Granny Knows Best – Being Famous

Somebody who should have known better once said that a day would come when everyone was famous for twenty minutes. And now it’s here how much do we hate it?

That, my dears, seems entirely dependent on your age.
Mostly people over fifty (with a few frightening exceptions) find it all a bit distasteful and struggle to see what the cult of fame has to offer the world – except inanities and conspicuous consumption.

So why do people engage? 
Because they want to be famous, did I hear you say?

And why is that pray?
The desire for fame seems to me to be both vapid and grasping, and to speak loudly of a life with fuck all in it. 
And you need not look at me like that neither…
I’m not famous: ‘Granny’ might be, but she’s not precisely me. And I ain’t precisely her. So.

But back to the rant you so rudely interrupted.
When I was a younger person you had to do something pretty big to get famous: 

• Climb a shagging great mountain in your flip-flops. 
• Discover a cure for stupidity. 
• Write a post-modern novel post mortem.
• Stop a war.
• Start a war.
• Run faster than whoever was chasing you. 
  And so on.

Now?

• You can be famous for being somebody’s mother.
• You can be famous for who you marry.
• You can be famous for who you sleep with (polite euphemism for shag).
• You can be famous for spending immoderate amounts of money
• You can be famous for making videos of yourself in your bedroom behaving inanely.
• You can even be famous for having a big fat ass.

Tell you what. I. Give. Up.

What would happen if we just ignored the ‘influencers’ and their overblown egos?
Maybe corporate eejits would stop paying them inordinate sums of money to promote products on their websites/blogs/vlogs/whatever. Maybe teenage girls would stop drawing their eyebrows with magic markers and trying to be both thin and fat at the same time.
Maybe we’d go back to famous people being ones who did something positive with their lives.

Maybe.
And maybe not.
Maybe our collective psyche is so fucked up that we need useless celebrity to enable us to get through life.

And that is such a frightening thought that me and Gyp are off to the pub. You lot can do whatever it is you have done to deserve a woman famous for her backside. I need a pint and a game of darts to cleanse my palate.