The good news for Sir Keir Starmer is that Fiona Wilson is one of the rising stars of the Labour front bench, more popular than some of his long-serving shadow cabinet ministers. The bad news is that she doesn’t actually exist. New polling revealed in The Times newspaper, shows that just a few months before a general election the non-existent politician scored a remarkable 47 per cent in terms of name recognition in a recent political survey.
Suffice it to say that political leaders in the United Kingdom seem to be keen to stay silent about this fact and other embarrassing 'opinion-polllng' outcomes whereupon ordinary people seem to struggle to know quite who their politicians are - or in fact, are not!
Leaving politics to one side, I myself have struggled over the past few years to actually identify anyone loosely labelled a 'celebrity' when they appear on our televisions to great fanfare. Nowadays whole weekends on our televisions seem to be taken up with the word celebrity inserted into every naff gameshow that was ever invented to fill our time on a Saturday night. Unhappily, a woman of my acquaintance insists that it’s “… an age thing” but I think not, as remembering the name of a pretty woman appearing on one of Michael McIntyre’s - mainly vacuous, not so special - er, er, specials - shouldn’t be that difficult surely?
I have this theory that there is a whole industry out-there in television land, purely constructed to create a celebrity culture, based not upon talent or anything as definable as that, but - mostly upon the constant and relentless build-up of a sort of vague recognition. In fact, television is so aligned to this sort of non-talented ‘talent’ that after a while it becomes an almost subconscious genre all of its own. By the way, so as to be not too specific in terms of television, radio also does this sort of elevated promotion of celebrities, who in the main you can never quite remember, the why or how, they became a celebrity in the first place.
Hopefully dear reader, in getting you alongside me in terms of the concept of celebrity, I might even get you to agree with me regarding the fact that not many modern comedians are actually that funny at all…ever! Put this way, when was the last time you actually laughed your head off at anyone other than a politician? Sorry about that, but I think you know what I mean. However, I do recognise the fact that humour, perhaps more than any other ‘theatrical’ craft is subject to more subtle discriminations than any other, at times ensuring that modern mores change and develop, and then occasionally reverse upon themselves.
It’s just that it would be nice if modern comedians were actually quite funny on occasions. Returning to the modern concept of celebrity, I have to say that there seems to be no blueprint to success in this endeavour, indeed the total randomness of the concept seems to be at its very heart. Confusingly, you don’t even have to be very good at what you do to achieve a certain level of celebrity. Indeed, how many modern-day British ‘celebs’ have been awarded this status because of their utter uselessness at their chosen area of supposed expertise? Quite a few if you think about it and a number that is growing as the hours of broadcasting have to be filled by - “You know whatsisname, the one that’s always on the television.” It sort of says it all doesn’t it?