paparazzi, a word derived from Paparazzo, the name of a character in a film by Federico Fellini called La Dolce Vita who was a photographer of this kind.

Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg in a famous scene from La Dolce Vita

When celebrities pass through airports, or go jogging, or go to a juice bar in Santa Monica, or fall out of a pub in Croydon, the paparazzi are there, snapping relentlessly. When celebrities get married, which they do a lot of, or go to the beach, the paparazzi are in a helicopter or a boat, with a telephoto lens, snapping relentlessly.

They sell the pictures they take to the many magazines, television channels and Web sites that exist partly or wholly to display them. And these exist, of course, because a huge number of people want to see them. And want to see a lot of them. There needs to be a constant supply. Also, they need to get more and more revealing. It used to be enough for a celebrity to be photographed in a bikini. A bikini shot no longer suffices unless it reveals that a celebrity has Piled On the Pounds After Her Baby, or is Way Too Thin, or has cellulite (I really don't know; ask your mother).

And this brings us to what's called a paradox. These celebrities we have now: most of them are nobodies. Sure, some of them have been in soap operas, or had a parent who was the British Prime Minister. But most of them? They just seem to emerge, for no apparent reason. Once they become celebrities, though, their entirely ordinary status is obliterated, and their every move (not to mention their cellulite) becomes a subject of intense interest.

The paradox is that people want to see photographs of a celebrity's cellulite because it reassures them of their ordinariness, of their human vulnerability, even though they were manifestly ordinary before everyone decided, for no real reason, that they were a celebrity.

It's all a bit puzzling, and sometimes a bit depressing. There's no great harm in it, but there's no great good in it either, and it consumes an awful lot of time, energy and money.

What brought all this on, by the way, was the news the British MP (Member of Parliament) George Galloway is to appear on a television programme called Celebrity Big Brother.

George Galloway is a controversial politician. The controversy surrounds his relationship with a country called Iraq (which we'll almost certainly be returning t0). Specifically, it is alleged that he opposed severe trade sanctions against that country (a position I agreed with) because he was, indirectly, paid to do so by the Iraqi government. These allegations have not been proven, but they, and the matter of the sanctions against Iraq and its subsequent invasion by the United States, are all pretty serious.

In contrast, Celebrity Big Brother is the opposite of serious. The word sometimes used as the opposite of serious is frivolous, but Celebrity Big Brother is less than frivolous. It has so little meaning or value that it sucks these things in from all around it, like a black hole, so that even normally intelligent newspapers are forced to write about it as if it were something and not nothing.

It is what's called a spin-off of another television programme, simply called Big Brother, whose premise was that ordinary people would be filmed living in a house. No, that's it; that's the show. Then other ordinary people, the viewers, would decide each week who they liked the least and that person would leave the house. No, I'm serious. They've made five or six series of this.

The ordinary people who appeared in Big Brother are a good example of what we were talking about earlier, since many of them became celebrities by virtue of having appeared in this television programme about ordinary people, and then went on to have their cellulite photographed so that people could be reassured of their ordinariness. Yes, I know. I don't quite know what to say about it either.

So, George Galloway, who may or may not have been involved in gross corruption related to one of the most serious ongoing political and humanitarian crises in the world, is going to be filmed pouring milk on his cereal, scratching his armpit and getting up to go to the toilet with other celebrities until the viewers decide they don't like him any more.

For this, he will of course receive a substantial fee. This means that the controversy over whether he sold his political support to a corrupt regime (which, years ago, might have brought him the infamy we were talking about above) has enabled him to sell himself. In other words, he is now a celebrity.

What does all of this mean? I'm not sure. But what I think it might mean is that all kinds of distinctions are collapsing; that it no longer matters why someone has come to our attention. That perhaps soon there will be no movie stars, or suicidal rock idols, or Cambridge-educated spies, or venal and disgraced politicians.

There will just be celebrities, and all we will know about them is that we want to see them, and see more and more of them, until we tire of them (or vote them off). Then we'll want to see someone else. No one in particular, just someone else.

It mightn't bother you all that much, when you get here. You might dismiss all this as just another of your father's foibles and obsessions. You might be right.

And who knows? You might be a celebrity.