Fame, fortune, celebrity — and death

Leia was no ordinary princess. And Carrie fisher was no ordinary woman. Princess (latterly General) Leia will never grace our cinema screens again and Carrie Fisher has left a literary legacy of repute and an unforgiving self-penned chronicle of her failings and triumphs. Born into Hollywood royalty, a star before she was 20 and then years of drug abuse and addiction (the two are very different) alcoholism and depression and a string of failed relationships. Imperfections aside she will be fondly remembered.

So will George Michael a singer who for many (not me) defined 1980s pop in the West. Less famous than Fisher in this neck of the woods but still a figure to generate column inches in all our newspapers on learning of his demise. He was also deeply flawed; another to who fame and fortune brought little happiness. His substance abuse and prodigious alcoholic binges were the stuff of gossip-column legend. He died alone on Christmas Day, peacefully, in his bed.

It has been something of a grim year when it comes to celebrity deaths. It started with David Bowie and continued relentlessly until this month when Richard Adams, author of Watership Down, also went to the Great Warren in the Sky.

For many, these dead people are part of our collective memory, items of mental furniture that were part of childhood, adolescence and growing up — growing old, even. Adams signed my copy of Watership Down, and I still have it. I saw David Bowie twice live in concert. Attended the first showing on the first day of release of Star Wars in Leicester Square, London, on a freebie ticket that was given to my university. That close, that personal. There will be countless thousands of others who have similar experiences of authors, films and concert performances no matter what their culture or nationality. The celebrities we treasure are the ones we forgive whatever their indiscretions, and find a corner in our hearts.

Which brings us to those celebs that still have a spring in their step and specifically the entire ghastly Kardashian family and our very own Arshad Khan. Err… who? Arshad Khan. The Chai Wallah. A teenager who shot to instant fame on the basis of a chance photo taken by a blogger that went viral on the social networks. Born into nothing more exotic than a life working on the family tea-stall he has shot into the celebrity stratosphere. Loved by all and sundry — he is not old enough to have accumulated much by way of Naughty Boy stories — he will either make a career out of being famous or crash and burn.

So. The Kardashians. Collectively the intellectual equivalent of a learning-impaired rock they at first sight have little to commend them. They don’t sing, can’t dance, have never acted in a professional sense and have written nowt beyond their names on the bottom of yet another contract that is going to mint them yet more squillions of dollars. They are ‘reality stars’ though what reality they inhabit is beyond the ken of most of humanity. Arshad Khan I get. The Kardashians I don’t.

But hist — if they have so little to offer beyond their embonpoint and derrieres then what is it that is being bought? A vicarious sexuality? A slice of envy perhaps? Or the chance to look down from the Olympian heights of our own highly-burnished morality and stainless lives on a set of tacky know-nothings having a frolic in the bubble-bath-of-being-famous-for-nothing? My suspicion leans strongly towards the latter. A chance for us all to look purse-lipped and disparaging in a well-I-never-it’s-disgraceful kind of way. Which nobody is going to do, at least not in public, regarding Carrie Fisher. Or George Michael for that matter and David Bowie well my Dears he was a bit of a lad was he not or maybe something a bit other than a lad now you mention it. And as for that Richard Adams well he was just a cuddly bunny up till the last breath he drew. Lovely man. Scroll forwards 20 years and Fisher, Michael, Bowie and Adams will still be with us. And the Kardashians? Who? You know… the Kardashians. Naah… never heard of ‘em.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 29^th, 2016.

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