Proper Gander: Fame And Fortune (2021)

The Proper Gander TV column from the February 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

BBC Two’s recent documentary series Celebrity: A 21st Century Story is thankfully more than just a bunch of talking heads reminiscing about the singers and models who dipped in and out of the spotlight over the last couple of decades. Running for four hours in total, the series has plenty of time to consider the place that ‘celebrity culture’ has in our society, and what shapes its changing trends. Commendably, the programme’s focus is on economics, and how celebrities contribute to the revenue of profit-hungry mass media giants. A famous person will draw in viewers to a TV show, readers to a magazine or newspaper, or subscribers to a social media account, as well as making money through sales of any music or other commodities they directly contribute to. Advertisers are particularly keen to latch on to celebrities, hoping to leech on their popularity to find customers for whatever tat they’re marketing. All of this is linked in with whatever technology is currently in vogue across the media, technology which itself is driven by what is profitable.

Narrating Celebrity: A 21st Century Story is Diane Morgan (otherwise known for her mockumentaries in the guise of Philomena Cunk), and alongside the archive footage are interviews with journalists, paparazzi and (now-faded) stars reflecting on the highs and lows of their time in the public eye.

The series begins with what could be described as an expansion in the market. When the first set of contestants walked into the Big Brother house and onto our screens in 2000, they also marked a shift in what we mean by a ‘celebrity’. Celebrity status was no longer just reserved for a distant few, but could also be for ‘ordinary people’. The exploits of the Big Brother housemates (especially when they found their own pantomime villain in ‘Nasty Nick’) were soon all over the tabloids and in office water cooler chats. Not long afterwards, the talent show format was revived, with Pop Idol and its ilk feeding on the aspirations of any of us proles to sell out Wembley and top the charts. The new breed of talent shows emphasised the contestants’ emotional journeys, and then let the public decide whose dreams would be crushed. The phone-in vote, also used for Big Brother, was less an exercise in democracy than a way of increasing revenue for the programme-makers; income from the cost of calls soon generated over £3 million for Pop Idol. More money came in from CD sales; combined, runner-up and winner Gareth Gates and Will Young’s first singles sold three million copies. Big Brother brought in a quarter of Channel 4’s advertising revenue in its early years due to its popularity. ‘Ordinary people’ being elevated to star status had become another source of profit.

TV production companies, record labels, advertisers and agents weren’t the only ones keen to make money from this new trend. Celeb-focused journals saw a boost in sales, with Heat magazine’s circulation doubling thanks to it tapping into the popularity of Pop Idol in particular. A gossipy article about any celeb needs to be accompanied by eye-catching photos, and the mid ‘00s was a lucrative time for the paparazzi. Candid shots of Fern Britton on the beach or Charlotte Church in Tesco were sold for thousands of pounds to glossy mags such as OK!, Hello! and Heat. Their online equivalents were the even trashier websites like Holy Moly! and Pop Bitch, which had the advantage of being able to share snaps and titbits with their voyeuristic viewers straight away. The push for more brazen and irreverent content led to many women celebrities being victim to body shaming and upskirting. Even a celebrity’s mental health problems and substance misuse (usually fuelled by being in the limelight) have been turned into a spectacle by websites and print. One of the most severe examples was in 2007 when singer Britney Spears (struggling in her personal life) confronted one of the photographers stalking her, and attacked his car with an umbrella. This turned out to be another goldmine for the paparazzi who sold pictures of the incident for $400,000.

A consequence of the profitability of celebrity gossip magazines and blogs was a decline in newspaper sales, with tabloids losing millions of readers in the mid ‘00s. One way they responded was by branching out online. A newspaper’s website, unlike its printed version, can be used to find out how many people read each article, just by measuring how many clicks they attract. This data, along with statistics on the demographics of those who clicked, can then determine the interests of readers so that adverts can be targeted to their most receptive audience. This advertising then, of course, provides revenue for the newspaper and the products being flogged. These websites are really just marketing platforms, with articles to draw the punters in. Other tactics used by newspapers have been far more surreptitious and cynical. Journalists found material for stories by digging into the tax and medical records of celebs and their families, and hacking potentially thousands of peoples’ phones, most notoriously for The News of the World.

Celebrities had lost control of what details of their lives were made public. Some, like Britney Spears, suffered under the pressure of being constantly scrutinised and used. Others turned this to their own advantage, such as Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian, who both became famous through ‘sex tapes’ being leaked onto the internet. This exposure gave them hundreds of millions of fans, who became the audiences for their newly commissioned reality TV shows. Having a fly-on-the-wall documentary is a tried-and-tested way for celebs to keep on delivering new content to fans; model Katie ‘Jordan’ Price and the Osbournes had discovered this by 2002. And when broadcasting their usual routines becomes stale, there would be the option of reinventing themselves by signing up for Celebrity Big Brother, Strictly Come Dancing or I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!.

Capitalism turns us all into commodities, things to be bought and sold, but celebrities take this to an extreme by commodifying everything about their lives, and turning themselves into a brand. And this brand has to both stand out and be malleable to what the public supposedly wants. Around 2010, this approach morphed into the new genre of ‘structured reality’ TV programmes like The Only Way Is Essex and Made In Chelsea. These shows stuck to the template of having cameras follow people round, but with the twists that these are ‘real people’ and that their lives have been made more watchable by producers giving them scenarios to improvise, such as ‘x dumps y after being told y was flirting with z’. The participants’ public profiles were raised not just by the shows, but also by their social media accounts, which have become an increasingly important way for celebrities to manage their image, or have it managed for them. When pop band One Direction were manufactured from X-Factor contestants, each member had their own social media profiles to gauge the views of their fanbase. A Facebook page or Twitter account became a valuable combination of instant market research, an advert which distributes itself and, especially importantly, a means to sell endorsed products. Viewers of matchmaking show Love Island use an app not only to vote for contestants but also to buy whichever design of bikinis are being worn on that week’s episode. The app has generated £12 million in sales for ITV and its brands. Stars have been endorsing products for decades, but what was emerging was the ‘influencer’, who uses social media to tie together their fame and what they market. The biggest influencers have had enough clout to shape trends, and not just in what clothes or jewellery people buy. For example, Kylie Jenner rose to prominence by being part of the Kardashian family on their TV show. By the age of 20, she had over 100 million followers on social media app Instagram. Because of her influence, one message she posted criticising Instagram’s rival Snapchat apparently took £1 billion off the latter’s stock market value.

Social media isn’t just used by influencers, it also helps create them. Bedroom broadcasters became a new type of celebrity from around 2012, when 4G technology had spread enough to enable more people to make their own videos and upload them to YouTube. A gaming or make-up vlogger whose videos get hundreds of millions of views a month represents hundreds of millions of potential customers to target with adverts and endorsements. By 2015, ‘YouTube creators’ had become more popular and influential than ‘traditional entertainment stars’, according to a survey carried out by Variety.

Social media has become the main way for anyone with a public image to stay relevant. The Royal family, who a few years earlier would have thought that such things were beneath one, also jumped on the bandwagon, led by Meghan Markle. Before she married into The Firm she had already used her acting roles to attract readers to her lifestyle blog, which brought her tens of thousands in sponsorship and endorsements. Now, she and Harry have their ‘Sussex Royal’ Instagram account to promote themselves, while other Windsors also have profiles on Twitter and Facebook. This allows them to shape whatever pronouncements they make, without needing to go through traditional intermediaries like the press. Politicians have done the same, and Donald Trump took full advantage of this, using his Twitter feed to criticise much of the mainstream media and inflict his many deranged thoughts on us.

The rise to power of both Donald Trump and Boris Johnson can be attributed in part to how they celebrified themselves by building their brands through the media. Johnson came from a journalistic background, and Trump was the star of The Apprentice USA, so they were both aware of the need for media presence. Before Trump started presenting The Apprentice in 2003, his business had been in the doldrums, and the show made his companies and therefore him look bigger than they had really been. As the documentary says, Trump then ‘used the tools of reality TV not only to win viewers, but to win votes’. Boris Johnson was keen to use any and every publicity stunt to further his career, including appearances on Have I Got News For You and EastEnders. It’s nothing new for politicians to use TV to talk at the public, but recent years have seen them using the medium to try and make themselves more relatable. Johnson himself once quipped during a speech ‘if Parliament were a reality TV show, then the whole lot of us, I’m afraid, would have been voted out of the jungle by now’. Politicians have seen how celebrities use TV to gain a following and want to ape this for themselves. Jeremy Corbyn went on Gogglebox, Ann Widdecombe and Ed Balls rhumbaed on Strictly Come Dancing, George Galloway pretended to be a cat on Celebrity Big Brother, and even Boris Johnson’s family have got in on the act, with his father and sister slumming it on I’m A Celebrity… Interviewed for the documentary, ex-Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer Balls says that being a politician put a ‘thick prism of glass’ between him and other people, and his appearance on Strictly broke down this barrier so people could see the real him. He adds that doing Gangnam Style meant that ‘I’d done my bit to make the country feel a little bit better’.

While politicians have tried to tap into the world of celebrity to get support, celebrities have also used their status to make a political stand. Kim Kardashian was influential enough to encourage Donald Trump to pardon and release Alice Marie Johnson, who had been convicted of drug trafficking. And actresses attending the 2018 Grammy and Golden Globe award ceremonies wore black and brought Me Too and Time’s Up activists with them to the red carpet in support of the movements, given impetus when film producer Harvey Weinstein was revealed as a sex offender.

Celebrity status now carries some political power, as well as economic power. How this has been expressed has changed over the years, alongside the developments in media technology, from print journalism and TV through to the internet and, especially, social media. And as technology has become more sophisticated, it has led to more precise ways of analysing us as consumers and pushing us to follow celebrity trends and buy more. Watching reality TV, or flicking through a copy of Heat, or subscribing to a YouTube influencer is often just a ‘guilty pleasure’, a brief escape from our own humdrum, stressful lives. But as Celebrity: A 21st Century Story illustrates, celebrity culture has been shaped by what the media industry finds to be most profitable for its owners, and so manipulates and exploits both celebs and ourselves.

Mike Foster

Guns Before Needs (2015)

From the April 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Normally under capitalism it’s profits before needs but sometimes, since capitalism can’t exist without the state, something else is granted priority. Not meeting any of people’s needs of course but a state’s need to have armed force at its disposal. This, not just to protect sources of raw materials, trade routes, markets and investment outlets for its capitalist firms but also because, in the diplomatic jockeying between states for power and influence on the world stage, “might is right”.

The US government is concerned that austerity in Britain has gone too far as the war (or,  in Orwellian, the “defence”) budget has also been cut.

The US government knows that Britain, thanks to its imperial(ist) past, has in its armed forces a highly efficient killing machine that it can rely on to back up its own killing machine. The militarist lobby in Britain has wheeled out retired generals and admirals to support more money for the killing machine they once commanded.

And the attitude of the Labour Party? “Labour has pledged to outspend the Conservatives on defence in the next parliament, heaping pressure on David Cameron as he faces a growing rebellion over armed forces expenditure.

Ed Balls promised yesterday that Labour would go “nowhere near the huge scale of defence cuts you are going to see under the Conservatives”.

After a speech in London, the shadow chancellor said that he would prioritise defence in the spending review after the election, adding: “I think that it’s really important that we live up to our international responsibilities.”

Mr Balls added: “A Labour Treasury will want to back the defence of our country at a critical time, and that’s why I am refusing point-blank to sign up to the extreme plans that George Osborne has set out before us as his election manifesto.” (Times, 10 March).

Not that we should be – or are – surprised. The Labour Party has always supported the war preparations of the British state and the wars in which has been engaged. And yet there are some who still see it as the lesser of two evils.

But how do you tell the difference?

Greasy Pole: Working For Jeremy (2017)

The Greasy Pole column from the August 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

It was last September that Theresa May spoke out on the matter of her feeling strong and stable in her place at Ten Downing Street: ‘I think the next election will be in 2020. I’m not going to be calling a snap election’. At the time she had a majority in the House of Commons and the Labour opposition under Jeremy Corbyn was in such disarray that it was usual for the more boisterous Tory benches to show how exultantly they despised him in guffaws of ‘More! . . . More! . . . ’ each time he sat down after speaking. Meanwhile one Labour MP had rated Corbyn’s performance in Prime Ministers Questions as ‘a fucking disaster’ – an opinion which, perhaps similarly worded, was crudely popular on the opposition benches. Except that in May the Prime Minster announced that she had changed her mind so there would be an election on 8 June. And when that day came, after the votes had been counted and all those Tory MPs had been voted out, there been such a change among the Labour ranks that Corbyn was welcomed by them with enthusiastic applause as a victor, which carried him onto the Front Bench wreathed in smiles.

Shipyard Language

That assessment of Corbyn and PMQ came from John Woodcock, the MP for Barrow In Furness where employment is heavily dependent on the production of those Trident nuclear submarines which Corbyn opposes. Woodcock thinks that under Corbyn the party is, to use again what might be called shipyard language, ‘fucked’. In the Labour leadership election he voted for Liz Kendall – possibly under the impression that Corbyn was not a serious candidate, but perhaps his knowledge of the electoral process is not as penetrating as he would like it to be; his majority in general elections has fallen from 5,208 in 2010 to 209 in 2017. Elsewhere, on the fringes of Parliament, the language was less manipulative but equally forceful for its doubts about where Corbyn stood on the issue of the European Union. For example the book All Out War by Tim Shipman, the political editor of the Sunday Times, claims to provide something of a ‘ringside seat’ on the decision-making processes at work during these tumultuous times. Overall, Corbyn does not feature as one of the more dynamic, demanding influences at work for change because he ‘. . . had no experience of top-level politics until he won the Labour leadership in September 2015’. There is reference to a ‘lacklustre performance’ in the matter of the continuing membership of British capitalism in the EU; his ‘ . . . behaviour stoked bemused irritation among his colleagues..’ Another, but similar, view from the political side came from ex-Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer Ed Balls; ‘If I’d still been in Parliament, I don’t think I could have served in Jeremy’s Shadow Cabinet; not because I believe in sulking in tents, but because it would have been impossible to serve in any kind of senior position if I had fundamental disagreements with the leadership on core policy issues, and I suspect there would have been many’.

De Piero

The matter of whether that would have been good or bad for the Labour government was complicated by the various talents on offer. Consider for example Gloria De Piero, from a family originating in Italy but afflicted with severe and persistent impoverishment because neither parent was healthy enough to hold onto paid employment. But De Piero plugged on through all the stresses, achieving some handsomely relevant qualifications which were enough to carry her into a career in TV journalism with the likes of Jonathan Dimbleby and then into politics. In February 2010 she resigned from GMTV to try for the Labour nomination for the Ashfield seat where the sitting MP Geoff Hoon was stepping down after a varied career including a number of ministerial posts entailing predictable ambitions for the party leadership. But this was not all plain sailing, for Hoon was involved in a series of blunders and worse which eventually earned him the title of Geoff Buffoon. Whatever his defence in these matters it was clearly time for him to give way to a less contentious candidate and De Piero stood out for this. One outcome was that in her first attempt at the seat, in 2010, De Piero had a majority of 192 (compared to Hoon’s 2005 figure of 10,213) resulting from a swing of 17.2 percent to the Liberal candidate Jason Zadrozny – which was quickly wiped out in time for the next election in 2015 after Zadrozny was prosecuted for sexual offences.

Topless

However De Piero was not influenced by the stresses, the questions, the doubts about being a Labour candidate. At some stage – when she was 15 years old – she had been persuaded into posing for some topless photographs. The matter remained dormant until 2010, when it was reported in The Mail On Sunday which had bought the photos and again in October 2013 when a news agency was attempting to buy them. De Piero’s protests were supported by a former Tory MP describing the matter as a ‘ . . . quasi-sexual or moralistic assault on her behaviour as a 15-year old girl’ and at De Piero’s request the newspaper sent her the photos and the negatives with a written apology. Now she is more experienced; in July last year she demonstrated the assumed influence of a Front Bencher by contributing a piece to The Sun which was ‘begging’ that paper’s readers to join the Labour Party so that they could vote for ‘ . . . a leader who recognises that the Labour Party was founded to be a Party of Government’. A year later she had changed her mind to such an extent that she had been able to accept a place in Corbyn’s team in the vital job of Shadow Justice Minister.

Gloria De Piero is not the only Labour MP to change their mind over accepting the temptation to work with Jeremy Corbyn. Roberta Blackman-Woods (‘I no longer have confidence in you as a leader’) is one. Another is Karl Turner (‘I’ve eaten humble pie over criticisms of Jeremy Corbyn’). And Holly Lynch (‘An ineffective Leader’). This fact informs us, and strengthens us, in our opposition to the people who are elected to rule over us in a social system which is essentially, inhumanely, chaotic.

Ivan

Greasy Pole: Theresa - Strong And Stable (2017)

The Greasy Pole column from the July 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

We were told that Theresa May decided, flushed with optimism, to hold a general election on June 8 when she was hiking with her husband through Dolgellau, a small market town lying at the base of the Cader Idris range in Snowdonia. Dolgellau was once a woollen town but it was taken over by the automatic looms. Now it relies on tourists, who walk and climb or stay at the hotels there. When May was a small toddler a group of Socialist Party members climbed to the summit of Cader Idris, where one of them who was pregnant stood deeply awestruck by the view. That evening in the hotel there was a lot to be discussed – such as capitalism’s abuse of the world’s beauties, like the political conceits of the system’s rulers to the misery of its people. For May it is rather different now from her relaxed stroll through Dolgellau.

Speaking Out

One who would have been particularly interested in that discussion was Ed Balls, whose book – Speaking Out – has recently been published. This is an account of his political experiences including a previous election when, according to Balls in an advisory mood: ‘What we badly need in Britain is a return to the sort of leadership exemplified by Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister and Gordon Brown as a Chancellor…’ without speculating on how this proposed combustible partnership might have operated. Speaking Out is about Balls’ time as an Oxford undergraduate, then as an economist at Harvard followed by the Financial Times and a place at the Treasury until with the election of the Labour Government under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown a succession of ministerial posts preceded the defeat of that government and had him emerging as shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer.

PMQs

That was when he achieved a kind of notoriety appearing on the TV screens exchanging insults and indecipherable hand gestures with David Cameron during Prime Ministers Questions – which entailed the exposure of Cameron to lasting scorn among the fans by mistaking West Ham for Aston Villa. Those broadcast clashes earned Balls a reputation as a left-winger inspired by a passion to help establish a more equal society. Except that he denied this with his very own words: ‘But being Labour doesn’t mean that I can’t also believe in a market economy which creates wealth and good jobs . . .  you couldn’t build a stronger economy on a fairer society through opposing business; it had to be a partnership between the dynamism of business and the helping hand of government. And my arrival from the Financial Times, the pink-papered global business newspaper, to work for Labour in 1994 was one symbol of that change they were pursuing’.

Osborne

This was a preamble to Balls’ next, heavily publicised, ambitiously gratifying, personal appearance on TV when as the news came in late on polling day he picked over the tastier morsels with George Osborne. It was not comforting for Theresa May – but then how was Osborne to react when one of her first responses to becoming party leader was ruthlessly to eject him from being Chancellor of the Exchequer – even if he could then take his revenge as editor of the Evening Standard? And in any case May herself had never hesitated to make enemies. Apart from her infamously informing the Tories that they were better known as The Nasty Party there was the matter of her costly tastes in clothes, like a ‘Deliciously Soft Escada Cashmere Coat’ priced at £1950 and her revealing underwear such as headlined by the Express as ‘The Day Theresa May’s Boob-Busting Bra Sparked Twitter Meltdown’.

Paisley

Walking that day with her husband through Dolgellau Theresa May could feel easy about fixing the date of the election. She had cleared a number of rivals out of the Party, leaving her supreme to assure the voters that she alone would ensure Strong Stable Government. She would see off Jean-Claude Juncker along with those other tiresome European mediocrities. The Tories were a long way ahead with every opinion poll, leaving Jeremy Corbyn behind in what seemed a swamp of defeat. But as the campaign got under way another, profoundly unsettling, picture emerged. And when it came to that fateful day Jeremy Corbyn was returned in his constituency with 73 per cent of the vote and the Labour Party gained 30 seats. After all those confident boasts May’s party did not have enough MPs to set up a government. There was plenty of advice and predictions. In the end she turned up with yet another surprise by announcing that, along with her guilt and despair about the outcome of her campaign she would ensure that at least she could be at the head of a government, even if it entailed being in alliance with the Democratic Unionists – Ian Paisley’s original sprouting in Northern Ireland.

Crackpots

The DUP was formed in 1971 and has survived during various disciplines of militarism known as The Troubles. It is now the largest party in the Northern Ireland Assembly and its ten seats at Westminster make it the fifth largest in the Commons. But as it was typically known as ‘a coalition of crackpots’ it seemed unlikely that May would aggravate the chaos in her party by trying to survive as a government with their support. But that is what emerged from the chaos, with May as the titular leader of a minority government intended to operate on only ‘matters of mutual concern’, which left her enemies to speculate hopefully on exactly how it could fail. There is no lack of evidence that this will happen, if only in the recorded attitudes of the DUP leaders. One is in the Caleb Foundation opinion that the origins of the Earth – by god over six days – should be taught in schools. The party is hostile to LGBT groups and opposed to same sex marriage: ‘Peter will not marry Paul’. Northern Ireland is the only place in the UK where it is illegal to have an abortion, with a prison term of life for cases of drug-induced abortion. In December 2015 Arlene Foster became the party leader but in January 2017 she had to step down from the post of First Minister after presiding over a disastrous Renewable Heat Incentive Scheme costing the Budget some £400 million and ensuring that Theresa May’s effort to survive through an alliance with the DUP would look very unlikely. Which should divert us no more than on that long gone day on the Welsh mountain.

Ivan