Reality Matters_ 19 Writers Come Clean About the Shows We Can't Stop Watching - Anna David [20]
“The, er, English Olympic rowing squad.”
Beat.
“Do you mean the British squad?”
“Sorry,” I said, slapping my forehead. “I’m an idiot.”
Later, as we reviewed grainy video footage of Sir Steve’s Olympic victories, I attempted to claw my way back into his good books by pointing out Martin Cross, one of the Oxford team’s coaches, sitting alongside him when he won his first gold in 1984.
“Isn’t that Martin in the stern?” I asked, indicating a shaggy-haired young man at the front of the boat.
“That’s the bow,” he said, looking at me in the same way he looked at the Germans when he and Matthew Pinsent left them in their wake at Barcelona.
Needless to say, a BBC cameraman was on hand to capture both of these exchanges.
Why does anyone agree to appear on a reality show? The obvious answer is because they want to be famous—but why? Is it simply a desire for status? Celebrities live in the grandest houses, dictate the latest fashions, and enjoy unlimited sexual opportunities—but even this description of the perks of being a celeb is a rationalization. The desire for fame is more primordial than that. It’s about the longing for recognition, the need to stand out in the crowd.
I have to confess, I’m as pathetic as the next man in my craving for attention. At some prerational level I, too, think I’ll never be fully actualized until I’m a celebrity. More than this, I believe that once I’ve crossed that Rubicon I’ll achieve a kind of immortality. This must be at the root of why anyone wants to be famous: it’s a way of cheating death.
But I’m enough of a student of the subject to know that fame, as an end in itself, doesn’t have the same currency it once did. Scarcely a day passes without a hand-wringing article appearing in the press about how fame and celebrity have become the dominant values of our time, when, in fact, almost the opposite is the case. In the first decade of the twenty-first century—thanks, in part, to the phenomenal success of programs like Survivor—we’ve witnessed the gradual separation of fame and status. These days, being well known doesn’t automatically ensure high social standing (let alone immortality). You can be famous and still be a loser: a famous loser. In Britain, the best example is probably James Hewitt, the guardsman who had an affair with Princess Diana, but there are countless others.
It doesn’t really make sense to call James Hewitt a “celebrity.” I mean, what does he have in common with Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise? There are so many different varieties of fame these days we need to develop a whole new vocabulary to describe them. At the moment, the best we can do is rank celebrities according to whether they’re A-list, B-list, etc. But even if we use every letter of the alphabet that still gives us only twenty-six different types. That’s surely not enough. Eskimos have forty-seven different words for snow. Shouldn’t we have forty-seven words for celebrity?
Then there’s the issue of duration. All things being equal, being famous is probably preferable to not being famous, but you better make damn sure you remain in the spotlight for longer than fifteen minutes. Unlike love, to have had fame and lost it is worse than never having had it at all. It’s like the argument about why you should never take a one-off opportunity to fly first class: once you’ve turned left, you’ll never want to turn right again. Sometimes it’s better not to know what you’re missing.
It’s not just reality stars who have to worry about this. Even some A-list celebrities have the shelf life of milk. Egged on by the tabloids, the public appear to have an insatiable appetite for seeing the famous toppled from their thrones. Being in the public eye is a bit like being in jail: one wrong move and all your privileges are taken away.
Why is this? One approach to answering that question is to look at the life of Lord Byron, the first modern celebrity. Byron was an overnight sensation, becoming famous at the age of twenty-four with the appearance of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. For the next three years, every door