Watch a documentary about the rise of Ms Abi Titmuss, a youngish blonde cypher of a woman whose face and body regularly dominate the UK tabloid press and men’s magazine covers at time of writing. The curious thing is, she admits to being a fraud as a celebrity and a fraud as a model. Her position, such as it is, is because she has realised how to make an enormous amount of money very quickly, doing fairly easy things and have a rather nice time doing it. It’s an opportunity that she’d glimpsed as the girlfriend of a famous man, then pursued with the dedication and relentless tenacity of a zealot. The tabloid spotlight first hit her as The Girlfriend of Mr X, while she was still working as a nurse in a London hospital, earning much less money for much less fun. The day she decided to get a PR person of her own, quit her job and ‘do’ fame, she felt she’d ‘paid her dues’ to the world, and wanted something more.
I can’t possibly blame her for that. But I’m just not convinced the hospital’s loss is really the media’s gain, and I don’t think she is either.
There are accidental celebrities, those who do something successfully enough that their name is known to millions of strangers, but who accept the fame as a necessary side-effect. Then there are deliberate celebrities, who actively enjoy and encourage the trappings of fame, but also like there to be something to point to by way of explanation for the attention-seeking. A song, a book, a film, a TV series. Something to qualify them. These two types have existed since the invention of showbusiness. It’s only recently that I believe a third category has come into being, of which Ms Titmuss is very much a member: disposable celebrities.
It’s an oxymoronic tag. If you can earn money from being a famous Name alone, that surely suggests you can’t be undone. But with Ms Titmuss, she admits she is not unique, that it will be over sooner rather than later. Blonde women willing to be photographed are not in short supply, and she has not made herself into anything more than a blonde woman with a name. Fame itself doesn’t really suit her. In one interview, she tries to say what she does for a living. She can barely describe herself as a model, though that’s what she technically is, because she says she doesn’t feel like a model. So you’d think she’d have something interesting to say about the nature of modern celebrity, about mass sexuality, about why she does it – money aside. But no. Money aside, there really seems to be no other interest in fame for her. It’s just a job she can do which is better paid than nursing. I’m fascinated and appalled at the same time.
If a celebrity gets on a train full of great thinkers and scientists, and the train crashes, the newspapers will report their name first. That’s what fame means. At the time of the tsunami disaster, one newspaper devoted its front page to an unsmiling photo of the great director and actor Richard Attenborough, because he’d lost his granddaughter in the tragedy. Other bereaved grandfathers were not given a look-in. Even when the great anti-showbiz DJ John Peel died, there were photographers at the funeral service poised to snap celebrities in attendance. The implication being, if a celebrity is involved with an event, the event is somehow elevated – even death or disaster. It can only be a matter of time before there is a publication devoted to funerals attended by celebrities: inevitably called Goodbye! Magazine.
During the BBC TV coverage of the Live 8 concert, a blonde woman called Ferne Cotton was employed to ask inane questions of celebrities in the backstage area, helpfully mentioning the word ‘amazing’ in every other sentence. The cameras cut away from a glimpse of exiled Zimbabwean singer Thomas Mapfumo at the Eden Project concert, in order for Ms Cotton to speak to Neil Morrissey.
