Posts Tagged ‘formula’

I spent a little of last night, as the festive season faded and a whole new year and the return to work hove into view, watching the latest iteration of Celebrity Big Brother wipe it’s arse across my TV screen. As the usual array of desperate people, half-arsed film heroes and one hit blips on the music radar began to settle into the Big Brother house, in much the same fashion as their predecessors had last year, I got to thinking – is 2010 going to be any different from 2009? Will we have ANYTHING new in the coming months, rather than just a retread of everything that’s gone before? As we seep into January, it seems not. Read the rest of this entry »

A busy day yesterday, starting off at the Groucho Club at eight in the morning. I was taking part in the Editorial Intelligence/HarperCollins panel. The discussion was: Does the Media Break More Celebrities than it Makes?

I was joined by Clarence Mitchell, who represented the McCann family throughout their tribulations; Rachel Johnson, who writes for the Sunday Times and just happens to be Boris’ sister (“I won’t mention the B word,” she told the audience) and Mary Riddell, the assistant Editor at the Daily Telegraph. The chair was Peter York.

It was a fascinating discussion – Mary Riddell was just back from the Labour conference, where she had watched Gordon Brown again vowing not to be part of a culture of spin and celebrity after a year of the media attempting to break him. Clarence Mitchell gave an extraordinarily candid account of the media’s treatment of the McCann family.

The media’s lust for content is at the root of it all – especially in a media that runs at such frenetic speeds thanks to the internet and mobile communication. As it ever was, there is a proliferation of media eager to feed on the celebrities who thrust their heads over the parapet and it will last as long as the media owners make vast quantities of cash and the celebrities keep popping up for their turn in the spotlight.

More often than not, we agreed, the media chooses not to break a celebrity (unless they have a seriously overweening sense of themselves), preferring to knock them down a bit and watch which way they climb back up. They watch very closely, reporting progress all the way.

Then in the evening came Peachy Coochy, in which twenty people presented 20 slides and talked about each one for 20 seconds each. I was presenting a selection of slides from The Fame Formula and had condensed the book into the required six minutes and forty seconds. I tried to improvise at first, but it was a painful process – I tend to speak in paragraphs. I ended up writing a script – there was no other way to reduce a 380 page book to a less-than-seven-minute performance…

The night, run under the watchful eye of David Gale at the Toynbee Studios, was a sell out and a great success. Of the other 19 Coocheurs, the ones that spring immediately to mind were Hugo Glendenning’s series of photos of Sumo wrestlers, which he had taken in various Sumo camps in Japan, and Peter Culshaw – of whom it has been said that he is to ligging what Pele was to dribbling – who dissected Sarah Palin and Alaska in under seven minutes.

The Peachy Coochy nights are running every month and are well worth investigating – click here for more information.

Big Brother’s latest series ends tonight, bringing to a close another marathon session of ogling at a group of people desperate for fame but with nothing to recommend them but dysfunctional personalities, loud mouths and deep wells of (often misguided) self-belief.

It really doesn’t have to be that way, as this entry to the Fame Formula competition, by a personable young man from Australia called Scott Johnson, shows.

Here’s a guy who says “I don’t want to famous but I want [the] key issue I’m sponsoring to be famous, who is prepared to do a lot of hard graft on behalf of a charity and who turned up to one of the Borders video booth auditions with a mission to use fame for the general good.

He exemplifies the point of the Fame Formula competition in that it is a competition for people with a talent or cause that they feel deserves recognition, be they poet, preacher, artist, dancer, singer, novelist, actor or, in his case, charitably-minded activist. Fame without talent, after all, is like mustard without meat – it leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

To find out more about the competition, or to enter, click here.