Dec 3 2005
Graeme Whitfield,
Western Mail
AS GOD is my witness, I will not rest until I have rid this land of rubbish celebrities.
From Big Brother contestants to faded game show hosts, from end-of- the-pier "comedians" to - ugh! - Claire Sweeney, there is now nowhere you can go to escape the mafia of the mediocre.
Entire magazine articles are devoted to the home lives of GMTV presenters, or paparazzi shots of the bloke who came third in Fame Academy buying some pears. TV shows that would once have never got past the commissioners' bins are now thrust onto prime-time audiences just by putting the word "celebrity" in the title. But there comes a point when any right-thinking society says enough. That time, my friends, came when Cannon and Ball returned to mainstream TV.
Anyone who grew up in the 1980s will remember how that time was blighted by the twin horrors of Thatcherism and ITV's Saturday night schedule. Pit closures, huge unemployment and Jim Davidson in Up the Elephant and Round the Castle made it a decade to forget.
We were scarred by the experience but somehow made it through, stronger for it. The one hope we had was that we would never ever return to such horrors ever again.
Which is why seeing Cannon and Ball drafted in to star in I'm a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here! made my heart sink faster than a fat lad in a vat of custard.
I'm generalising wildly here, I know, but there was once a time when people became famous for being good at their jobs. If they were comedians, we laughed at their jokes; if they were singers, we sang along to their songs. We can look back now, of course, and question just how talented some of these people actually were, but at least we believed it at the time.
Now things have changed and we seem to actively pick out celebrities because of their inherent awfulness.
When the producers of I'm a Celebrity... were putting together their ideal cast list, they didn't - let's face it - go for people who would sit around the campfire and entertain us all with witty banter and insightful comments. They wanted someone who would make us laugh our bums off when they were up to their neck in koala droppings.
It might make for the odd diverting TV moment, but it all seems needlessly cynical. If all we want from the telly is to sneer at ageing has-beens, we might as well have Bobby Davro presenting Newsnight and the Great Soprendo joining Richard Stilgoe to analyse Prime Minister's Question Time.
Do programmes like Our Friends in the North, The Sopranos and Frasier add to the quality of our lives? Yes, they do. Does Rebecca Loos offering hand relief to a pig? I don't think so. The Heat and Hello! magazines culture we live in has led us to a world when a new generation of children have to hear the catchphrase, "Rock on, Tommy" passing for comedy on national TV.
If that isn't a wake-up call to us all, I don't know what is.
