Posts Tagged ‘jade goody’

When the troubled tabloid-sacrifice uber babe Katie Price decided to re-enter the jungle, I received numerous requests to comment on TV and radio. For once I held back; I just wasn’t convinced that I had the interest or the energy to offer any opinion on another Katie Price PR move. In truth, I could not ascertain whether I thought she was obsessed by self-absorption or self-loathing.

My reluctance to comment changed when I read Jan Moir’s fantastic assassination of Katie in the Mail: “Sweet kangaroo cutlets, what have we here? Katie Price back in the jungle again? How much more of boobilicious, publicity-mad She-Chav Katie can we take?”

Jordan, the goddess of the tabloid centre spread, is seriously wounded; instead of avoiding jet lag by popping into a rehab clinic (on discounted rate for the assured media coverage) she has placed her surgically engineered torso back in the reality stocks. Is it a hapless move to rehabilitate her image in the public eye or an unrecoverable PR disaster? I am sure the audience can spot the PR conceit and are not persuaded.

Katie Price’s arrival on I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here is a stunt motivated by the ego drive that comes with self-expression and self-manifestation for its own ends. Price set the trend and rewrote the wannabe handbook on how to succeed in the modern celebrity “have-a-go maelstrom”. Her self-importance can’t be restrained with niceties.

This latest PR endeavour illustrates that her addiction to column inches is now her greatest enemy. Obsessed with crushing her personal Satan – estranged hubby Peter Andre, who she met in the jungle the first time round – the exercise is surely going to go the same way as Jade Goody’s second, unpleasant experience in the Big Brother house. Can we ever forget Shilpagate?

If we take a moment to reflect, it is worth noting that we are all connected to the tarnished icon that is Jordan, addicted to the guilty pleasure of watching her antics. Her latest quest to relaunch her brand is, at the core, naïve. On the one hand, constant refreshment is at the heart of everything that has made her what she is, but on the other, it’s the core of everything that is rotten. It is a putrid masterpiece of strategy, to care so desperately for the opinion of those that don’t care.

By going into the jungle, she is begging her disciples to listen to her truth. Months of battling to win the hearts and minds of the great unwashed has failed, whilst her cuckolded other half, Andre, has been swept up into the coddling arms of the public, who see him as a victim of Katie Price’s machinations.

Twitter is the place on the net to have fun with publicity, as a brilliant new Halloween stunt, featured in The Sun, proves beyond doubt.

“Twitter users will get the chance to communicate with departed showbiz stars this Halloween — in the world’s first online séance,” proclaims the paper. “Tweeters can choose which of their deceased idols they want to talk to, pick a question — then follow the ‘Tweance’ in real time using the social networking site.”

The ‘Tweance’ has been cooked up by Angels Fancy Dress, doubtless keen to move some spooky costumes this October. Mundane considerations aside, they clearly have an almost psychic understanding of the way the web works and, more importantly, the way people engage with social networking sites; they have drawn in all the triggers needed for a publicity windfall – celebrity, the chance to communicate with dead celebrities and the opportunity for millions to nominate who will be spoken to and to see all the answers coming out in real time.

They’ve brought in “top psychic” Jayne Wallace, who has already “contacted the spirit of Jade Goody in a séance organised by The Sun” – she “will quiz four late stars nominated by Twitterers between 10am and 12pm on Friday October 30”.

Whatever you think of psychics and the possibilities of contacting the dead, there is no escaping the fact that there are plenty of people out there who believe – and no doubt that they will be following this Tweance religiously as well as nominating their favourite dead celebrities and sending in questions. This could go right round the world.

What excites me most about this is the way that Twitter is being used to break new ground. I ran the first ever Twithibition, an exhibition of great publicity stunts at the Edinburgh Fringe, in the summer. This Tweance is the next step towards making Twitter the communication channel of choice for the world, a place where things can happen instantly and effect real change whilst you watch. It’s thrilling.

All I need to decide now is whom to nominate…

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.

Here is the webcast of the head to head between Max Clifford and myself at the London College of Communications last Tuesday, in nine handy bite-sized chunks. Apologies to anyone who logged in to Ustream in the hope of seeing the debate streamed live – Ustream crashed and prevented us from going ahead.

Part One

Part Two: Andrew reveals his knowledge of football, and Max discusses the difference between ’stars’ and ‘celebrities’

Part Three: Mark begins with an attack on new agents, who lack in skill and who profit by peddling hope.

Part Four: Are reality shows good or bad?

Part Five: Any advice for Gordon Brown?

Part Six: Which begins with Max being asked how he has kept the identity of his bisexual Premiership footballing client out of the media…

Part Seven: Does Max feel guilty about profiting from Jade’s death, or Kerry Katona’s misfortune – or causing misery for other people?

Part Eight: LCC Year 3 PR student Cally Sheard questions Max on whether the public or the media determine the agenda, using the Barrymore story as an example.

Part Nine: Conclusion!

I enjoyed the launch of the Fame Formula paperback at the Riverside Studios at Hammersmith on Wednesday night for many reasons: it’s a great venue, the people who came were interested and interesting, it was good to expound on the brilliance of publicist extraordinaire Russell Birdwell to an audience and it was marvellous to see one of the films he promoted, Nothing Sacred, on a big screen for the first time. And what a film it is!

It may have been made in 1937, but Nothing Sacred still resonates today, thanks to Ben Hecht’s razor sharp script and William Wellman’s ironic, deadpan direction. The film features a disgraced reporter who, desperate to make good with his editor after a series of exposed scams and fake news stories, discovers a girl who is dying of radium poisoning and decides to bring her to New York to be feted by the world.

It’s extraordinary how like the Jade Goody story the film is, but for the fact that Hazel Flagg, played by the luminous Carol Lombard, is not actually dying of cancer. From the ecstatic headlines reporting Hazel’s every move and utterance to the grand plans for a funeral to see her off in style – something she deserves because she is so “brave and vulnerable” – it skewers modern celebrity reporting perfectly.

Nothing Sacred turns the screw on the nature of celebrity ever tighter, right up until the end, despite being made 72 years ago. If you haven’t seen it, you really should. I’d even suggest it should be remade, but it would have to be done by someone with a sharp, satirical eye like Jason Reitman – this is not a film that deserves softening by Hollywood.

Next up on the promotional trail is my head-to-head debate with Max Clifford at the London College of Communication on Tuesday, May 5th at 6 p.m. discussing the toxic nature of modern celebrity. I’m not sure if there are any tickets left, but if you can’t make it, rest assured that the volatile results will be filmed for webcast and recorded for podcast.

Jade Goody’s not cold in her grave and already a “controversial” artist is leeching off her celebrity to generate some quick and dirty PR. News broke in the Hackney Gazette last week that performance artist Mark McGowan is organising a re-enactment of the final hours of Jade Goody’s life.

It’s a pretty typical scam; the two-hour show will feature a performer lying on a bed donning a cardboard box as a head and will also feature artists playing the roles of Jackey Budden, Jade’s mother, her publicist Max Clifford and Jack Tweed, her husband. And, what a surprise, it’s opening in the most pretentious area of artdom – Shoreditch – on May 18th.

McGowan obviously enjoys boosting his name with takes on controversial subject matter – back in 2005 he created a re-enactment of the shooting of Jean Charles de Menzes by the police. To achieve this, he sat in a bath filled with baked beans with chips in his nostrils, and then he went dancing outside Scotland Yard in a pink tutu and a pig mask.

Surely, Mr. McGowan, you can come up with something better this time round? We understand that art is difficult to define, but if the piece on Jade is anything like the Jean Charles de Menzes re-enactment, it will simply be an obvious and, more importantly, insensitive ploy to get publicity for an otherwise unknown and, seemingly, totally talentless person. Sensationalism and exploitation are easy to achieve – it takes a certain kind of genius to create something really infectious and inspiring out of the misery of others.

It does not appear that your show will be art in the traditional sense of skill or mastery, nor does it look like you have any intention of stimulating thought or emotion. This seems to me to be merely a vehicle for the artist (and I use that word loosely) to communicate his desperation to be noticed.

Well, I suppose it’s suckered me in to giving it ink.

I was intrigued to read in yesterday’s Independent about the splash Paul Duddridge is making in Hollywood. He’s moved from being an agent for comedians based in Soho to becoming a fame guru in Los Angeles in two years and seems to be making a good fist of getting numbers of the countless acting hopefuls who litter the staff rosters of LA bars and restaurants to come to his seminars in the hope that they, too, will be able to make Hollywood work for them.

The promise he offers is to make them famous in 40 days, if they follow the instructions in his two-day seminar to the letter.

“’I started out giving tips to people, and straight away, it just seemed to work,’” Duddridge told the Independent. “’What’s more, it turned out I was giving the same tips, over and over again. Now think I’ve boiled down my theory of fame into forty instructions, forty specific rules that will get you noticed.”

“He is, if you like, the sergeant major of a show-business boot camp,” says the Independent.

It seems to me, however, to be another Hollywood trawler net, powered by publicity, that might capture a star but is more likely to drag up shoals of fodder for Jade Goody-land, the sort of reality TV/brief tabloid stardom culture that is dependent on a constant turnover of faces.

Longevity is about talent, about originality. Yes, people can become famous very quickly, but their ability to stay famous is dependent on what new versions of themselves and their talent they can offer over years. As I have discussed in The Fame Formula, even the most talented need to refresh their fame every fifteen months if they want to stay in the limelight.

Duddridge’s theory of fame is based around Keanu Reeves. “’He’s a major, major movie star, yet no-one thinks he’s a great actor,’” says Duddridge. “’Even he may not think he’s a great actor. But I’m guessing people would give right arm to be as successful as him. My system that is more geared towards getting you to where he’s at.’”

Which is fine, but it should be remembered that Keanu Reeves started out as a child actor, has worked in movies continually, is rather handsome and has a screen presence, far beyond his ability to act, that any amount of training will not replicate.

I wish Duddridge luck with the venture, as well as the hopefuls he is teaching to become starrier in their outlook (to the point that one of the first things he instructs them to do is turn down auditions to test whether the people holding the audition really want to see them). But I believe that the global psyche has moved on from the bling bling nature of fame and fortune that has seen us through the last 20 years and that he won’t be able to utilize the old PR mechanisms to make this work in the way he might have been able to five years ago.

Put any misgivings about Jade Goody’s Barnumesque three-ring Circus sideshow to one side for moment. Instead, focus on the silver fox who has been the undisputed ringmaster of recent events in her life; Max Clifford.

He may not be attired in a garish ring suit, but Max Clifford is clearly visible as the man, centre stage, pulling the financial strings. This is not written as a genuflection to the cult of Clifford, more as an explanation of the reality; he is doing something more than a mere job – he is reacting to the peccadilloes of the age.

Clearly it is necessary for him to either not care about Jade or refuse to be paid to do that job; to carry it off, he has to place himself into a zone devoid of any emotion. Max remains calm, confident and never flustered despite the slings and arrows aimed at him. His style of delivery has been criticized but it is deliberate, matter of fact. Max is a spokesman; he is doing a job that few can deliver. Reminiscent of a river pilot steering his charge through dangerous and congested waters, Max vigilantly avoids all the sandbanks that might scupper the good ship of any celebrity brand he is steering. Max has always functioned in the wasteland between public merit and clandestine vice, creating content for the curtain-twitching masses–none of whom will ever admit to their trivia addiction.

This weekend was a high water mark in the celebrity-obsessed world we have allowed to prosper. The enduring picture we have taken away from Jade Goody’s wedding, however, was not the pitiful Goody forcing a smile through the pain; it was Max, surrounded by a sea of microphones and flanked by camera lenses. Like an effortless high wire act juggling nine clubs, he kept the media audience outside and inside the big top entertained in a style that few understand, measuring each sound bite for maximum effect.

Waspish bourgeois media dinner parties, I am sure, have a curt point of view regarding Clifford’s modus operandi. But they fail to comprehend his skill. Yes, he has enemies but he knows the power of collateral. For decades he has not compromised his style; he knows what works and the power of his personal business relationships. He’s happier to operate openly, on the phone and in the flesh. His skill can’t be replicated by a miracle app. Max has not bowed to the digital age and his instinct, shaped by decades of experience, is impossible to learn without years in the foxhole. Despite operating in the age of time compression, Max confounds the 24-7 swirl. His telltale grey hair is an insignia, a livery, which indicates his membership of a unique Guild that few have the skill or stamina to join.

I have often observed his methods of dealing with each media ruck and marvelled at his deft hand-off passes, reminiscent of the Welsh wizard Gareth Edwards in full flow. He is an adept distracter who knows how to deliver up a sound byte in an utterly disarming fashion whilst keeping the uber-media paymaster happy. He’s more than aware that one false move, one slip, could lead to a chain reaction that could negate the final payment of the big check.

When the cameras stop rolling and Jade becomes a sad footnote in Celebrity-ville, Max will pop up again and again; he is a brand and he occupies a unique place in the media landscape. If you’re in the public eye and you need to exploit your 15 months of fame quickly, he is accessible. Max has his finger on the pulse.

It seems to me that his type of PR has been genetically engineered in the last 15 years to suit the times. But, despite this engineering, I do not see any Clifford clones or heirs to his throne coming up through the ranks. Is this because of the way PR is retrenching, underscoring the inability of the new breed to come to terms with the ever-shifting churn of media from both side of the fence? Or will the next few years create a world where celebrity will not be able to command the fees that a new Max can make a meaningful profit from?

There are a number of PR people out there who need to take a clear look at Max Clifford. These are the people who decry his tactics and lampoon his deadpan manner with the press, the people who are rushing headlong into the digital media age without any grounding in the skills that have made him such a success; most notably the 360 degree vision that allows him to spot incoming missiles before they hit, be they aimed at him or his clients. Regardless of what anyone thinks of him, there is much that can be learned from him.

To some, Max Clifford will be an apotheosis of the media and to others the rationale for moral intervention, but he is first and foremost a creation of the media and of his clients. His success in finding a continually crashing wave of “sordid human interest” stories for the tabloid press has been unparalleled over the last 20 years, a new age that has seen the boundaries of morality and taste shifting significantly.

He is a prime example of the squalor of the universal global media. Without modern media poverty, he could never have been successful. The future for Max is to help people amortize the moral morass because the morality compass was demagnetized decades ago and he is one of the few people still making it twitch.

Make no mistake, the floorboards of his office will creak under the weight of many more scandals for years yet.

“Dying is an art,” wrote Sylvia Plath, in her poem Lady Lazarus, and the very public final weeks of Jade Goody are reinforcing Plath’s point remarkably well. Jade Goody has moved on from the unthinking, mouthy persona that brought her to national attention with a sudden aplomb, becoming, in her need to make a better life for the two children she will be leaving behind in the wake of her terminal cervical cancer, an iconic figure whose death will mark the end of an era of celebrity in Britain.

Jade Goody

There are notes of disgust registering around the country that she’s intending to let a film crew follow her through her final weeks as well as to her wedding, assuming it happens before she is too ill to cope. There shouldn’t be; this is a woman dying as she lived. She is, in many ways, like Mickey Rourke’s character in The Wrestler, in that all she knows is a life in front of the camera and all she can do to ensure the future for her children is to make as much money as quickly as possible for them in the only way she knows how; on television and in the press.

It’s telling that she has made it clear that she wants to ensure that her children are educated; this is the woman who came from difficult, uneducated beginnings to make a career in the celebrity industry, a woman who created a new life for herself on Big Brother and took on the personality the tabloids created for her, only to watch them turn on her with more vigour when she rose above the cheap insults that were initially levelled at her. She’s not the brightest of women but, tellingly, she knows it. And it’s her attempts to make amends for her mistakes that have endeared her to the British public. She is finally taking control of her life in the spotlight in a way that she wasn’t able to do when she first found herself in the arms of fame.

She is a most human celebrity and it is to be hoped, for the sake of her children, that she will be remembered for her late transmogrification into a role model; according to The Guardian, the swift and vicious spread of her cervical cancer – and her brutal, well-publicised honesty about it – is responsible for a massive upsurge of requests for smear tests. This alone drives home what people think about her. She is ‘one of us’, albeit ‘one of us’ who has become an industry in her own right. She is fallible but not above trying to make amends for her failings, even if that means doing so in excruciating detail in the public eye.

“There is a charge//For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge/For the hearing of my heart…” wrote Sylvia Plath, again in Lady Lazarus. And: “The peanut-crunching crowd/Shoves in to see//Them unwrap me hand and foot/The big strip tease.” Jade Goody has run with this idea and made a positive of it; where Plath was contemplating her attempts at suicide, the ‘big strip tease’ of Goody’s final weeks is solely about taking care of the future for her children and may well see her reborn in the public’s collective memory as someone who rose above the pain and despair and did some good.

Goody is not succumbing to Gwili Andre’s lonely and miserable mode of death, alone in her flat consumed by the fires taking root in her piles of cuttings. She has not allowed fame to make her bitter. She is taking what remains of her life and transforming it, seemingly aware that she, like so many celebrities before her, from Marilyn Monroe to Princess Diana, will be frozen in the moment by her early death. Of course she’d prefer to live to see her children grow old rather than die in front of the cameras, but what she’s doing is right for her and what she thinks is right for her children.

If it disturbs you, do not watch or read the reports, but do not try to prevent Jade Goody from choosing the manner of her death; she has finally proved that she deserves more than that.