Saturday 18 March 2017

Pop will eat itself



I despair.

Time was when famous people were famous for something - for their acting, artistic, scientific, sporting or political prowess, perhaps. Genuine "stars" were the people whose talents made them a household name; people of the calibre of Clark Gable, Alfred Hitchcock, Katherine Hepburn, Laurence Olivier or Ingrid Bergman...

Nowadays, such cultural morés appear to be vanishing in the wake of a slew of cheap and nasty, attention-seeking non-entities whose only claim to fame is the fact they have appeared on "reality TV" [whose "reality"?, I'd like to know] or happen to be popular on "social media". These people are now considered worthy of the epithet "celebrity", apparently.

A case in point is the crowing announcement today by none other than the BBC [once itself a proud bastion of culture; no longer predominantly so, especially in the last few decades] that a couple of people-one-should-never-have-heard-of, who seemingly were featured in a television show about people watching television [some prime time excrement called Gogglebox, which is shown on another former culturally significant medium, Channel 4] are going to appear in another "reality television" show Strictly Come Dancing.

It is a sad day when this is the level of entertainment to which the general populace aspires.

"Bread and circuses", indeed.

4 comments:

  1. I quite agree!

    Although, I do watch Strictly... To be honest, I don't care who the celebrities are (I've never heard of most of them, anyway), I'd watch it even if "civilians" were paired with the professional dancers.

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    Replies
    1. Even "civilians"? That was the original premise of one of British television's longest running shows, the far superior Come Dancing.

      At least that show was more about the dancing, rather than the hysteria of Strictly. Unfortunately, these days the professional dancers don't have names such as Syd Perkin and Edna Duffield...

      Jx

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    2. I do have vague recollections of Come Dancing and Angela Rippon, but I think I was too young to appreciate it then.
      I have much better memories of Barry and Yvonne Stuart-Hargreaves from Hi-de-Hi!

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