OK, so they’re famous. So what?

MY DICTIONARY, the Oxford Concise, describes a celebrity as “a well-known person”, short and sweet, and I suppose in broad terms that’s what a celebrity is. I suppose too that with that definition a notorious axe murderer can be a celebrity. Jeffrey Dahmer would have been considered a celebrity.

But I have to tell you that I don’t understand this relatively modern trend of celebrityism, to which whole magazines are devoted. I just don’t get it. It’s like a new sort of religion, to which multitudes belong and whose gods’ powers are measured in dollars, dress sense, drugs and divorce. The people you’ll see in these magazines (in my limited experience, anyway) are not this year’s crop of
Nobel prize winners. They have done nothing as worthwhile as seek a cure for cancer or dissuade the looney in North Korea from pressing the button of mutually assured destruction. No, inevitably they’ll be film actors and television personalities, sports men
and women, singers with or without drug habits and the British royal family. And the question I ask is: Who cares?

Well, obviously, millions of people do. I can remember as long ago as what must be now about, I dunno, six or seven, perhaps eight years ago, maybe longer, and I was watching the news on television, and one of the items, one of the main stories, was the fact that Tom the Jaw-Clencher Cruise and his missus Doris Holmes had had a baby. Who cares! Well, obviously the editor of the programme thought enough people did to warrant putting it in the news line-up. And maybe people were thrilled to hear about it, but why?
Why is it that a whole industry of paparazzi chase these celebrities across the world hoping to get a snap of an indiscrete moment? Because they know that they can sell the pictures to celebrity magazines and Sunday newspapers, and the more sensational the pictures, the flash of a nipple or the distracted picking of a nostril, the more some picture editor somewhere will pay for it.
And yet, I admit that I do enjoy biographies and autobiographies, and inevitably they are about celebrated people. Most recently I read the autobiography of the actor Judi Dench, Dame Judi Dench in fact, but I have read biographies of people a lot more obscure, and they have been as remarkable people in their lives as Judi Dench has been in hers. Idi Amin was a remarkable man in his own way.
I paged through a “CELEB MAG” recently and lo, lo and behold nogal, there coincidentally was the spawn of TomKat – I can’t remember what she was doing and don’t care (probably shopping or throwing a tantrum at Heathrow Airport), but some readers
obviously did. And there was her mother Katie who, you’ll be astounded to learn, was in Miami. And so?
Oh, and look, there’s ol’ GI Jane, Demi Moore, now 51 years old, and she was in Mexico, in a bikini and apparently with a new man. Do I care? Not in the least. And the stoopid Kardashians got a page which even for the purposes of this column I couldn’t be bothered to read.
Tori Spelling, an odd-looking woman at the best of times, was having marital problems, but so what, so’s the rest of Hollywood; Kelly Osbourne, the fruit of Ozzie’s loins (if you can imagine such an anatomical picture), had dyed her hair purple for reasons
only known to herself, but it was an event so remarkable that it warranted a half-page picture.

Then there was Willy and Kate and baby George. Ag shame. She apparently wants another baby which Willy, no doubt, the dirty
dog, will be willing to provide, but why anyone in South Africa should be interested in that, I have no idea. Yes, they’re a nice enough couple, but procreation among the British royal family has as much relevance to us as… hold on, wait a bit…. I see that Kate and Willy, says “a source” are actually contemplating adopting a third child after they’ve had their second, “from… maybe
somewhere in Africa”. Great Scott! They too have caught this disease of celebrityism and are emulating Brad and Angelina who made adoptions from the Third World trendy.

Ricky Martin has split with his boyfriend you’ll be surprised to hear (if you cared in the first place and actually know who the Ricky Martin is), and meanwhile that most enduring celebrity couple David and Vicky Beckham have bought a house in London that
cost them around R680 million but, unlike Jacob Zuma’s house, does not include a tuckshop, so perhaps they were robbed. I don’t see mention of a cattle kraal and chicken run either, so they were definitely short changed. I don’t mind David Beckham although
his fixation with his hair borders on vanity, but Victoria, his wife, grates me worse than fingernails on a blackboard. Why are people fixated on these two clowns?
I dunno, I just don’t get it, I really don’t.