Fame, fame, fatal fame

Ever since the first series began, I’ve been try­ing to adequately explain to people why I loathe Big Brother with a pas­sion. I’ve never quite man­aged it, instead burbling all sorts of ran­dom argu­ments about how it’s not real­istic as a social exper­i­ment, or about how it is an unfor­tu­nate sign of our soci­ety that instead of fol­low­ing the lives of ourselves and our friends and fam­ily with such interest, we instead make an appoint­ment to view people we don’t know inter­act­ing in a com­pletely false situ­ation. Oh, and not for­get­ting that most of the people fea­tured are bor­der­line obnox­ious. Not sur­pris­ingly, people aren’t very con­vinced. I don’t blame them. These days, the pro­gramme is so pop­u­lar and so ubi­quit­ous, that I just tend to keep quiet.

Any­way, just in case I’m sound­ing like a kill­joy, I can fully appre­ci­ate that the series is enter­tain­ing, voyeur­istic, tit­il­lat­ing, prime mater­ial for scan­dal­ous gos­sip — and I’ll fully admit that hav­ing never watched a single full epis­ode pre­vi­ously, dur­ing this series I have been suckered in to watch­ing two whole pro­grammes. For your inform­a­tion — yes, I would like Brian to win.

How­ever, in a column writ­ten just after some per­son called Narinder (who, frankly, sounds thor­oughly unpleas­ant) was evicted from the house, the superb polit­ical com­ment­ator and comedian Mark Steel, as always, hit the nail right on the head. It’s all about fame. We’re obsessed with it. I tend to think that, even more than the £70,000 which the con­test­ants in Big Brother could win, it’s the fame which encour­aged them to apply. Yet what are they going to be fam­ous for? Er, well, noth­ing. Liv­ing in a house for nine weeks, and that’s it:

“Fame for its own sake has become such a dom­in­ant part of our cul­ture. A celeb’s suc­cess is deemed to be in line with how well known they are, although the best known are almost cer­tain to be people who’ve done noth­ing of any value.”

It’s a dis­ease of our mod­ern, celebrity cul­ture — and I hadn’t real­ised, until now, how much I hate it. I’m not against fame or celebrity if the per­son involved has actu­ally done some­thing, or achieved some­thing using their skills and tal­ents. But to thirst after pop­ular­ity and suc­cess for doing pre­cisely noth­ing of any real merit — whether it’s liv­ing in a house for nine weeks with a bunch of other hideous mis­fits, being a learner-driver on some real­ity TV pro­gramme, or being a friend of some­body well-known and man­aging to push your way into the pub­lic eye via their notori­ety — seems like the com­plete nadir of our obses­sion with fame.

I can recall a time when being a celebrity actu­ally meant some­thing. Today, your milk­man could be on the front page of The Sun, and he prob­ably is.