Sunday 14 September 2014

Badgerstoke on Celebrity

Badgerstoke on Celebrity
 
Some years ago an artist called Andrew Walpole (a distant relative of the 18th Century Prime Minister I am led to believe) said that “in the future everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes”.

Mrs Badgerstoke and I haven’t had our fifteen minutes yet but out daughter Gloria has. In 2006 she won second prize in the regional hairdresser of the year competition. To win the prize she had to cut six people’s hair in half an hour. She was awarded points for style and neatness. I understand that she would have lost points if she had drawn blood from her subjects and the removal of a whole ear would have led to her disqualification. Anyway she was pictured in our local paper smiling broadly and brandishing a pair of scissors next to a worried looking man whose hair she was cutting. The headline read “A Cut Above”; the journalists on local papers are not up to the standard of the nationals.

Most TV quiz shows now have celebrity versions. I did watch the celebrity version of “Who Wants To Be Rich” last week and I could only identify one of the celebrities. There was a footballer for a lower league football club, an actress who had been in a situation comedy twenty years ago and a singer who’d come third in a TV talent show.

We have many more celebrities now than in the past. Take celebrity chefs for example, when I was young we just had Fanny Craddock on TV but now there must be twenty or thirty. For those of you who can’t remember Fanny Craddock she would not have allowed so many other people to intrude on her subject. The number of celebrity chefs seems to have led directly to obesity in the population and it would be a good idea for the Government to step in and regulate them. Setting up a regulator called OfNosh would meet with public approval I think.

Celebrities will fade from public view if they are not careful and one trick to keep themselves in the public eye is to appear on such programmes as “Help I’m A Celebrity Stuck In Australia” where they are given tasks to do such as eating the testicles of aborigines and sitting in a transparent box with a live alligator. I’m sure these things must be faked. I have heard that the alligator had been previously well fed with a meal of jumbucks. I’m not sure what a jumbuck is but you can’t get them in Tesco.

Another mechanism to keep themselves in the public eye is for celebrities to give their children unusual names. Dave Beckham called his first child Brooklyn because I understand the child was conceived in that place (I hope he chose somewhere private). I did read somewhere that he gave up this process with his second child which was conceived in South London as the name Peckham Beckham was just a little too silly.

Mrs B and I are still wondering what our fifteen minutes of fame might consist of. I hope it isn’t too exciting as my wife can get a little carried away sometime. As a teenager she met Cliff Richard and she has led me to believe that that incident led to a toiletry accident on her part.

Badgerstoke’s Tip: You will be soon forgotten if you become famous for doing something nice. If you want people to remember you then it is better to be very naughty.

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