celebrities and us

Britain has a unique celebrity culture. On the one hand, aside from the Americans, nobody pays as much attention to the private lives of so many individuals in the world of entertainment. Nobody has the array of magazines, tv programmes and newspaper articles devoted to the Jade Goodies of the world that we do.

For Britain, famous people are almost a sort of aristocracy, with all the attendant baggage for us peasants that implies. A friend of mine used to work for a well-known international ticket company, in their Manchester box office. One night before a gig, a local celebrity comes in, an actress off Coronation Street. Her kid's going to see some live show - Bob the Builder or something along those lines. She's shown up with no booking code, no ID, doesn't even know what postcode it's booked under (her P.A. booked it apparently). Now my friend is good at his job and a nice bloke, so he's looking for a way to help her. Not because he knows who she is, but just because. Looking for any way to identify which tickets are hers. But this woman just can't help, she's got nothing she can tell him. So she pulls out the celebrity card, his manager recognises her, and insists that my friend doles out two duplicate tickets, which he dutifully does.

Now, any normal person shows up without anyway to prove that these tickets are theirs, not even booked in their name in fact, you see them for the chancer they are and send them on their way. But no, the celebrity aristocracy, already so blessed, gets little favour after little favour, their droit de seigneur and why not, it's only a few perks. So she stands in the queue, and demands one of the staff holds her place, whilst she takes her little one to the bathroom - a wonderful service, if only they could offer it to everyone. Then walks straight past the bar queue, and gets outraged when a glass collector won't serve her drink, and so on throughout the night. "Oooh, you'll never guess who we had in this evening?"

But the downside of being an aristocrat exists too. You get all this privilege, for little or no work, and people resent you for it. In fact, we really resent them for it. Not the shrink-wrapped, perfect-world US celebrity culture for us. We hate celebrities. Pick up Heat magazine if you don't believe me, or read the gossip column in The Sun. We adore slagging these people off, we love it when they get fat, or too skinny, or make a fool of themselves, or they fail. Half the time we prefer our celebrities to be talentless morons, there to be abused by the system or to make themselves look inadequate. It's almost like the only way we can bear to be the peasants is by engaging in the time honoured tradition of fool's day, where the world gets stood on its head, and we get to laugh at the motherfuckers on top.

Maybe there was a bit of all this in Steven Gerrard's court case. Putting aside the the so-sad-it's-funny nature of the Gerrard defence (as one friend put it, "he stood up after being elbowed in the head by my friend, of course I felt threatened and had to hit him 4 times"), Gerrard admitted that he'd been up to the DJ booth to demand they change the music and couldn't understand why the bloke wouldn't do it. Now, do you and I expect the DJ in a bar to change the music on our request? We might, on occasion, put a request to them, but the general assumption is that most places put the music on that they want to play. If you don't like it, you find somewhere else. This is normal mortal land. Gerrard and his mates first insist that they get control of the music. Then they end up in a fight about it. Even if the fight is six of one, half a dozen of the other, the expectation of these petty favours that come with a modicum of celebrity is pretty common. The refusal is too. Your average self-respecting man (not fanboy) doesn't think you deserve special favours because you're lucky enough to earn a lot of money for playing a game. The world has given you plenty already. If Steven Gerrard asked me to change the music in my house, I'd politely tell him to fuck off.

Whilst the acquittal itself might seem a little weird in some quarters (or typical in more cynical ones), the situation, a member of the celebratocracy throwing their weight around and not even noticing their doing it, is all too common.

I don´t want to live in 2009

Recently, I belatedly got into the BBC drama series, Life on Mars. I´m spending six weeks in the homestead, my parents have it on DVD and I´ve got a lot of time of my hands. On top of that, I rather like John Simms (even if he had a significant hand in the film that launched this prick´s ridiculous career) and given that the show is on Spanish tv (even remaking it as La Chica de Ayer for Antena 3), thought I should get into it.

Anyway, it´s bloody good, cop gets hit by car, goes back to 1973, you don´t know if he´s dead, in a coma, insane or whatever. Lots of cool 70s cars and clothes, as well as one of the best TV characters of all time - Sam Tyler´s boss DCI Gene Hunt. It has an irritating tendency to moralise about 70s police work, as if modern policing was a fluffy politically correct fantasy world, but what can you do?

I really like their vision of 1973. Are people supposed to be nostalgic for times they never lived through? Maybe you can only truly idealise fiction. All I know is that 2009 is a terribly bland time to live through. For me, us naughtians are not only miserable but worse, fatalistic too. Not only to be expect things to be shit, we don´t even have any plan (or desire) to make them less shit. Our national culture is probably the worst off for repackaging whatever bollocks they happen to be selling over the water, or perhaps whatever Simon Fuller and Simon Cowell come up with to put on the telly. We drink mass-produced "Irish" cider with ice, because we saw it on an advert, even though we have a far tastier and authentic english one. There hasn´t been a good new band from these shores in about 10 years, so we just recycle mediocrities and pretend they´re good.

What important thing could really excite you about modern Britain? The coming Conservative government? The "radical reform" of our public services ? A great culture movement that will engage people in a way never seen before? Or maybe just more decades of being lorded over by glorified PR men...

the feel of the place

You ever feel like this country has a vague sort of malevolence in the air. There's something I can't quite put my finger on, it's just a feeling but it's there nonetheless. I suppose to notice you might have to spend some time away, but there's something angry and bitter about us. Like none of us are really happy, or feel like we have a stake in anything or anyone. I never normally this melancholy in the Summer...

ay, que calor

In four weeks time I´m taking a break from the heat and going back to England. However brilliant thirty degree heat, six months of the year might seem in theory, it´s better for lying on the beach than for attempting to control eleven year olds in a second language.

At the moment I´m wondering if there will still be a Labour Party by the time I get back. Between the Blairites disgruntled by, erm, Gordon Brown being mean to them, the prospect of more trade unions disafiliating and at least one trade union hesitantly moving toward founding a new party, it´s getting pulled apart in a lot of different directions. 

I always think though, however much slagging the left in the LP always gets/got for making the party unelectable (or potentially so), for always complaining about the leadership and basically acting like they didn´t actually want Labour to win or like them very much, it´s always the right wing that takes its ball home when they lose. Ramsay MacDonald, the SDP, now the Blairites, it´s always the "populist" right who think that winning elections means activists shutting the fuck up and doing as they´re told, that are prepared to royally shaft the party when it suits them.

this crisis is annoying, huh?

You wait 30 years for a crisis of capitalism, and when it comes you´re still not satisfied. I mean first off, for the most part, certainly the British Left, spent the last couple of decades intently staring at it´s own navel, fighting with each other, worrying about solidarity with villagers in South East Kurdistan, and generally doing anything except building a strong and lasting alternative to the political mainstream.

So, here we are in the midst of a big economic and political crisis and who benefits? The fucking Tories, the arseholes who actually designed the absurd economic system that left the UK so vulnerable. Now they´re getting to turn round and say, ooh, it´s Labour´s poor economic management you see. Of course, it´s no coincidence that the countries hardest hit are the one´s, like ours, that built in the highest degree of dependence on the finance, construction and retail sectors of the economy, and, not to go all shouty: THAT WAS EVERYONE´S IDEA, THE ENTIRE FUCKING POLITICAL CLASS, YOU DON´T GET TO DISOWN IT BECAUSE YOU AREN´T IN POWER.

Furthermore, it´s not badly managed, it´s not being taken advantage of by greedy businessmen (now, convenient hate figures, previously heroic wealth creators), the thing is functioning exactly how it was designed to. If you design a system in a certain way, and claim credit for it when it works, when everything goes wrong, you don´t get to just wash your hands of it.

Outside of the Tories, guess what, just like we warned when everyone was mincing around waving their lollipops about the war, the force that is probably going to explode over the next couple of truly depressing years will be ... fascism. Already the warnings are flooding in about the BNP getting to send off their little shaven-headed white power comrades to the European parliament. More than one anyway. Well, why? Why is it that form of extremism that´s getting play and not some variety of Leftism, or even, maybe, why not both. Because, the BNP have actually been on the streets doing ordinary everyday politics and, come the crisis that´s going to give them a base from which explode. The various groups of our side have spent the years complacently talking about a downturn as some kind of explanation for decline or stagnation, will now pay the price for neglecting the hard yards.

Aside from that, the protests that we´ve had over the past few months; the strikes, the demos, the throwing stuff at union reps. I mean. Nobody likes to say I told you so, but fuck me. Casualisation, agency work, subcontracting, privatisation. We said it made workers more vulnerable, we said it made them easy to fire, that in the end it was going to turn back the clock to Victorian labour relations, where we all go back to being in employment day by day at the employer´s discretion. We said the unions were fucking gash and wouldn´t, couldn´t do anything about this. And, lo, it came to be. Half the workers at Cowley were agency. How the fuck didn´t that get fought before the crisis? Why wait until employers don´t give a shit whether you strike or not? Why organise, why protest, when everything´s so bad that management don´t even care what you do? Why didn´t we do this shit when we actually had the leverage of being in boomtimes?

And bollocks to the boom, when was that? It´s not like we´ve all been living it up the last 15 years. Getting by, throwing a quarter of society on sink estates to rot in longterm unemployment and near destitution, other people watching their real wages slowly deteriorate, their pensions disappear, their rights eroded, their housing become prohibitively expensive, the cost of living steadily rising. Now what? Kicking millions out of work, probably millions more taking cuts or freezes. Everything still seems to cost as much, even though we´ve got less money. More jobless, more homeless, more cuts to the support system, more with less.

The question is: how angry are we, really?