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Wednesday 9 July 2008

Status Anxiety

Toby Young on wanting to be famous

‘So,’ said the television interviewer, fixing me with an inquisitorial stare, ‘why are you so desperate to be a celebrity?’ This was last week on BBC2, but the question comes up in virtually every television interview I do. I’m beginning to suspect that I’m the only member of the chattering classes foolish enough to admit I want to be a celebrity. Indeed, it’s more or less the sole topic I’m asked to comment on. Whenever it hits the headlines, the 22-year-old researchers employed by news and current affairs programmes flick through the ‘celebrity’ category on their Rolodexes, starting at the top with ‘A-listers’, then gradually work their way down until they get to ‘wannabes’. There they find just one name — mine — along with a work number, a home number, a mobile and three email addresses.
Why is this admission so infra dig? After all, the desire for fame is not exactly uncommon. A recent survey carried out by a CBeebies television programme discovered that 31 per cent of pre-school children want to be a celebrity when they grow up. Is this supposed to be something you grow out of? Not judging from the number of people who apply to be on Big Brother each year. Wanting to be famous is surely the most ubiquitous ambition of our age, afflicting young and old alike.
So why do people look at me when I say it as if I’ve just confessed to being a Nazi sympathiser? Is it because I’m a scribbler? Are writers expected to be inspired by higher things? Samuel Johnson’s famous quote springs to mind here, but even admitting to doing it for the money is respectable by comparison. There’s something cheap and tawdry about wanting to be a celebrity, as though no one setting out to achieve something so vulgar could possibly produce anything worthwhile. Such snobbery is based on a ludicrously high-minded notion of what inspires people to greatness. According to Freud, all artists are motivated by the desire for ‘honour, power, riches, fame and the love of women’. Even Arthur Miller, the patron saint of liberals, confessed to finding his notoriety a bit of a thrill. ‘Something in me groaned at their approach,’ he wrote of being recognised by members of the public, ‘even if, against my will, I couldn’t deny the animal fun of being noticed.’
Whenever I make this point at dinner parties, the standard response is to accuse me of mixing up fame and celebrity, as if the two are completely unrelated. Thus, it is all very well for Martin Amis to announce that he wants to write books that will still be read in 100 years’ time, but God forbid he should set out to write a bestseller. In other words, everlasting fame is good, but the short-lived variety — the kind that lasts 15 minutes — is bad. ‘One dreams of the goddess Fame, and winds up with the bitch Publicity,’ wrote the American satirist Peter De Vries.
But why should one be so admirable, and the other so contemptible? Why should duration make such a difference? Surely, if the yearning to be noticed is sad and pathetic, then the desire to be noticed by successive generations to come, stretching to the end of time, is even more sad and pathetic? If we’re being logical about this, we should rank Martin Amis even lower on the respectability scale than Jade Goody. She only wants to be famous in her lifetime. He wants to be famous for ever.
I suspect that what is really at issue here is the democratisation of celebrity. Now that it is available to the masses, its currency has been devalued. Fame is like Burberry: a once-desirable commodity has been contaminated by its association with people like Daniella Westbrook. Expressing any interest in it at all is like saying you want a swimming pool in your back garden. It may have been glamorous once, but it is now the exclusive preserve of the WAGs.
Interestingly, the most vocal exponent of this new snobbery is the comedian Ricky Gervais. ‘I don’t know why people search for fame,’ he said in a recent interview. ‘For me, it’s merely the upshot of what I do.’ Well, not exactly, Ricky. It’s also the upshot of doing hundreds of interviews, appearing on countless chat shows and making numerous ‘guest star’ appearances in Hollywood movies. Then again, perhaps I’m misjudging him. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and hope he’s just doing it for the money.

Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.

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