Of all the dreary polls and games bored people like to post on the Web, my least favourite is probably ‘Celeb Haikus’. It’s a version of those “Spotted!” pages in magazines like Heat, where readers are encouraged to send it sightings of celebrities.
“Dale Winton, in a road”
“Sue Pollard, buying things in a shop”.
That’s not an anecdote or even proper gossip. It’s just filling space and encouraging banality for its own sake, not to mention consolidating the notion of celebrity prostration in a godless void. It’d only be justifiable if this yen for so-called celebrity surveillance was of the neighbourhood watch persuasion:
“Spotted! Michael Parkinson, seen washing human entrails from his hands, laughing.”
“Spotted! Bruce Forsyth, killing a boy.”
Haikus have always annoyed me too; at school I regarded them as the quadratic equations of poetry. Cheap rules, cheap aftertaste. So here’s the Celeb Haiku to end them all, he said with foolish optimism.
“Spotted!” Shaftesbury Ave
Mark Frith, Editor, Heat Mag
Not spotted: his soul
Actually, I should confess I rather like the glossy graphics and fun attitude of Heat Magazine. And the TV section is pretty good. It’s just the encouragement of spying upon celebrities as a kind of national sport that irks me.
