Posts Tagged ‘freak show’

BP’s PR machine has been in overdrive of late; their latest effort at saying “look how hard we’re working to sort the oil spill out” is a live roving webcam monitoring the clean-up effort. I’ve tried to go on it but it’s never operational – either broken or offline. Whether that’s by overload of people looking or by design remains to be seen.

I wonder what Barnum would have done? Yesterday, I went to see an exhibition on him for the 200th anniversary of his birth in Sheffield at the National Circus and Fairground archive at the University of Sheffield, run by Vanessa Toumin. It was brought home to me once again that Barnum never lost an opportunity to network with the famous people of his day, such as Mark Twain, and make sure that he and his ideas were deeply embedded in the 19th century conversation. Read the rest of this entry »

I took part in the Cambridge Union debate last night, arguing for the proposition ‘This House Believes that Reality TV Represents Everything Wretched about Britain Today’. I underestimated the space, at how steeped in grandeur it is, and found myself more than a little nervous.

The debate was well attended; over two thirds full. Joining me to argue for the proposition were Max Clifford and the retiring Union president, Jonathan Laurence. Opposing the motion were Times journalist Hugo Rifkind, showbiz writer Zoe Griffin and James McQuillan, who appeared on The Apprentice.

The other speakers last night went for a comic interpretation of the motion. My technique was more serious-minded, more Old Testament – Quentin Tarantino fans might have deduced I was trying to mimic Samuel L Jackson’s famous biblical Pulp Fiction speech. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s not that much of a gap between Phineas Taylor Barnum, grandmaster of the freak show, and Simon Cowell. Both Barnum and Cowell are exemplars of transmuting showbiz into mega-biz gold. The difference is that we look back now, 150 years later, and judge the freakshows that made Barnum’s name as exploitative and degrading. I wonder how we will judge Britain’s Got Talent in 30 years time?

There is no doubt that Barnum would have loved Britain’s Got Talent – a cost-effective format that gathers a collection of strange and strangely determined people into its fold and pushes their saleability, if they have any, to the hilt. It’s nothing new – Russell Birdwell conducted star searches for Selznick International back in the 1930s, the Harry Potter films made a public search for their star. The only new thing in the mix is the ability to spread word on the show’s latest runaway idol to the world in seconds flat via YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and the blogosphere.

Cowell is a remarkable man, who puts the business into show with enormous skill. With Britain’s Got Talent, he has recognised, as Barnum did, that there is a vast well of public desire to ogle. They invest briefly in the people that X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent draw out of the woodwork, admire them and root for them for a time when the sing or perform well – within a certain set of strictures – and then watch as they sink slowly and unwillingly back into oblivion.

There is a huge appetite for the fairytale ending on TV shows such as Britain’s Got Talent, but beyond the fairytale endings, real life isn’t that simple. The audience is always going to want to know what happens next. The pressure of expectation, especially on a global scale, is enough to make anyone crack, let alone a woman with learning difficulties who has been plucked from obscurity and plunged into the vast acid bath of fame. Susan Boyle may be an ugly duckling who has become a swan, but what happens when the public find the next ugly duckling to swoon over? What it amounts to, from either end of the process, is too much pressure on the shoulders of Susan Boyle.

Susan Boyle is very unlikely to be anything but a one hit wonder. I’ll stick my neck out and say that it may well be a mega-hit on the back of all the euphoria because yes, she has a very good voice. Britain’s Got Talent has lifted her from obscurity, but the trouble is it also seems to expect her to deal with the pressures of fame on a scale that nobody could have predicted. The show side-steps the well-worn cliché of the long pub tours and constant struggle that has marked the progress to fame in the past – a process which was still no guarantee of steeling the acts it produced for the sudden onrush of the corrosive processes of mega-fame. Despite the quality of Boyle’s voice and the willingness of the public to love her at the moment, I still can’t see this as a lasting love affair.

I’m not attacking Susan Boyle when I say that I don’t think that people will pay to see her perform in six months time. I just don’t think she’s got the wherewithal to withstand the pressures of fame and I don’t believe the public will stick with her, because too many of them are too in love with the moment of her transformation to consider or care what happens beyond the happy ever after moment of that one big hit, other than to watch her implode. She is not a role model because there is no room for role models in the world of ‘pile ‘em high and sell ‘em cheap’ celebrity.

What I am attacking is the process, the public expectation, the weight being placed on Boyle’s shoulders. As I told the Times, “’You can’t pluck somebody with those issues and fix them overnight. This has been a fantastic soap opera for the fame-makers, Syco [Simon Cowell’s record label] and Talkback TV. I’m not suggesting that they are cynical and deliberately looking to exploit, but they have got their eye on the buck. They’ve done very well out of Paul Potts and they want to see what they can make out of this. We are beginning to see more and more people who are casualties of the process. Jade Goody was over. She was resurrected by her illness.’”

If Boyle overcomes the caustic nature of fame and makes a real go of it – wonderful! I’ll gladly be proved wrong. But I honestly believe that she will have one huge hit and then slowly disappear, most likely because the public will have found another fairytale to follow. If that happens, I just hope the realization that it’s all gone away doesn’t destroy an already palpably fragile woman. She doesn’t deserve that.

Reading about the Wellcome Collection’s stunt to promote research into the science of the freak show, featuring contortionist Delia du Sol, in the Evening Standard yesterday, I was reminded how, in the dark days of the recession before the big one, I met an extraordinary contortionist called Hugo Zamoratte.

Delia du Sol

Zamoratte was an Argentina exile who was able to stuff himself into bottles; he had discovered a natural talent for dislocating his joints after he accidentally dislocated his arm in the Argentinian National Guard. After 20 years of practicing his art in South America, training in yoga and gymnastics all the while, he illegally crawled into the US from Mexico through a tiny sewer outlet.

On his arrival in America, Zamoratte’s extraordinary skill was quickly exploited and showcased by the Ringling Brothers. He became a national sensation in the USA. My client at the time, Gerry Cottle’s Circus, were impressed by his ability to stuff himself inside bottles that held as little as ten litres and booked him for their annual season at Wembley Arena. I was handed the task of generating media interest.

Hugo Zamoratte

I spent weeks researching the great contortionists and, in the course of my research, I discovered the Art of Enterology. Escapology we all knew about – Houdini escaped from things whilst the great Enterologist squeezed into tiny spaces. The art had died out thanks to the more immediate thrill that escapology presented – both took weeks of preparation, but the escape happened in minutes, whereas the enterologists had to take their time getting into the right shape to enter a bottle. Audiences naturally inclined to the flashier, more immediate art.

I stole the idea of this long-lost practice and applied it to Zamoratte, dragging him through all the media hoops available at the time, from Jonathan Ross’ The Last Resort to the Wogan show, presenting him as the missing link in the art of Enterology. Ross still mentions Zamoratte when I see him – his impact was enormous. He garnered a great deal of attention for the Gerry Cottle Circus and went on to become a true international phenomenon.

And then he vanished, like Mickey Rourke’s wrestler. For all I know he is trapped in a bottle somewhere like a genie, wishing he’d spent more time practising escapology. In the meantime, I was fired up with the art of Enterology and, when Britvic asked me to help them launch their new design of bottle a few years later, I returned to the idea, setting up a series of auditions to find a new enterologist who could fit themselves inside an outsized version of the new Britvic bottle.

There was only one person who could do it; Delia du Sol, who is now working with the Wellcome Trust. She was a brilliant eneterologist – the only one who could enter Britvic’s bottle. She had only one flaw – she could never close the little door in the side of the bottle and would have been left exposed, like the overgrown Alice in the White Rabbit’s house, if one of my team hadn’t been on hand to shut the door behind her.

Delia in the Britvic bottle

Wellcome’s stunt has no connection with me, I should point out. They have clearly imitated the stunt, recreated it now that some time has passed – very flattering it is too. I’m of the opinion that my book, Improperganda, inspired them to do so. Secondhand copies of the book have been flying off the shelves in the wake of the release of The Fame Formula. Perhaps it’s time for a reprint of Improperganda?

More to the point, I wonder what other stunts of mine that appear in the book will be imitated in the coming months as companies find that they need more interesting ways of communicating their brands and celebrities over the fog of the credit crunch.