Posts Tagged ‘peter andre’

Given the current debate surrounding PR, PR spam and how to further the better practices of PR in the 21st Century, the news that 3am has fallen out with Peter Andre’s management, CAN Associates because CAN wanted to control every aspect of a minor story about Andre teaming up with a coffee emporium can’t have come at a worse time. 3am’s account makes for riveting reading. Click here to find out more.

PR is living in interesting times at the moment. As traditional marketing and advertising suffers a confidence slump, the best people in PR are carefully repositioning themselves and the PR industry into a lead practice that can take on all aspects of the modern, digitally savvy rapid-change media. But for every good and forward-thinking PR firm, there’s always one who wallows in the clichés of the industry, as CAN’s attempts to out-Kingsley Pat Kingsley have proved. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

Have you overdosed on the X Factor? Are the opinions of the judges getting you down? Have you felt like venting your feelings about the loss of your favourite contestant? Did Danyl’s departure in the semi-finals really get your goat? Did Lucie losing out to Jedward rile you to the point of despair? Or are you simply sick of the whole ‘poptastic’ shebang?

If the answer to any of these questions is “YES”, Borkowski has a couple of tasty slices of satirical goodness to ease your rage, two fine diversions from a toxic weekend of TV carnage. In a burst of pre-Christmas generosity, we present The Exterminating Factor, a neat-but-twisted X rated game that allows the player an opportunity to vent their destructive feelings. All within the bounds of legality and common sense, of course – we are in no way suggesting that the game’s scenario should be re-enacted in real life.

You see, this twisted little game allows the player to shoot virtual nails into the disembodied heads of Simon Cowell, Danni Minogue, Cheryl Cole and Louis Walsh – and what would there be on TV worth being ranted and fulminated about if The Exterminator Factor were taken too seriously and acted upon in real life?

Better just to play the game and feel that shiver of nervous satisfaction as the first virtual nail strikes and two smaller judges’ heads burst from Simon Cowell’s smiling face. Or gasp as the dimpled smile of a tiny Cheryl Cole disappears forever in a hail of virtual nails.

Based on the gaming classic Asteroids, The Exterminating Factor is the perfect way of letting loose all your pent up frustrations at the 21st Century’s premier talent contest cum soap opera. Click on the picture to access the game.

And as if that wasn’t enough, Borkowski also presents a sharp, satirical poem for all the pacifists and non-gamers out there who are tired of celebrity for the sake of celebrity; of popularity contests masquerading as talent contests; who cannot bear to see the world and its wife doing everything in its power to be famous.

The Sleb’s Prayer, by the remarkable poet Adam Horovitz, features music based on a sample by great 60s garage rock band, The Groupies. The track has been wrapped up in Mel Rodiq’s stunning video in the style of magazines like Heat and OK. You can see it below.

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.

The more implausible elements of the ‘Balloon Boy’ story are deflating fast, but still people are hanging on in there, waiting to see what happens when the balloon crashes finally to earth.

Deprived of the possibility of an injured or dead child to fulminate over, the press are waiting to see what happens to the child’s father and making scathing noises about his “appalling” hoax. Legal action looms on the horizon and the life of a man desperate for attention looks likely to deflate even more drastically than the balloon he claimed had carried off his son.

But why is there all this fuss? The media are furious at being scammed and at appearing gullible, but they have scammed many times before and shrugged it off, admitting they’ve been kippered – such stories make for good entertainment.

Hoaxes have been a part of the American psyche for decades – just think of Orson Welles’ radio version of War of the Worlds in the 1930s. The flying saucer is one of the most recognisable tropes of the modern era of hoaxing; ‘balloon boy’s’ father was just – amateurishly – continuing a theme. On reflection, ‘Balloon Boy’ is one hoax that the media could and should have been able to see through, given that there was no realistic way that the balloon could have held a cat, let alone a six year old boy.

Why are the media so furious about a man who is so patently desperate for fame that he was prepared to try anything? Is it really because he pulled the wool over their eyes? It is the media’s fault that people are doing anything and everything they can to get noticed – all one need do is look at the reports of fabulous nobodies like Kerry Katona, Jordan and Pete and so on, who litter the newspapers daily at the expense of actual news, and at the thousands of wannabes who clutter up the tarmac at X Factor auditions. It’s seen as the last measure of job security, being famous, even if it often pays little.

The media needs to take a long hard look at what it is asking the public to buy into in future, if it is serious about turning on the people it has helped create.

When King of Comedy came out 26 years ago, the character of Rupert Pupkin was a grotesque, an inflated satire. Now that mindset is everywhere – the world is full of Rupert Pupkins, created by the press and public’s endless desire for the next sacrificial lamb in the servant’s quarters of fame. The press are largely culpable for this, using stories such as ‘Balloon Boy’ to bury bad news or carry people away on a soapy ride. To censure someone for trying to play the game by slightly different rules is simply hypocrisy.

A bumper day for picture stories in the Telegraph. First up, there’s the photo op for the launch of the Guinness Book of Records, which shows that the Barnum model of photo opportunity has never gone away – this picture of He Pingping, the Mongolian man, who, at 2ft 4in, is the world’s shortest man being a direct reference to the one staged by PT Barnum, below.

I believe that Barnum would revel in the way that the Guinness Book of Records has legitismised his interest in the biggest, smallest, oldest and oddest – and he’d surely revel even more in the fact that the sort of picture opportunities he was creating with General Tom Thumb 140 years ago are still as eagerly lapped up (and copied) by news editors today as they were then.

And then there was the image of British Catholics venerating the remains of ‘the greatest saint of modern times’, the Carmelite nun who died in 1897, at Portsmouth Cathedral.

It is rather astounding that such mediaeval-seeming devotional practice still takes place in this modern era, replete as it is with the Jordan vs. Pete parables and the secular Sleb iconography of Heat and its peers. More astounding still is the fact that people are knowingly coming to look at a coffin containing only portions of the saint’s thigh and foot bones, her body having been divided into three after her death. Normally nowadays that’s the sort of behaviour that lurid tabloid headlines are built on…

What do ex-pop star Dane Bowers and the BNP leader, Nick Griffin, have in common? They’re both publicity predators, prowling at the fringes of big news and ready to leap in and attach their teeth into the rump of a story that will get them attention.

Griffin is all over the news at the moment, attaching himself to the coat tails of the BNP’s London Assembly member Richard Barnbrook, who was invited to Buckingham Palace for a garden party and sought to bring Griffin as his significant other to the party. But Griffin, in true publicity predator style, has now consumed the story entirely.

According to the Daily Mail: “The leader of the British National Party yesterday pulled out of the Royal garden party following a public outcry over his invitation. Nick Griffin said he had ‘no wish to embarrass the Queen’ by attending Buckingham Palace on July 21.”

The far right have always been good at propaganda and at getting ink – Goebbels was an astonishing propagandist who turned the swastika into the world’s most recognisable brand logos. Griffin’s trick, learned from pop stars and the 24/7 news cycle, has been to insert himself into the soap opera of the news cycle. Soap, as we know, demands a rich mix of people and always rewards the most Machiavellian characters with big story lines.

You just have to look at Dane Bowers for proof. Bowers is back in the life of his ex, Katie Price aka Jordan, determinedly reinserting himself into the ongoing soap opera that is the Pete’n’Jordan bust up, calling her as his alibi after being arrested for drink driving outside her house. It’s a guaranteed method of reclaiming fame – this fresh injection of notoriety should last him a good fifteen months, even if he and Jordan are not an item again after all.

Griffin’s predatory ambitions are – at the moment, anyway – much more short term. He’s hoping to turn his ‘noble’ gesture to the Queen into votes at next week’s local and European elections. If that works, then the long game begins and Griffin the publicity predator will be red in tooth and claw.

In the meantime, both Griffin and Bowers are successfully writing themselves into the news-soap. For proof, all you need to look at is the reaction of Middle England. Right now, Griffin and Bowers are the names on a huge number of people’s lips.