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.