The media race for those ÔcelebrityÕ and ÔfameÕ stories

I read in one of the papers that Rosanna Davidson is thinking of giving up the limelight. Her resolution was trumpeted in the Sunday Indo – that weekly dispatch on all that is truly important and enduring in the week.

It would seem she finds it to be all too ephemeral, lacking in substance and a bit bitchy. The poor dear, doesn’t she know that the very essence of ‘celebrity’ is that it is fleeting, has about as much substance as the morning dew, and that bitchiness is as essential to it as bacon is to cabbage?

One would imagine that any winner of a beauty contest as big as Miss World, would be in a better position than most to realise that the cameras will, eventually, move on, but that, in the meantime, they will follow your every move . . . especially if you encourage the paparazzi as part of the unspoken contract between media and personalities which goes with ‘celebrity’.

I would venture to suggest that we have become quite experts on the whole area of ‘celebrity’ in the more recent years . . . well, there was a time when what one might term ‘hard news’ might dominate most of the front pages, but, in the circulation race, ‘celebrity’ has become quite the thing.

How else would you explain days of headings like ‘Rat Ro’ and ‘Ronan Cheating’ about Ronan Keating in recent times in the tabloids, they having got hold of reams of detail about his love life, and tracked him down to a hideaway in the K Club, while they also tried to find his girlfriend.

I have thought for many years that the definition given by writer, commentator and TV critic, Clive James, on the difference between ‘fame’ and ‘celebrity’ was searingly accurate. I referred to it before in these columns . . . but maybe year after year of watching and commenting on soap opera and series like Dallas gave James an insight that few others seem to have into this media business.

He said that ‘celebrity’ could be mistaken for ‘fame’. And he then went on to define ‘fame’ as something one earned as part of a reputation for something which one had achieved, or done. On the other hand, he defined ‘celebrity’ as being celebrated for simply being, or making a name on television or in the media.

Big Brother – and the ‘celebrities’ it has created – has to be the perfect example of the latter. People have built careers on the basis of having been on television, very often doing little other than sitting there scratching, idly chatting, or, occasionally, being central to engineered blazing rows when the ratings started to slide.

For more, read this week's Galway City Tribune.