Celebrities have a special power that emanates from their status. They’re glamorous and desirable and we want to be like them because we’d like that status and glamour. And if we can’t have it ourselves, then the next best thing is to share in the status and glamour of a celebrity who does have it.
This is the power of celebrity. Advertisers and marketers understand this power. That’s why you see famous people in ads telling us how great product A is. If celebrity A uses product A, we can be a bit closer to them by using product A too.
You remember my autograph book that granddad dicked up for me? Why do people have autograph books? So they have receipts of anyone famous they’ve met in their life, though I wonder if anyone keeps autograph books now. Okay, why do people immediately get their phone out and ask a celebrity for a selfie whenever they bump into someone famous? The same reason, so they have a receipt of meeting that person, even if the only thing that person said to them was “yes” in response to the selfie question.
We’re all the same on this aren’t we? I’m sure a friend won’t mind me retelling a story they shared as I think it shows how we’ll all go a bit goofy for celebrity.
Drift back through time and space with me and imagine a sunny Saturday morning in a picturesque little hamlet, somewhere in the UK.
A young couple are doing Saturday morning stuff in their front garden when they notice Norman Cook, AKA Fatboy Slim…what?…who?…the DJ and producer, used to be in The Housemartins, did that video with Christopher Walken1…who?…really?…er, just think of Walken as our generation’s Kevin Hart, but taller…anyway, he’s walking down the street with his then-wife Zoe Ball…huh…no, that’s great, I’m pleased you’ve heard of her…she’s on Radio Two?…really?…and what on earth are you doing listening to Radio 2?…your mum listens to it…sure, whatever…so Fatboy Slim and Zoe Ball and their kid Woody…sorry, what?…Woody’s a celebrity…the what?…The Circle, I’ll google it later, can we just get on with this?…right so Fatboy Slim and Zoe Ball and Woody are walking down the street towards the young couple.
The young woman of the house, like most of us, doesn’t want to miss the opportunity to meet some celebrities but feels awkward about calling to them when they pass, so she has a simple, yet brilliant idea.
Looking around at all that’s available to her in that typical front garden, can you guess what cunning plan she comes up with? You can take a minute to think it…what? How on earth did you guess that?
But yes, you’ve nailed it exactly, she picks up an African Pygmy Goat and then while petting it nonchalantly and seemingly oblivious to almost being in the presence of an internationally renowned DJ and his TV and radio celebrity wife, stares distractedly across the stream at something on the other bank.
What is that?
A young otter, perhaps? Frolicking in and out of the reeds or, oh my word, will you look at that? Ooh, look, it is a young otter. And is it juggling three little otter-sized chainsaws? Gosh, yes, it actually is too, no wonder she’s so fascinated. How cute is that, and with his little otter-sized ice hockey goalkeeper mask on? Don’t you just want to cuddle him so hard and hurUUUUUAAAAAGHAGHUUUUUUH-blaaarrrgghhhh-BLEEEEGGGHHH-bluurrgghhhh-splurch-hurgh-hurgh-hurgh-bleeeech-splat…ewwww!2
No, oh no, that poor duck. I never expected that, did you? No, I guess no-one ever does.3 Oh well, I’m sure the duck never knew what happened, it was all so quick.
But look, over there, while we’ve been distracted by that cute little otter, the young woman has struck up a conversation with Zoe Ball and Fatboy Slim. It’s a simple and time-honoured fact, no-one can walk past someone who’s hugging the goat, not even celebrities.
The young man, however, took the moral high ground and continued what he was doing. For about a second. Then he realised he’d never have as good an opportunity to pitch his idea for a virtual animated band of beetroots called Beets International and what would be a surefire debut global smash breakout track, Dud Be Good to Me, a devilishly clever power-ballad mashup of Creep, Get Free and The Air That I Breathe4, all about the British comedians Peter Cook and Dudley Moore.5
They could have been Gorillaz, but no, thanks to Norm’s lack of vision, Gorillaz are Gorillaz.
Apparently, that really happened. Well I’ve added my twist on top of how the story was told to me, including the otter with the chainsaws. Beyond that though, it shows how people have a weakness when confronted by the glamour of celebrity. We’re affected to the point that we’ll value what they say on most anything, regardless of whether they have any more experience or knowledge of a subject than us.
It may seem harmless enough, but we can find ourselves treating the opinions of others as if they’re experts, when they may be more clueless about things than we are. Success in one field doesn’t make someone well-qualified to comment on every other field.
I know nothing about the GB News presenter Beverley Turner, but she offers us a fine example. In the summer of 2023 she tweeted that COVID 19 causes less harm to certain ethnicities and that the virus was looking like it was bio-engineered to destroy the West.6
The tweet was later deleted, which suggests even she saw just how daft and offensive it sounded. I don’t want to judge her for her initial action too harshly. If I was into social media, I dread to think what junk I’d be posting online every time I’d had a couple of sherberts, and she did the right thing in deleting it.
But how many people saw it before then? Some of them will have just rolled their eyes in disbelief, but some will know she’s employed as a presenter on a news channel and just accept that what she’s said must be factually correct.
It’s like a Jekyll and Hyde situation. Is she a news presenter presenting verifiable facts or just another rando online sharing something they’ve seen declared as “the real truth” in a YouTube video by someone surrounded by an awful lot of tin foil?
Which one is the real Slim Shady?7
Balls and Chemicals
In the very limited research I did into Beverley Turner, I discovered that the balance of opinion seemed to tip towards the less-than-favourable end of the scale.
What happens when opinions are being presented by people who may seem particularly trustworthy?
When the Euro launched in 1993, the UK chose not to join.
In 2001, James Dyson, the inventor of the Ballbarrow and cyclonic vacuum cleaners, among other things, was an avid supporter of the UK joining the Eurozone, saying “I am a great supporter of the single currency. I want to help British manufacturers export their products to Europe.”8
Dyson is a hugely successful inventor and entrepreneur who clearly has a brilliant and innovative mind. He’s one of those warriors that our societies rely upon. That doesn’t mean he should be a trusted source of knowledge on everything, though.
In the run-up to the 2016 Brexit vote, Dyson had done a complete u-turn and was calling for Britons to vote to leave the EU. It’s not like there had been any fundamental changes in the Eurozone and the pros and cons of it should have been perfectly obvious in 2001.
We can’t know what drove such a change of mind over 15 years, but if you thought it was because in 2001 Dyson thought he could make more money by Britain being in the Eurozone and in 2016 Dyson thought he could make more money with Britain completely leaving the EU, I’m not sure how I’d argue against you.
Particularly as he moved Dyson Limited’s global headquarters to Singapore just a few years after the Brexit vote. That may suggest to some that his own focus has moved away from Europe and some may also argue that his support for Brexit was more about what was best for him rather than best for the British people. That shouldn’t be a surprise, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if some voters had been influenced by his views. After all he’s a hugely successful businessman, he must know what he’s talking about.
Jim Ratcliffe was another British billionaire who supported Brexit and advocated for leaving the EU in the run-up to the vote. You’d hope that having got his wish he’d have been keen to take full advantage of the benefits that he anticipated Brexit bringing.
That would certainly explain why he was planning to build his Ineos Grenadier vehicles in Wales.9
So does it seem a bit odd to you that he changed plans and instead started building his vehicles in France? Apparently, the electric version will be built in Austria, another country in the EU that he believed it was best for Britain to leave. How about that, doesn’t that seem odd?
Oh, and he’s a tax resident in Monaco too10 (not an EU nation, but uses the Euro, is in the customs union and Schengen area, so largely the same as being an EU member and quite definitely not part of the UK that he was so keen should leave the EU). That’s just odder still, isn’t it? Does it seem to you that he’s continuing to enjoy the advantages of the EU that he encouraged the British people to give up?
I’m not going to accuse either man of being a hypocrite, though Dyson may have helped establish a precedent for allowing it in his case11, because they’re just being human in the same way we all are.
They’ve done what was in their best interests, that’s all. You and I do the same every day. The difference is that we don’t have a platform from which we share our thoughts and beliefs easily with the general population and even if we did, we don’t have the celebrity status that will make people listen to us.
We need to remember that people are people. Yes, Dyson and Ratcliffe are two of society’s warriors, but that doesn’t mean that they know everything or that they care about us. Yes they generate jobs and wealth for several societies, but that’s just a side-effect of generating wealth for themselves.
Celebrity status can set people onto a pedestal that makes us look up to them, but unless they’re talking on a subject that they are clearly an expert in and we can really trust them to be acting in our best interests, their opinions shouldn’t hold any more weight than the opinions of family and friends or people we work with or strangers we chat to in a bar on the weekend.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCDIYvFmgW8 ↩︎
- Anyone worried about AI taking over needs to try using it more. I asked both ChatGPT and Gemini to write the sound of someone vomiting and retching and the responses were so lame. ChatGPT even suggested I was breaking the terms of use, but that may have more to do with an elaborate prompt involving a decapitated duck. Ultimately, as so often happens, the good people of Reddit came through like champions – https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/bdu38t/how_would_you_spell_the_vomit_barf_sound_in_text/ ↩︎
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5Df191WJ3o ↩︎
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaXFc4Zb78s ↩︎
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88iiMUKepSE ↩︎
- https://metro.co.uk/2023/07/19/gb-news-presenter-beverley-turner-jewish-group-conspiracy-theory-19157808/ ↩︎
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJO5HU_7_1w ↩︎
- https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/branson-and-dyson-back-euro-9227185.html ↩︎
- https://web.archive.org/web/20200620123833/https://www.ineos.com/news/shared-news/ineos-automotives-uncompromising-4×4-to-be-built-in-wales-and-named-grenadier/ ↩︎
- https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/sep/25/sir-jim-ratcliffe-uks-richest-person-moves-to-tax-free-monaco-brexit-ineos-domicile ↩︎
- https://www.courthousenews.com/vacuum-tycoon-dyson-loses-a-libel-case-against-a-uk-newspaper-for-a-column-on-his-support-of-brexit/ which rather reminds me of the British actor and sock magnate Conrad Knight and his legal case https://youtu.be/gkM_98p0JOk?si=CWcc_XNzCdE-UOzB&t=7414 ↩︎