A singer/actor can enter into the public eye with their talent. We look in their direction, and await news of their next song/film. Eventually we get bored of waiting, and that artist leaves the public consciousness. So how do celebs prevent this from happening? They release a story of course. There’s no new work to talk about, so they talk about their personal lives.
That’s how it begins. But recently, it seems that the personal lives of celebrities are more interesting that what they actually do. So much so, that shows like “Made in Chelsea” and “Jersey Shore” skip out the talent altogether. More and more people are gaining their fifteen minutes of fame without doing a single thing to earn it. It started with rocky relationships, and magazines focusing on who weighed what. Then, on the 18th of July 2000, Channel Four took it to a whole new level. We saw a group of strangers bundled into a house, and we all waited to see what happened. At first it was hilarious. However, after a while, Big Brother lost its appeal, and we all went back to normal T.V.
Over ten years later, reality T.V is rearing its attention grabbing head once more. What is it about the personal lives of others that enthral us all so much? I asked some university students, and got some interesting answers.
One third year student told me that people “see something in their lives that they would aspire to themselves, or fantasise about.” This answer was generally the norm, with many people attributing the sudden rise of reality T.V to “escapism.” This hints at an underlying dissatisfaction with the way life is going. The world is a pretty bad place for us all right now. No one has much money, it’s going to cost over £30k for students to get through university, and no one can get a job. So to cheer ourselves up, we take a glimpse of how good life could be, were we born in Essex. How good it could be, or how low we could sink. One first year told me that he only watched shows like Jersey Shore to “laugh at the people on it,” giving me just a shred of hope that we haven’t all lost our minds. As for becoming obsessed with celebs behind closed doors, he thinks that “we want to see if they’re so glamorous away from the spot light.”
It’s natural to be curious. They look so perfect on the covers of magazines; we want to see if that’s how they live their lives. So we forget that we aren’t seeing reality, we are seeing a carefully scripted scene, meant to be presented and perceived as reality. We aspire to have lives like the ones we see on the television, without taking into account that those lives don’t exist.
It’s a sad day for artists everywhere when the shenanigans of Snooki and JWOWW can make you a ‘celebrity.’ To be a celebrity used to mean you were someone of talent, and had contributed in some way to the world around you. If T.V and magazines carry on like they are, God knows what that word will come to mean.
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