Celebrity

I've been thinking about celebrity these past few days. Not the kind that 'iconises' and manipulates and destroys, Michael Jackson style; something much smaller, even laughably so, and closer to home. You may have noticed a few posts down that a local paper decided I was worth a page of its time. Latina Oggi sells around 9,000 copies a day, so it's hardly life-changing to be interviewed by it, even if you do make the second page of the home-town edition. As I said before, I knew nothing about the article until I was stopped by my local newsagent, who thanked me. What for? I asked. For the interview? What interview? And so on. I bought a couple of copies and came home to read it. It was based on a piece I wrote about Fondi last year for the Sunday Telegraph and whatever information the journalist had managed to glean from the net. There were some pretty dreadful translations in it, the kind people produce when they concentrate so much on understanding the other language they forget their own: 'orange-coloured trees' for 'orange trees'; 'fruit shops' for 'local fruit'. There were one or two moments of pure invention, such as that I've written for TV (I wish) or that I was spotted in the main street by a group of young people who recognised me as 'their favourite author' - unlikely at the best of times, and particularly so in Italy, where nothing of mine, apart from two poems over twenty years ago, has ever been published. Still, on the whole, I was pleased with and amused by the attention and thought the whole idea of an 'interview' conducted without my knowedge or agreement a bit of harmless fun. This continued over the following days, when people I knew stopped me in the street to thank me, as the newsagent had done, for having spoken well of Fondi at a time when most references to the town link it, with some justice, to the Mafia. And, really, that was it. Until I had dinner with some friends last Saturday.

There were four guests, two Italian, two English. The English friends, like me, have both lived here in Italy for several decades, and the language of the table was Italian. We'd all had a fair bit to drink by the time the article was mentioned. One of our English friends - Jane - hadn't seen it, so it was duly produced and read out, to general hilarity. At the end, though, Roberto - a film and TV director - asked me what I was going to do about the mistakes in it. Initially, I thought he was joking. But he was quite serious. It had never occurred to me that the article had any weight beyond the ephemeral fact of its local publication. He was startled. You work in communication, he said. You know full well that sooner or later someone will google you and find this article and assume that everything in it is true. They'll do that anyway, I said. But I also said that no serious journalist would regard as authoritative an article that talked about orange-coloured trees. Don't be naive, he said. Besides, this article has appeared in a paper with a specific readership (local, right of centre) and purpose (to make Fondi look good as it's battered by accusations of Mafia infiltration), neither of which you'd normally consider sympathetic. People will assume you've given this piece the thumbs-up knowing its context, he said, and Renata, who also writes for TV, agreed. Suddenly, my harmless bit of fun began to look less harmless. But I don't care one jot about local opinion, I protested. Besides, I added, adopting the classic Billie Bunter line of defence, everyone likes it. But you're public now, Roberto said, whether you like it or not. You need to be able to control what's said about you. But it's only a local paper, I insisted. Everyone will have forgotten about it in a week's time. Not if they google your name and Fondi, Roberto and Renata said. My English friends disagreed, taking my line that it didn't matter. And of course they were wrong and Roberto and Renata were right. Type in Charles Lambert and Fondi and the article is the first thing to appear, in Italian, and the fifth overall. It exists. It claims to be an interview, or to be based on an interview, with me. It represents me in a way over which I have no control. It's canonical.

And it occurred to me later, as I thought about why, despite this, I still didn't want to write to Latina Oggi and complain about the inaccuracies and the downright lies, that my reluctance wasn't just to do with a feeling that I'd be letting down all those people who'd been so pleased to see someone say a few good things about their town, in which I happen to live and about which I happened to write an article, to raise my profile, a year ago. That feeling was certainly present, and it may have been what persuaded at least one of my two English friends, Sally, who also lives here in Fondi, to think it better not to react. It marked an acceptance that we, as foreigners in a small town, necessarily value, or should value. Because isn't that the charm of small foreign towns - that they eventually succumb to us? But my line of argument at dinner was that I didn't want to correct the article because I didn't care what people thought about me, because Fondi is not my town, and because I neither have nor want to have a town that's mine. And that's much closer to the truth.

The more I think about it the more I realise that what split the table into two along essentially nationalist lines is that for me, and for my English friends, what Italian journalists write in their papers isn't quite real, just as bad language in Italian isn't quite real - the weight of it eludes us. This is partly the result of the objective shoddiness of much Italian journalism, but it goes deeper than that. Italian papers are as unreal and inessential to us as they are real, and essential, and capable of bearing and creating value, to our Italian friends. I'm not sure what this says about celebrity, but it seems to have the same ironic relationship to the phenomenon as whoever it was called their band Big in Japan. As if it mattered.

Pickles

Not to be outdone when it comes to relevance and quality, Italian state television has its own version of Celebrity Come Dancing. It's called Ballando con le Stelle (Dancing with the Stars) and it has the same cavalier approach to stardom as CCD does to celebrity. Presumably on the principle that no one with a real reputation to lose would appear on the show (pace John Sergeant), it's redefined the word star to cover 'ex-spouse of star', 'glamour model', and so on. This year, though, it's gone one better (in barrel-scraping terms). It's invited Emanuele Filiberto Savoia to shake a leg on prime-time telly.

EFS, for those of you who don't know, is the grandson of the last king of Italy, forced to skedaddle after palling up to Mussolini. His father, Vittorio Emanuele, a slack-faced halfwit with the brains and moral equipment of an amoeba, managed to use his 'business' contacts under the last Berlusconi government to have the whole gang re-admitted to the country after decades of gilded exile in Geneva, Paris, Sardinia (yes, Sardinia is in Italy, but money makes borders permeable).

Since their return, Daddy Savoia has been in trouble with the law for various 'business' dealings involving gambling, sex slavery and prostitution, and, along with his son and wife, a botoxed biscuit heiress who makes Ivana Trump look classy, has sued the Italian government for moral damages. (More about this here.) EF's first bid for stardom (in the televisual sense) came when he endorsed a pickle manufacturer. Along with many others, I wrote to the company to suggest that this wasn't a wise choice and received, within seconds, a long, carefully-worded email in which the pickle makers hedged their bets, defended their decision, apologised, etc. Two days later, the ad disappeared from Italian TV screens and EF's contract was rescinded.

Since then he's entered politics, running for a party whose name I forget and registering the polling equivalent of nul points. His political sympathies remain on the market, for anyone who might regard them as a worthwhile investment. He was last in the news just over a year ago when he refused to pay a speeding fine. He refused to pay for two reasons. The first was that he wasn't driving the car at the time. The second was that the road signs weren't very clear. This is known in legal circles as the Billy Bunter defence. (As in: I never ate the cake. And, anyway, it was horrible.)

Ballando con le Stelle starts on Saturday. Waltz on, Pickles.

Millstones

Margaret Drabble claims that her publishers, Penguin, are trying to persuade her to dumb her work down and increase sales. She spoke to the Independent:

"I do feel publishers are under very strong pressure to sell books rather than encourage long-term readers. They have not asked me to dumb down ... but I have a feeling there's a problem. I write literary novels but I can sense my publishers have difficulty in selling me as a genre ... whether in literary fiction, or women's fiction or shopping fiction. They don't quite know whether I'm highbrow or literary," she said.

Penguin were 'unavailable for comment.' You can read more about it here. 

Debord, de trop

ooI’m in England for a few days to see my mother. My visit's coincided with Naomi Campbell’s recent tantrum at Heathrow's disaster-struck T5 (luggage to Milan to be sorted...') and, less excitingly, the return to television of someone called Nigel Marven. Marven’s been popping up on all kinds of programmes, from Jonathan Ross, despite not having very much to say, to a daytime cooking show, despite not eating meat or drinking wine, which rendered him more or less useless, although no one seemed to care. He’s promoting his new series, so presumably all is forgiven.

One of the preview clips we were shown was of Marven, up to his knees in malodorous swamp, straddling a furiously threshing creature called, I think, a snapper turtle. He was forcing open its large, ungainly mouth to show us a small flickering scrap of flesh built into its tongue and used to attract fish. He touched it to see what the snapper turtle would do, the way you might squeeze an avocado before you buy to make sure it’s ripe enough for that evening.

He’s one of that new school of TV naturalists who’ve sussed that, just as the anthropologist contaminates and becomes integral to the culture under the microscope, so these various heirs of Jacques Cousteau and David Attenborough – and Marven began as one of Attenborough’s assistants – are no longer invisible observers from camouflaged hides in woods and fields, the kind of thing we used to try to build when I was a child and children were allowed to leave the house without armed guards. These days, they want to be seen. They’re part of the show. To all intents and purposes, they are the show.

Steve Irwin, the Australian whose self-aggrandising antics led to his death, must have been the first – though he certainly won’t be the last – to grasp that what we really want to watch isn’t the animal in its natural state at all. What we now appear to want is to watch the animal being drawn, dragged, biting, kicking, enraged, into our natural state: the state of the spectacle, our Everyman before the lens. We want to see the animal exposed in some way, transformed by its own anger or confusion or fear into the real performer’s stooge. The fact that the creature might damage the performer, even lethally, is part of the pleasure. It ought to be shameful, but it isn’t, or doesn’t seem to be. It seems to be what looking at the world – indeed, caring about the world – involves.

What does this have to do with Naomi Campbell? Well, it strikes me that what Marven and his colleagues most resemble, in their attitude towards their audience and their subjects, are paparazzi. Invasive, judgemental, acting in what they see – or pretend to see – as the public interest, they violate the world they’re supposed to be, in some way, recording. They’re so busily turned back towards us as they run to and then from their prey, teasing, coaxing, disturbing, rendering the otherwise unavailable available, that they don’t see the inauthenticity of it all; or, if they do, don’t care.

Now the last person in the world I’d normally defend is the maid-beating peace-crusading utterly dreadful Naomi Campbell. But when she turns on a photographer, or even a member of the public armed with camera phone, what she most resembles isn’t a celebrity so much as a snapper turtle, or dugong, or cayman, one of the harried beasts in Marven’s smugly relentless grip, held with its jaws forced open so that we can genuinely get the beauty of it hot.

Christmas roast

The British press has been titillated these past few days over the pre-Christmas party organised by Manchester United players. It started off chastely enough, with drag queens and lap dancing, but subsequently adjourned to a hotel, entirely booked for the occasion, in the company of a hundred aspiring WAGs. As one journalist pointed out, you don’t book a hotel unless you intend to use the rooms. Six footballers (or five, according to your source; the actual number may or may not be academic) and one young woman did indeed use one of the rooms, apparently to their mutual satisfaction. It’s thanks to their sexual antics that large swathes of middle Britain are now acquainted with the more exotic meaning of roasting.
Marina Hyde, in the Guardian, commented, quite rightly in my opinion, that the footballers weren’t driven by passion or even lust – one in six is actually not that hot a ratio if you’re one of the six – but by their desire to emulate the internet porn that has taught them all they know about what men do with women. And yet. And yet.

I’ve also been on the receiving end of a group of men, fluidly numbered but at no time fewer than four. In my case, it wasn’t so much roasting as microwaving saveloys, but I don’t recall feeling humiliated or exploited, or even dirty. What I recall is being up for it in an eager, undiscriminating – OK, drunken – way. I was thirty, not seventeen, and the men I was with, in the loosest sense, were almost certainly not professional footballers, so my motives were almost certainly purer and more pondered than those of the aspiring Victoria Beckham in Room 101 (or whatever). Almost certainly. After all, I didn’t give head (or anything else) for a recording contract or the newest quilted handbag, the one that looks more like a shrunken anorak than an iconic fashion object (but what do I know?). I didn’t expect to be interviewed by Hello, or snubbed by Lindsay Lohan, or have my ‘life’ filmed for a Channel 4 documentary (though I wouldn’t have minded). I wasn’t after anything much beyond the moment, some time around 3 am on a Friday morning if I remember rightly, on my knees behind a laurel bush and, well, lapping it up in the most literal sense. I was happy, more than happy, to be there.

Maybe I had to be self-hating to find it fun, by which I mean radically naughty and thrilling and life-enhancing, but I did. And that’s the problem. Because I don’t think she did, the girl who was roasted in some hotel in Manchester and was happy because they’d said she was a good fuck. And I don’t think they did either, the would-be Jeff Strykers and John Holmeses, queuing for their go at whatever bit of her was free. And that’s a pity. Because if it isn’t fun, it’s not much more than a career move in a very crowded profession. It’s bags and shoes and interviews, assuming you can find your knickers.

Celebrity

I've made it! The GoogleAd up at the moment is a link to David Gest's site. I'm not allowed to tell, or even ask, you to click on it, but I'm sure you'll need no encouragement. Joan Collins was on the Graham Norton Show last night -- yes I'm in England for a few days -- and said that her pew at the Minnelli-Gest wedding were taking bets on how long it would last. Now, of course, he's a star and so all is forgiven but I remember seeing the couple on, yes, Graham Norton soon after their marriage -- well, obviously -- and shivering with the creepiness of it all.

Such is fame.

Work avoidance strategy No.1

As if Dan Quayle and Arnold Schwarzenegger weren't bad enough, the next two look-alikes on the list were Tony Blair and Dick Cheney (thankfully excluded by the program from my fetching collage).

This is worse than discovering you share 80% of your DNA with the earthworm.

On second thoughts, maybe it isn't.

No success like failure

I was surprised recently when the name of a friend of mine came up in a conversation I was having with someone who works in the media, younger than me, finger on the zeitgeist: let's call him J. I met the friend who was mentioned at university and last year, after more than 25 years, we made contact and found that our friendship was, against all odds, intact. In those 25 years, I've done what I've done, working abroad, writing and so on, and my friend has become a household name in Britain, much loved and suitably rewarded (You know who you are!) for his work in television and theatre.

And what did J. say? That it was odd to see how two people could start off equal and yet one of them should become so successful and the other should end up a... At this point his voice trailed away but it was fairly clear that the word he wasn't prepared to utter in my presence was 'failure'.

And I started to look at my life and my friend's, and weigh them against each other. We've both done pretty much what we've wanted to do in our lives. We both have relationships that are strong and have lasted for over 20 years. He has children and I don't, but J. didn't know that. We've both achieved recognition for our work (though mine has come much more recently, and to a far more modest degree). We're both surrounded by friends. We both have houses we love and are proud of. We both have dogs... I could go on.

In fact, the only significant differences are two. Money and fame.

So why was I so surprised?