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Fame Games: The Production of Celebrity
in Australia. by Pat Boran (Magill, April 2001)
It's not every subject that can unite Matthew the evangelist, Kylie Minogue, Noel Coward, Channel 4's Big Brother and 1980's proto boy band Bros (rhymes with dross). Fame, however, is one of those things that increasingly makes the world a smaller place. For Milton in Paradise Lost, true fame was 'no plant that grows on mortal soil', meaning something that couldn't be earned by human effort, and yet its perception as 'a powerful aphrodisiac' (to quote Graham Greene) means there will always be queues for it, whether they be of boy band or playmate wannabees. Of the many paradoxes of fame, one of the most startling, surely, is the power it exerts over the young, as if none believed in the often-confessed loneliness of the famous or, at the same time, believed that fame was something to be earned. Andy Warhol's famous prediction that, 'In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes' has much to answer for and allows many to forget what Dali ironically called 'the tragedy' of being famous, that you have to devote so much time to it. Nowadays, the people who spend most time on fame are not the famous themselves but the veritable legions of publicists, spinners and commentators who live in a fawning, symbiotic relationship with the mass media. And while it's tempting to think of this as a new phenomenon, one only has to glance back at the Gospels to see that, though John doesn't mention it, Matthew refers no less than four times to Christ's spreading fame -- a reminder that, even then, the power of fame was remarkable. The fame industry that Warhol might have predicted is to a great extent the result of post-war global communications, driven in the main by television and the apparent democracy that came with it. The recent Big Brother phenomenon can be seen as a logical if not quite natural extension of that. Somewhere between the two come the endless hours of celebrity interviews, visits to houses with impressive pools, and the simpering tete-a-tetes recorded within sight of the set of the latest blockbuster-in-progress. As recently as last month, in a city centre pub, I watched on video the funeral of a drinking friend, and saw the other people around me become briefly famous, and for the greater part liking it. With the technology in place, Warhol's fifteen minutes are never more than fifteen minutes away. A great and real worry, expressed in a new book entitled Fame Games: The Production of Celebrity in Australia, is that over the past twenty years or so the media has significantly shifted from being interested in information to peddling entertainment, and that one of its prime purposes now is what the authors call 'the production of celebrity'. Though the book's province of interest is Australia, the observations it makes might equally well apply to a broad survey of print and electronic media in this country. The Australia experience highlights worrying trends. A survey conducted there over a period of four weeks, two in February and two in July 1997, and involving a cross-section of newspapers, magazines and entertainment and current affairs programmes on television, found a total of 3,141 stories that revolved around celebrities. On average, the print publications, both broadsheets and tabloids, devoted between 25% and 32% of their entire content in this period to celebrities. And while day-time television reached as high as 43.6%, perhaps more shocking is the fact that the average television news bulletin clocked up a staggering 9%. Twenty years ago, the entire Australian landmass, perhaps like Ireland, was seen by many to be a marginal zone in the eyes of the global film, television and celebrity industry. With the runaway success of Neighbours in the mid 1980s, however, Australia found itself with the technology, the media infrastructure and the highest per capita magazine buying rate in the world. The only problem was what one publicist here calls its 'serious personality shortage'. In a sense, the new breed of managers and producers had to invent new celebrities to take advantage of the opportunities suddenly available. Enter Kylie, Jason Donovan, Michael Hutchence and Co. While many celebrate the new place, centre stage, of Australian TV, music and films, the accompanying cult of personality worries others as it almost literally papers over more serious issues. For Germaine Greer, the effects can be seen in publications like the UK pre-teen/teen glossy, Sugar. 'Nothing in Sugar magazine,' she writers, 'suggests a girl can have a life apart from lads, that she has any interests of her own beyond make-up, clothes and relationships, that she will ever get a job or travel' The absence of such information, and of visions or aspirations of the readers themselves, is to a great extent due to a morbid fascination with the lives of boy bands, actors etc. The Hello and OK magazine phenomena are merely adult versions of the same thing. The authors of Fame Games are nevertheless at pains to point out that their reason in writing this hugely interesting book is not to damn but to understand such publications and their dependency on celebrity. And it is in this area that they make some of their most interesting observations. While we like to think our favourite celebrities are not spoiled with success, for instance, suspicions that that success is not merited can make for a very hostile public. Many tabloids, for example, make much of their living from exploiting that love-hate paradox, helping to build individuals up to the status of gods, and then trying to expose the flawed mortal hiding behind the façade. For celebrities themselves, and more importantly for their publicists, the challenge is to present figures who seem connected to the world while never quite being as human as the rest of us. The television chat show or magazine interview presents an ideal opportunity to live in both worlds, if briefly. here, however, the celebrity must never appear to desire the exposure, and will ideally agree to 'meet with reporters' between shoots of a new film, and if possible in some exotic leisure location, golf course or resort. If something has to be given the hard sell, the new album or movie, the celebrity will often be caught by photographers kissing his/her current partner in public, and surprisingly often while standing 'on a red carpet at the entrance to an opening night'. In this fascinating but dispiriting world of hard sell and insincerity, where too much publicity 'is barely enough', readers and viewers alike end up craving the release of humour. Few, sadly, have been as witty or honest on the subject as Noel Coward. Asked whether he found time in his busy life to watch television, he replied, 'Good heavens, television is something you appear on, you don't watch.' © copyright Pat Boran |