Celebrity magazines have a lot to answer for. I won’t lie – I enjoy them. In fact, I revel in reading them. I even participate in the bear baiting, terrible news stories that are the stock-in-trade of these pieces of toilet paper. What you’re reading now is essentially a slightly more arch, more ironic digital extension of those magazines.
We poke fun at them here, but really we’re feeding the same beast. We’re prostrating ourselves and wearing the same dirty clothes, piling bodies onto conveyor belts to be shipped into the fiery inferno of celebrity gossip. I’m little better than red top rag journalists.
Well, I’m a little better. For one thing, I don’t put TV adverts out where a C-list celebrity looks deadpan into the camera and says “read all about the breakdown of my marriage, my infidelity, and my battle with drink and depression – this Sunday!” But that’s what happened this past week, for the Daily Mirror, with Denise Welch.
Welch is best known for being one of the panellists on Loose Women, which is the UK’s version of The View. She appeared on one of the latest series of Celebrity Big Brother (when it went to a smaller channel and nobody watched), and was famous there for getting her geriatric boobs out. In short, she’s not famous for much. But she had a marriage, and like many celebrities, she then ended that marriage.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPkt-aV4_hg&feature=related
But she didn’t do it quietly. Oh no. She announced, live on TV, that her marriage was over. In an excruciating 9 minute video. Broadcast to the nation. That got followed up a few months later with said terrible TV advert for the newspaper tell-all, in which she had some soul destroying sentences to say.
I worried that Tim still wanted sex, though. While getting changed for bed, if I heard him on the stairs I'd hurry to put my nightie on, just in case, God forbid, he caught a glimpse.
Bear in mind this is to a newspaper audience. Of millions. No-one needs to know about that.
You think that’s bad? The celebrity kiss and tell has become so terribly well-known that we know way too much information about the private lives of celebrities. Did you want to know that Floyd Mayweather is “boring in bed” and 50 Cent is just “okay”? No? Well tough, because we’re in the age of celebrity oversharing.
You see it across news stands. Everything is branded as an EXCLUSIVE!!! in big brash lettering. What that really means is “WE’VE GOT DIRT THAT YOU’RE PROBABLY NOT CERTAIN YOU WANT TO HEAR BUT WE’LL TELL YOU ANYWAY!!!”
Kim Mathers decided that the world needed to know about Eminem’s sexual ineptitude:
He’s not very well endowed…. If you’re going to have sex with Marshall, make sure you have a little blue pill, because otherwise it does not work.
Great! I think? Maria Sharapova? Forget all your pornstar dreams about her: “I really thought, like a lot of guys, that she'd be the loud screaming type. It was so disillusioning.”
I WANT IT ALL TO STOP. I don’t want to hear about private lives laid bare. It’s wrong! People need privacy of some sort. They don’t need to be hawking their private lives to all and sundry. If you stop buying these types of magazines, everything will be okay. We’ll go back to a more modest time, when celebrities didn’t scream from magazine covers or allow us viewing into their dead, soulless eyes.
Children can play once more out in the street, and flowers will grow again. It’ll be great. Please. Please.