Fame and fortune

Having planned to devote every one of this week’s 800 words to Sir David Attenborough’s 60 Years in the Wild (Friday, BBC2), I was distracted by fame, fortune and the politics of influence: Give Us the Money (Sunday, BBC4) and Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream (Tuesday, BBC4). Both these programmes I watched with interest but absolutely no enjoyment whatsoever; their combined effect was a feeling of overall grubbiness, as if I had sat too close to a wrestling match on a wet afternoon in a swamp.

‘Give us the money!’ was the instruction given by Bob Geldof to the public at Live Aid in 1985. The public reached into their pockets and did as he asked, and a new kind of charity was born. ‘When we saw that we could be effective,’ says Bono, ‘it was very hard then to go away again.’ So he didn’t. Give Us the Money tried to examine what ‘effective’ has meant, for politics and for Africa, and found it a great deal easier (and less controversial) to gauge the former than the latter. We have become accustomed, over the past 25 years, to the spectacle of celebrity politics — we don’t swoon at the sight of a politician embracing a pop star, but nor do we flinch. We already know about Bono ‘pitching debt cancellation to President Clinton’ in the Oval Office, we’ve seen the Pope wearing those sunglasses and we remember the Irish Bible that he gave to President Bush. To learn that Republican senators behaved ‘like 13-year-old girls’ backstage at a U2 concert doesn’t give us the shivers in the way that it once would have done. (What am I saying? Yes it does. That image is the stuff of nightmares.) What Blair said to Geldof is not surprising for we know it to be typical: ‘He literally looked at me,’ Geldof recalled, ‘and said, “I’ll do the politics, but you do the public — and if you can’t do the public, the politics won’t happen.”