to the House of Lords. No, the word ‘ego’ here ‘means massive and utterly unfounded belief that everything you say or do is incredibly interesting just because you are the person saying or doing it’.
You can’t open a newspaper these days without (see YOU CAN’T OPEN A NEWSPAPER THESE DAYS WITHOUT …) seeing some piece of print onanism where somebody whose views change with the temperature of their earwax is going on about something that a) they know nothing about, b) they care nothing about, and c) they probably wrote a column about last month which stated a completely opposite point of view. This wouldn’t be so bad, but they always have to drag everything back to themselves. ‘This new law will cause hardship for millions. I know, because I saw a tramp once.’ GO TO HELL!
And that’s before we get into the world of the fawning interview and its cousin, the celebrity autobiography. There is something about the sight – or maybe it’s the smell, a faint odour of musk and diamonds – of celebrities that makes intelligent people and journalists go all wobbly at the brain. Yes, they are prettier than us, and richer, and have our entire lifetime sex ration in one evening, but the only thing they have in common with everyone else is that when they open their mouths they’re no more or less interesting than the rest of us. And as they spend all their waking hours on telly, talking about themselves, chances are high that they ran out of interesting stuff to say a long, long, long time ago.
PEOPLE WHO USED TO BE FAMOUS
Yes, we know. People come up to you all the time and say, ‘Didn’t you used to be X?’ Well, serves you right for being famous then. And for telling everybody when you were famous that, oh, you’d give anything to not be famous again.
PEOPLE WHO WERE NEARLY FAMOUS
Sometimes you feel sorry for them – that one wrong decision which crossed the thin line between eternal fame and working in a chip shop – then you look at their faces. Their strange, not-rich, not-poor faces, which can’t make up their minds if they’re the faces of people who were nearly famous and long to be sitting on the lap of fame, or people who don’t care about being famous and are just Normal. Although not with that fake tan, gold chain and ‘hairstyle’ you’re not.
PEOPLE WHO WENT TO SCHOOL WITH SOMEONE FAMOUS
Don’t go to their gigs when they come to your town. Don’t show the reporter from your local paper all your school photos. Don’t go on This Is Your Life and weakly shake their hand as they try to remember who you are. Buy a high-powered rifle and shoot them. They’re famous and you’re not! What’s wrong with you! (NB: If you do shoot anyone famous, don’t say you got the idea from this book. That would just make YOU look silly. Probably best to not shoot anyone at all.)
TV PRESENTERS
They don’t seem to know anything. Time was when a TV presenter was at worst a jobbing actor with a nice voice (see ACTORS) and at best a polymathic journalist and historian who’d sailed the Amazon in a kayak to interview Fidel Castro. But these days … It looks like the TV companies just send a van round the hair salons of the land with the words FREE CONDITIONER INSIDE THIS VAN! GET IN THE VAN! IT’S PERFECTLY SAFE!
You can understand it with the kids’ TV presenters. There’s not much need for intellectual rigour or a deep-veined knowledge of the Middle East when all you have to do is talk to a toy animal and introduce some other toy animals. It’s not even completely mind-offending with the teen and youthy presenters. Never mind the fact that they’ve only learned to read autocues and keep staring at books, wondering when the page is going to move down; never mind the fact that they can only communicate by waving their arms and shuffling about on their backsides, like a man who’s been glued to a toilet trying to get help. All they have to do is interview soap stars and pop stars, who are equally ill-prepared for taking GCSEs, buying things with coins or any other rigorous tests of the mind.
All that’s fine. What is a little bit vexing is the fact that newsreaders and current-affairs presenters seem to be going the same way. No wonder the world is in a terrible state. Thirty years ago, a good TV interviewer could reduce a president or a prime minister to tears just by ripping apart their domestic transport policy. Now an incisive interview with a politician doesn’t go much further than a pretty lady disguised as a real news reporter saying to a major political figure, ‘I like your shoes. Where did you get them?’
TV PRESENTERS 2
And what happened to talking proper? All right, so a full-on return to the bollock-throttling vocal styles of the 1950s isn’t necessarily a good thing. But it would be nice to have presenters who had some vague grasp of normal patterns of speech. It’s not as if they all come from tiny villages deep in the heart of the Auvergne. Most of them are putting on a completely made-up glottal Estuary media Cockernortherny accent anyway.
It’s all good for sales of the Radio Times anyway, since if you can’t understand what the stone-chewing inarticulatists are saying, you can just go and look it up in a listing mag, and pray it doesn’t say, ‘7.30 – Cawnashem Speet’.
SCIENTISTS
Science used to be our friend. It eradicated disease! It made labour-saving devices! It shortened distances and aided communication! It was like Superman, only instead of one man in a dim costume, it was loads of men and women in white coats, all working round the clock to try and make things less crap.
And it worked for ages. Things did become a lot less crap. Despite the claims of several religious groups, life is a lot better now that a) we don’t have to pretend that we’re all going to one of two made-up places, b) we can have it off with any grown-ups we feel like, and c) everyone knows that any bloke in a robe who claims to represent the creator is at best misguided and at worst a kiddy fiddler. So hurray for science and reason.
But now it seems to have got a bit odd. Those lovely scientists are cloning each other and growing giant cabbages and generally doing the big science equivalent of taking the back off the watch and pulling all the bits out without really knowing how to get them all back in again. They tell us they are doing so in the pursuit of knowledge. A special knowledge that comes on rectangular pieces of paper with numbers and pictures of presidents and queens on it (no, not stamps).
PEOPLE WHO YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF WRITING THEIR MEMOIRS
Who are you? Why have you written a book? Is the title of your book your catchphrase? Why are you smiling on the cover? Are you a pop singer? A page-three model? A former leader of the Conservative Party? What’s going on?
PEOPLE WHO ARE FAMOUS FOR ONE THING AND THEN GO AND DO ANOTHER THING
You know. Like gardening experts who write novels. Or actresses who ‘invent’ perfumes. Or rock stars who exhibit their horrible paintings. People like that. There should be a special Celebrity Law which covers the activities and maintenance of famous people, and one of the first stipulations of this excellent new Celebrity Law should be that EVERYONE WHO IS FAMOUS CAN BE FAMOUS FOR ONE THING AND ONE THING ONLY. Otherwise it’s just annoying.
PEOPLE WHO ARE REALLY, REALLY, REALLY FAT
Once – as we are always being told in the sort of columns that tell you things you could have worked out for yourself if you weren’t so busy reading columns – it was a sign of wealth and importance to be fat. (Even though most paintings and statues and so on of interesting historical figures – Jesus, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Napoleon, Florence Nightingale – show them to be of slender to average build. And also even though most of history’s gits – George III, Mussolini, Nero, Michael Moore – have clearly dined often and on lard.) Whatever the truth of that theory, these days it is clear that rich people are thin and poor people are fat. The difference is so marked that banks no longer ask your income when you apply for an account, they