Celebrity Fuckwit Shock Soup

Fear and Blogging in Las Vegas


I'm not a nosy person in my heart, but boredom and the proximity of my neighbours has made me enthusiastic to keep up a healthy level of community engagement recently. I restrict myself to normal levels of interest. I can tell you though, it can be quite hard to resist taking it to that slightly creepy next level. You secretly want to start peeping into people's windows, keeping detailed notes on every one of their comings and goings; when they visit the lavatory, their favorite programmes, how much they mention me, try to find out why they ignore me. Why don't they see me..? Why wont they listen...? I told them I'd do it... the voices.... So as you can tell, I keep it pretty friendly.

Nowadays, idle curtain twitching tittle tattle is apparently the news. On Sunday the eighties revival gathered further pace, as Fergie was back, making herself look like a massive tool after being caught in a sting, trying to sell off her ex-husband's brain cavity as real estate space (or something). Her dippy naivety, although not hugely newsworthy over a weekend which saw a tragic Indian plane crash and a fatal coach accident, did at least give me a warm, fuzzy feeling of nostalgia at seeing her back on form, making a huge tit out of herself.

For ages, the news has been encouraging us to look over the fence into the celebrity dirtbox and glare at the foibles of these porridge brains with hand clapping glee. Watching Fergie, Lord Treismen and Ronan 'the pest' Keating, all try to wriggle out of it is like watching someone recover from a huge hangover the morning after a dinner party where they got hideously drunk, made rude comments about the pigs in blankets and headbutted the host before squatting over the table and curling a juicy log into the coq-au-vin.

This nasty habit the tabloids have consists of getting bored with real reporting, tying a Dictaphone to a fat titted wench or passing themselves off as a Sheik, waving boobs or cash under a non-specific celebrity, then spending the next six weeks perving over the fallout and moralising on our behalf. All this plays out endlessly while we sit dumbstruck and unblinking like an old man catching the ten minute freeview by accident while flicking through the channels looking for the snooker.

As a populace are we really passing moral judgement on stupid people caught in entrapment-o-ramas? We seem to really be just bedazzled by suddenly being faced with decisions on how to react best to the life of people we previously gave only fleeting attention. Are we tittering, or are we pontificating on what we would have done with our friends then secretly knowing what we REALLY would have done and thanking the Lord it wasn't us?

I'm not going to even bother passing judgement on the tabloid sting tactics. I'm not even judging the failure of the celebrity rats to recognise they had landed on the cheese or to hear the clunk clunk clunk of the marble heading down the stairs before it was too late and the little man was being pinged off the diving board and into their faces with a giant telescopic lens. The notional service of the news being a secondary medium to report to the public a sequence of important events that have already taken place has long since died, to be replaced with an unending episode of Trigger Happy TV that takes itself about a million times more seriously and the pranks organised by men even uglier, fatter (but probably more funny) than Dom Jolly.

Instead, one can only marvel at the frequency, ease and dexterity of the whole system. There are seemingly endless skeletons in closets who crave swimming pool funds, willing to cash in on their exploitation of the only celebrity they will ever meet. There is also a sickly and less comfortable element to how some of the stories are played out and how we are encouraged to view the celebs after the sting. Brad Pitt remains a lovable rogue following his affair with Angelina Jolie, whilst England's Brave John Terry is hauled into the tabloid kangaroo court to be branded a trollop and hit round the head with a collective red top 'harrumph' of indignation. Cheryl Cole is the wronged woman, standing, doe eyed beside her man (until he finally located enough straws to break her back, in the form of further short sighted text wanking arrangements), yet Victoria Beckham remains about as popular as a turd in a souffle.

There's no point searching for indignation to attack readers attracted to scandal mongers who spend their nights cackling in the dark and plotting who to take down next, because the society makes the system, makes the society. We're all in some part complicit in this, making us all responsible. I especially hope that Fergie takes that comment seriously and is inclined to divvy up my share of the loot. I'd even watch an episode of Budgie the Helicopter for that. As long as I didn't have to look at her face. Ever. Again.

Cleopatracominatcha xxx