The Fry Chronicles (38 page)

The morning after
The Cellar Tapes
was aired on BBC2 I went for a walk along the King’s Road. How ought I to treat those who approached me? I switched on a sweet gentle smile and practised a kind of ‘Who? …
me
?’ gesture that involved looking behind me and then pointing with questioning disbelief at my own undeserving chest. I made sure, before setting out, that there were pens in my pocket as well as some artfully random scraps of paper for autographs. Would I write ‘Yours sincerely’ or ‘With best wishes’? I decided that I should try each a few times and see which looked better.

Photo call in Richmond Park for BBC version of
The Cellar Tapes.

The same: ultimately a git with a pipe stuck in his face.

The first people I passed as I made my way up Blacklands Terrace were an elderly couple who paid me no attention. Foreigners possibly, or the kind of Chelseaites who thought it smart not to have a television. A young woman came towards me with a West Highland terrier on a lead. I added an extra 10 per cent of soupy modesty to my sweet gentle smile and awaited her gasps and shrieks. She and the terrier passed right by without a flicker of recognition. How very strange. I turned left at the King’s Road and walked past the Peter Jones department store and twice around Sloane Square. Not one person stopped me, shot me a sideways glance of admiring recognition or favoured me with a single puzzled stare that told me that they knew the face but couldn’t quite place it. There was simply no reaction from anyone anywhere. I went into W. H. Smith’s and hung around the periodicals section, close to the piles of listings magazines. To pick up a
Radio Times
people had to ask me to step aside; obviously and by definition these persons must have been television watchers, but my features, by now set into a wild, despairing grin, meant nothing to them. This was most strange. Television, everybody in the world knew, conferred instant fame. One morning you do the weather on BBC1, the next you are besieged at the supermarket checkout queue. Instead I had woken up to find myself anonymous. I was still nothing more than another face in the London crowd. Maybe almost no one had watched the
Footlights show? Or maybe millions had, but I possessed one of those bland, forgettable faces that meant I was doomed never to be recognized. Surely this was unlikely? I had told my face a lot of tough and unforgiving truths in the past, but I had never accused it of being bland or forgettable.

I pulled a compensatory
BBC Micro
magazine from the shelf and left. As I was trailing disappointedly back to the flat I heard a voice behind me.

‘Excuse me, excuse me!’

I turned to see an excited young girl. At last. ‘Yes?’

‘You forgot your change.’

Here are the first lines of
Love’s Labour’s Lost
:

That is the King of Navarre’s opening speech, the one Hugh had such trouble with in the 1981 Marlowe Society production. It is a fine sentiment, but nothing could run more counter to the way the world thinks today. It certainly seems that all still hunt after fame, but how many are content for it to come only in the form of a tombstone inscription? They want it now. And that is how I wanted it too. Ever since I can remember I had dreamt of being famous. I know how embarrassing an admission this is. I could attempt to dress it up in finer words, imputing and inferring intricate psychological grounds, implicating and adducing complex developmental causations that elevated the condition into a syndrome, but there is no point dressing it up in fine linen. From the first moment I was aware of such a class of person existing, I had wanted to be a celebrity. We are forever telling ourselves that we live in a celebrity-obsessed culture; many hands are daily wrung at the supremacy of appearance over achievement, status over substance and image over industry. To
desire
fame argues a shallow and delusional outlook. This much we all know. But if we clever ones can see so clearly that fame is a snare and a delusion, we can also see just as clearly that as each year passes a greater and greater proportion of the western world’s youth is becoming entramelled in that snare and dazzled by that delusion.

We have in our minds a dreadful picture of the thousands who audition so pitifully for television talent shows and whose heads seem always to be buried in garish celebrity magazines. We feel sorrow and contempt for the narrow dimensions of their lives. We excoriate a society that is all surface and image. Teenaged girls in particular, we suggest, are slaves to body-image and fashion fantasies, they are junkies on the fame drug. How can our culture be so broken and so sick, we wonder, as to raise up as objects of veneration a raft of talentless nobodies who offer no moral, spiritual or intellectual sustenance and no discernible gifts beyond over-hygienic eroticism and unthreatening photogeneity?

I would offer the usual counters to that. Firstly, the phenomenon simply is not as new as everyone thinks it is. That there are more outlets, pipelines, conduits and means of transmitting and receiving news and images is obvious, but read any novel published in the early part of the twentieth century and you will find female uneducated characters who spend their spare moments dreaming of movie stars, tennis-players, explorers, racing-drivers and
barnstorming aviators. You’ll find these dreamy shop-girls and head-in-the-clouds housemaids in Evelyn Waugh, Agatha Christie, P. G. Wodehouse and every genre in between. The propensity to worship idols is not new. Nor is the wrathful contempt of those who believe that they alone understand the difference between false gods and true. In the story of the Ten Commandments I was always on the side of Aaron. I liked his golden calf. Biblical colour plates for children showed it garlanded with flowers, revelling idolaters dancing happily around it, clashing cymbals and embracing each other with wild, abandoned joy. The music and the hugs were clinching proof (especially the cymbals) in the minds of the Victorian illustrators that Aaron’s followers were debauched, degenerate, decadent and doomed to eternal damnation. With the party in full swing, Moses returns with those fatuous tablets tucked under his arm, dashes them petulantly to the ground, melts the golden calf and grinds it to powder, which he mixes into a drink that he forces all the Israelites to swallow. Next, being such a holy man of God, he slays 3,000 men before hauling his vengeful arse back up Mount Sinai to get a second batch of commandments. I think we can celebrate the fact that we now live in a culture, flawed or not, that instantly sees that, while Aaron may be a weak voluptuary, his brother is a dangerous fanatic. The gilt bull beats the guilty bullshit any way you choose to look at it. We humans are naturally disposed to worship gods and heroes, to build our pantheons and valhallas. I would rather see that impulse directed into the adoration of daft singers, thicko footballers and air-headed screen actors than into the veneration of dogmatic zealots, fanatical preachers, militant politicians and rabid cultural commentators.

Secondly, is it not a rule in life that no one is quite as stupid as we would like them to be? Spokesmen across the political divide from us are smarter than we would have them, mad mullahs and crazy nationalists are nothing like as dumb as we would wish. Film producers, shock jocks, insurgents, journalists, American military – all kinds of people we might reasonably expect to write off as mentally negligible have cunning, insight and intellect well beyond what is comfortable for us. This inconvenient truth extends to those on whom we lavish our patronizing pity too. If the social-networking services of the digital age teach us anything it is that only a fool would underestimate the intelligence, intuition and cognitive skills of the ‘masses’. I am talking about more than the ‘wisdom of crowds’ here. If you look beyond sillinesses like the puzzling inability of the majority to distinguish between
your
and
you’re
,
its
and
it’s
and
there
,
they’re
and
their
(all of which distinctions have nothing to do with language, only with grammar and orthographical convention: after all logic and consistency would suggest the insertion of a genitival apostrophe in the pronominal possessive
its
, but convention has decided, perhaps to avoid confusion with the elided
it is
, to dispense with one), if, as I say, you look beyond such pernickety pedantries, you will see that it is possible to be a fan of reality TV, talent shows and bubblegum pop and still have a brain. You will also see that a great many people know perfectly well how silly and camp and trivial their fandom is. They do not check in their minds when they enter a fan site. Judgement is not necessarily fled to brutish beasts, and men have not quite lost their reason. Which is all a way of questioning whether pop-culture hero worship is really so psychically damaging, so erosive of the cognitive faculties, so corrupting of the soul of mankind as we are so often told.

Thirdly, look at the kind of people who most object to the childishness and cheapness of celebrity culture. Does one really want to side with such apoplectic and bombastic bores? I should know, I often catch myself being one, and it isn’t pretty. I will defend the absolute value of Mozart over Miley Cyrus, of course I will, but we should be wary of false dichotomies. You do not have to choose between one or the other. You can have both. The human cultural jungle should be as varied and plural as the Amazonian rainforest. We are all richer for biodiversity. We may decide that a puma is worth more to us than a caterpillar, but surely we can agree that the habitat is all the better for being able to sustain each. Monocultures are uninhabitably dull and end as deserts.

Against all that it might be said that the quarrel is not with harmless idolatry. The problem, some would argue, is not that everybody worships celebrity, but they
want it for themselves.
Online user-generated content and the rise of the talent show and reality TV have bred a generation for whom it is not enough to flick through fan magazines, they want their own shot at stardom. They want, moreover, to go straight to fame and fortune, short-circuiting tedious considerations like hard work and talent. Well, we all know how satisfying it is to recite the shortcomings and hollowness of others – especially those who have money and recognition where we have none. It is certainly more pleasurable than inspecting our own shortcomings. I dare say we do live in a cheap age, an age where the things that should have value are little prized and things that are empty
of worth are too highly rated. But who on earth could think for a second that this is new to our race? Anyone familiar with Aristophanes, Martial, Catullus, Shakespeare, Jonson, Dryden, Johnson, Pope, Swift … You get the point. It has
always
been the case, since humans could first record their thoughts, that the ‘wrong people’ have been seen to have arrived at the highest positions. The emperors, kings, aristocrats, ruling classes and gentry, the arrivistes, parvenus and nouveaux riches, the financiers, merchant princes and industrialists, the artists, designers, literati and cultural elite, the actors, sportsmen, television stars, pop singers and presenters, they have all been unfairly elevated to positions they do not deserve. ‘In a just and properly ordered world,’ the angry ones wail, ‘
I
should be up there too, but I am too proud to say so, so I shall carp and snipe and rant with indignation and show my contempt for the whole boiling. But deep inside I want to be recognized. I just want to count.’