The Land of The Me

www.paulcoia.com

I’ve found myself suffering from celebrity fatigue this week. Reading about petulant stars in the papers every day means you can get too much of a mood thing and find yourself with toothache from chewing over their bitter sweet public lives. They resemble a box of chocolates, all with self centres.

The more outrageous our celebs behave the better their PR people feel, and someone should really call in the parents of all involved and give them a good telling off. Take Mariah Carey, the singer, who once memorably said on the death of the King Hussein of Jordan “I loved Jordan, he was one of the greatest athletes of our time”. She abruptly halted an interview at the weekend because the host underestimated how many albums she’d sold. While you or I would have laughed it off, in The Land Of The Me her self important behaviour gained a thumbs up from her record company and acres of Press coverage.

Last week I wrote about celebrity TV health advisors with their internet degrees which are only useful when rolled up and used for colonic irrigation, and blow me if American celebrity Demi Moore doesn’t come out this week and say she’s on a health kick involving leeches. Of course leeches are nothing new in Hollywood, being tiny slug like creatures who usually get fifteen percent of their client’s earnings, but Moore’s leeches were the real, slimy, jungle bred deal.

The thought of having a creature like that stuck to you for hours makes me feel ill so goodness knows how the leeches felt.

The first rule of Celebrity is never, ever, get any older. Ms Moore is almost twenty years nearer to sitting on fluffy clouds with a harp than her current boyfriend so she’s ripe pickings for any charlatan who promises to make her look younger. If her body’s a temple, the front balconies have already been renovated, the rear porch has been lifted and underpinned, and now she’s looked at the settlement and cracks and has decided the building needs rendered.

Her celebrity ex husband, meantime, is getting his ear hair smoothed by a female who is younger than this year’s daffodils and has fewer lines than a spear carrier in a silent movie.

The story was covered on Sky News, delivered by a new star who looked a bit like their old one, but in a lopsided, distorted, just had a mild stroke, kind of way. It turned out she was indeed the old one back from plastic surgery having been signed off by her surgeon who, I assume, is an unsuccessful cartoonist. The poor woman now looks so plastic she could be swiped at Tesco in exchange for a week’s groceries.

One very well known daytime TV celebrity who brought out a keep fit video recently based on her dancing and trampoline fitness regime, sold it as a way to get the pounds to sail away. In fact they’d sailed away on good ship Surgery as she’d had her stomach stapled and the video company was paying someone to sit all day long in front of her fridge to stop her bingeing.

So why are these people so abnormal? I’m sure the explosion of gossip mags and web sites has made the mystique of celebrity disappear so they constantly have to reinvent themselves and change appearance in order to look interesting. In short, today’s celebrities are all suffering from the paparazzi virus and are going for treatment in ever sillier ways which is all feeding my celebrity fatigue.

I now dread seeing Amy Winehouse’s flaky skin and tattoos, Posh Beckham’s cellulite, Britney Spears’ bald bits or Kate Moss’s anything at all. I no longer want to read about the hundreds of men who have slept at the Paris Hilton or see videos of them enjoying their stay. I want, in short, for our celebrities to go away and shut up.

They weren’t always like this. Rock Hudson kept his sexuality secret through all his career yet if he were alive today he would feel pressured in to clubbing nightly while wearing tight rubber shorts. His screen wife, Doris Day, would be adopting Vietnamese babies, Mae West would be in Hello magazine every week with a new husband, and Bogart and Bacall would have their own fashion ranges.

Even fiction would have to change to reflect modern spotlight life with Sherlock Holmes in and out of rehab for his “habit”, Hercules coming out as a steroid abuser and Frankenstein’s monster wearing sunglasses and big hats to cover the surgery work whilst protesting he’d walked in to a door.

I say let’s ditch these modern day celebrities and look for ones we deserve. The old fashioned type with a bit of mystique and charisma. The unattainable who rationed their appearances and let their work do the talking. No more pretend millionaires existing on overdrafts but back to the real ones carelessly buying up islands and yachts to get away from the public and enabling us to get away from them.

Celebrities! Can’t live with them, can’t live without their millions…….. as Heather Mills might say.