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.
