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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783961085 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Elliott & Thompson |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2015 |
| Series: | LBC Leading Britain's Conversation |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 144 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
So You Want to be a Celebrity?
By Steve Allen
Elliott and Thompson Limited
Copyright © 2015 Steve AllenAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78396-108-5
CHAPTER 1
What do I mean by celebrity?
By 'celebrity' I mean the current phenomenon of being famous for being famous. A person who started off as someone 'ordinary', someone any of us could know, someone who could live next door to you. Someone who doesn't necessarily have any skills or talents for the kind of things that would traditionally have led to fame. The person on the celebrity panel game who makes you think, 'Who the hell is that?' This is a modern celebrity. This is what, it seems, anyone can be. As long as they're prepared to put in the work.
This particular breed of celebrity probably started with Viv Nicholson in 1961. She famously won £152,319 on the football pools (a way of betting on the outcome of several football matches on one day) and when asked what she would do with it, declared loudly that she would 'Spend, spend, spend!' The papers loved her devil-may-care attitude, which went against the grain at a time when nobody had any money. The press followed her every move – the shopping trips, the holidays. The truth was, her husband had actually won the money and, until his death four years later, he kept her under control. After he died, though, she was on her own and, within a short time, she had spent what today would be £2.87 million, and was declared bankrupt. But she'd had a taste, and over the next couple of decades she kept desperately trying to rekindle the fame she had relished. She recorded a single (called 'Spend, Spend, Spend'), sang 'Big Spender!' in strip clubs and wrote an autobiography. In the late nineties, a musical based on her life ran successfully in the West End, giving her notoriety – her celebrity – one more spin.
We also had The Krays, who, had they ever left prison, would certainly have had their own celebrity. As it was, they were the stuff of legend, with people saying how 'they'd never hurt their own', seemingly not caring that they'd hurt, and even killed, people who were somebody else's.
And then there were the Great Train Robbers, who were famous for stealing the equivalent of £46 million from a Royal Mail train, and bashing the driver over the head with a metal bar. It was 1963, and already celebrity was coming in the strangest of forms. There was a film about one of them, Buster Edwards. He was played by Phil Collins and it was quite a big deal of a film, but I still used to see him every day at Waterloo Station, selling flowers. I thought that must make him happy, but then I wondered if he missed his 'exciting' life of crime, and that's why he ended up hanging himself in a lock-up garage. This would be our first hint that a certain kind of celebrity may not always be that great.
In the 1980s, Cynthia Payne – Madame Cyn, as the press called her – was famous for running a brothel in suburban south London. She was very good on chat shows and her naughtiness titillated a nation raised on Carry On films. How much of what she said was true we never got to grips with, but nobody seemed to mind, and of course the story eventually culminated in a film about her, Personal Services, starring Julie Walters. It was a good film, and Cynthia seems to have been content with her allotted time in the spotlight. She faded politely from our consciousness without embarrassing herself.
And so to now, the twenty-first century, ushered in by the BBC's Castaway 2000, which was the first programme where they sent people away – in this case for a year, to a remote Scottish island. We have to assume these people didn't want to become celebrities, that their intention was to take part in a fascinating experiment, but, as we know, that's not how it ended. One person caught the public's imagination and lo, we had our first reality-TV star in Ben Fogle. His family weren't new to public attention as his mother had been famous; she'd starred with Tommy Steele in Half a Sixpence back in 1967. So maybe that helped, but whether it did or not, Ben Fogle was the first real breakthrough reality star, and the TV channels were quick to realise how compelling – and cheap – this kind of television could be.
We had the first Big Brother that year as well, which was also a kind of experiment – put a load of strangers in a house filled with hidden cameras, don't let them out, and see how they survive. The first one was brilliant, because nobody understood the game yet, and the behaviour of the contestants was genuine and fascinating. Once they came out, however, the attention they all got was unparalleled – our innocence was gone, and we were primed for an explosion: the advent of the new celebrity.
CHAPTER 2What celebrity used to mean
In the old days, celebrities were famous for doing something. Achieving something. For acting or singing, designing clothes, even writing in some cases. There were rock stars, pop stars, but the biggest stars, the ones who really were larger than life, were the movie stars. People like Rita Hayworth, Joan Crawford, Rock Hudson, Jimmy Stewart, Marilyn Monroe, Bob Hope, Deanna Durbin ... The list is endless. And we had British ones, too – Diana Dors, Julie Christie and Andrews, Alec Guinness, Richard Burton, John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Terry Thomas ... Cary Grant is technically one of ours too, as is Liz Taylor. Movies went around the world, so the stars who were in them became huge. And without the Internet to tear them down, we didn't know their secrets; they kept their mystery. They were untouchable and special and we adored them, just as their publicity demanded we should.
The pop singers of the day were big news, but not as big as the movies. Bill Haley and His Comets were the first American rock and roll stars to tour Britain, which they did in 1957, to almost hysterical crowds. Less than twenty years later they were back doing The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club – a naff British variety show in the mid-1970s – with hardly anybody caring. Even back then, celebrity could be a cruel mistress.
A British movie star who did very well in Hollywood was David Niven, notable for writing the bestselling celebrity autobiography The Moon's a Balloon. After its runaway success, the autobiography became another way for actors to tell their stories the way they wanted them told. How easy things were before the Internet. If not for the original gossip columnists, Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, who wrote what they wanted when they wanted and didn't care who they hurt, the old-time stars really would have been able to keep all their secrets. Until their children were old enough to tell their own versions, that is. This happened most famously with Joan Crawford's daughter, Christina, who wrote about what a terrible and abusive mother Crawford had been in her bestselling memoir, Mommie Dearest, published in 1978. It shattered Crawford's reputation and caused a terrible rift in their family, with two sisters declaring it a fabrication, while their brother agreed that it was all true. Perhaps it's better these days, with the accusations coming from strangers sitting at computer keyboards.
What all these stars had was longevity. One good way of achieving this is dying young – not the best career choice, but it can work. Elvis Presley is the obvious one; had he not died young, would he be doing Vegas six nights a week? Probably. Look at Sinatra, a star who was still working until the day he dropped. You'd think, with the huge back catalogue of singers like these two, their forever stardom was always assured, and maybe that's true, but remember they didn't necessarily own the rights to their material, and that's where the cash is. When Elvis died, there was very little money in the pot. It had all been spent, and he owed a fortune, but he was loved, his fans were and still are very loyal, so when Priscilla made the wise move to open Graceland as a tourist destination, the fortunes of the Presley estate were assured.
That kind of celebrity is about longevity. The Beatles are another example, where the only two still alive – Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr – are a bit embarrassing, whereas the two who have died, George Harrison and John Lennon, are seen as kind of heroic. Still, as someone who did write his own material, I don't imagine McCartney minds too much. And Harrison did well too; he wrote 'Here Comes The Sun' and, more famously, 'Something', which has been covered by over 150 artists, including Presley and Sinatra. I actually always wanted to visit George's house, Friar Park, because he had something amazing and unique there: his own underground waterways beneath the house, which I always imagined to be like the lakes in Phantom of the Opera, with little boats all lit up floating around. Imagine seeing that. Imagine having that in your house. That's proper stardom.
So that's what I think celebrity used to be. I'm not sure, because it's too early to tell, if we've got any around at the moment who could ever be as big. But I'll take a chance and suggest that the ones who retain the mystery, about whom we don't know that much, will be the ones we still hear about in decades to come. People like Adele, James McAvoy, Maggie Smith, Keira Knightley, Ian McKellen, George Clooney, Emma Thompson, Julia Roberts, Maggie Gyllenhaal – the ones who are great at what they do and don't call the press to let them know where they're having dinner that night. The ones who do their job and then go back home.
Strangely enough, I think if you asked the British public to name our biggest stars, they'd probably say Posh and Becks. They play a very clever game – we know loads about them, but they still have this mystery. We don't understand their relationship, but they seem committed to each other and their family. Once you know everything, people become a bit boring. There was a time when the Royal Family seemed mysterious; they had all this history that we learned about in school, which made them seem important and fascinating, and then they did a documentary and then, even worse, they did a ridiculous game show (The Grand Knockout Tournament – Google it), and it was all over. We knew too much.
In the old days of Hollywood, it was up to the studios what got out about their stars. They controlled information and nobody crossed them. Nowadays, with the Internet, even if something's not true, certain 'journalists' will write it anyway, and then whoever it's about has to prove that it's wrong. It's terribly unfair really, but it's the way it is.
So becoming a star, the old kind of celebrity, is not easy. You need skill and talent and integrity, and that's absolutely not what we're talking about here. If you want to be that kind of celebrity, you'll be studying acting or singing or writing or designing, you'll be working in that medium already. You'll be talented. And you won't need a book like this.
CHAPTER 3Routes to becoming a celebrity
The most obvious route to celebrity, the one that's currently the very best way, is the reality TV show. It's certainly the fastest. Most of the celebrities who spring to my mind in this category are off Big Brother, TOWIE, or Made in Chelsea – shows where they point out that these are real people, but the stories may have been enhanced for your entertainment. Slightly scripted reality TV, they call it, or at least some do. There are other reality shows, like Come Dine with Me, and Four in a Bed – a show that's about B&Bs, with a deliberately grubby-sounding title – that you can do, if all you want to do is be on telly for a week, but they're unlikely to make you into a celebrity, and going on them doesn't show real commitment to wanting to become one. It's a temporary thing, and it might mean you're recognised in your local high street for a few weeks, but it's rarely going to give you anything more permanent. If that's good enough for you, go ahead and enjoy. If you want more, if you want real modern celebrity, based on no skills at all, keep reading.
To get on a show like TOWIE or Made in Chelsea, you need to be part of the group the TV channel has decided to show, and that's not really very likely. It doesn't always work either – I can't name anybody from Geordie Shore, can you? – so as well as being lucky enough to be in the right gang, you also need to be lucky enough that the show you're in is one of the ones the media pick up on. And then you need to have an edge that makes you stick out from the other cast members so that you're the one who gets the media attention. One of the girls from TOWIE was in her underwear in the Daily Star recently – if you're going this route, try not to do that, or at least do it for the Telegraph. Think of your parents. But otherwise, it seems, anything goes. Although you'll be better off if you come up with something original, something unusual.
Having established the difficulty of and luck needed to get on a show like TOWIE, we need to look at other, more accessible options. Big Brother is one. From what we've seen in recent years, it seems anyone can get on that. Though the gobbier or slightly weirder you are, the better. The days when Pete with Tourette's was a novelty are long gone. Now you need to be rude or dirty, have contentious opinions or no manners. Though you could try being the opposite – they like the odd posh-seeming person too, and they're unlikely to check if it's genuine.
The audition process for Big Brother is gruelling – interview after interview, all on camera, some with other potential housemates, some on your own. Each year thousands apply, and less than twenty will be on our screens all summer. But if you're determined, if you can portray a persona you think the producers will buy into and, more importantly, the viewing public will love or love to hate, then you have as much chance as anyone else. Hopefully a little more, if you read to the end of this book.
Then there are the talent shows. We've already established that you don't really have a talent, and luckily for today's shows, you don't need one. You have just as much chance of getting a shot at becoming a celebrity by being spectacularly bad. Producers on television talent shows know this, and just getting to the televised auditions stage means they're watching you and are ready with the pen, paper and binding contract. You don't need talent, as such, but you could be the next 'Where's my keys, where's my phone?' guy, and a chance of celebrity will be yours for the taking. Just in case you capture the public imagination, just in case the media pick up on your particular brand of awfulness, just in case you do something bizarre enough that they might want to put you out there for your novelty value, the contract is there and you will belong to them. For as long as they can earn money out of you. But that works for you, too. They won't bother if there's no mileage in you, so you need to use them as much as they will use you, because as fast as they can pick you up, they can drop you again.
There's also, of course, the old-fashioned, more traditional route of sleeping with a properly famous person and selling your story to the red tops. It's a bit tired and hackneyed, but it still works because sex still sells, especially if you've had it with someone everybody's heard of. Especially if they're married.
A successful actor or pop star will get you money and a story in a tabloid, but the real score is the famous footballer. That's where the big story is. It's also a lot easier – actors and pop stars are more careful these days, but footballers are still ordinary guys who get paid an extraordinary amount of money for kicking a bit of leather around. They can go to the clubs, spend a fortune on Cristal for all the pretty girls and after a few glasses of that, they're fair game. With the best will in the world, these guys earn crazy money. Look at Wayne Rooney – he's said to be on £300,000 a week. That's over a million a month. Of course these are the guys the public love to read about screwing up. And then, the moment you become famous for selling your story, you pose in your underwear and you're on your way. It doesn't really matter what you look like, as long as you don't mind getting your kit off in the papers, but if you are lucky enough to look good in a thong, this could be where you get lucky – you could get picked up by Victoria's Secret or Michelle Mone might ask you to model her bikini line, and you're off.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from So You Want to be a Celebrity? by Steve Allen. Copyright © 2015 Steve Allen. Excerpted by permission of Elliott and Thompson Limited.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction,1 What do I mean by celebrity?,
2 What celebrity used to mean,
3 Routes to becoming a celebrity,
4 After you get your break,
5 I've done the first bit, what do I do next?,
6 What if it doesn't last?,
7 The fascination with celebrity,
8 The downside of fame,
9 So why do I want to do this again?,