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What does the word mean to you? If you're of a certain vintage (old git), then Fame is the title of a David Bowie song from his I-wish-I-were-James-Brown period. For anyone born in the 1970s, Fame is the TV show turned film turned stage show turned video game turned breakfast cereal that captured the nation's teenagers by their heartstrings, filling their poor little heads with ideas of song and dance immortality.
On the other hand, for anyone currently under 30, fame seems to be the
only thing in life that matters. Work hard, do your exams, get yourself
a good job and maybe find a cure for cancer? Pah. Who wants that when,
by contrast, being a horrible little gobshite prepared to sacrifice all
semblance of personal dignity and undergo any humiliation imaginable on
a reality TV show, you can become famous. Alternatively, if you are of
the female persuasion, you can marry a little gobshite etc. etc.
footballer.
It was Andy Warhol who said that everyone would be famous for fifteen
minutes. It's not entirely clear exactly what he meant by that remark,
because it's obvious that not everyone can be famous for a nano second,
let alone fifteen minutes. Perhaps he was just talking about his own
band of hangers-on and nymphs, most of whom probably have been at least
on nodding terms with fame at some time or other, even if it's only
posthumously. Or maybe he just thought he was being clever, and because
it was Andy Warhol, everyone else thought it must be clever too, even
though it's actually rather silly. King's new clothes and all that.
Anyway, the thing about the current generation's idea of fame is that
it is built on something so tenuous - a single reality TV show
appearance, for example - that once the novelty factor has evaporated,
all that's left is, er, nothing. So they get reduced to ever less
glamorous gigs - opening the local bakers for fifty quid - and ever
more desperate stunts to get their name back in the papers.
It's a sad indictment of our country that it's come to this state of
affairs. It would be so much better if people had to actually achieve
something worthwhile before they became famous. Sadly, even when people
do make the grade for something laudable, such is the need of the press
to reduce things to the lowest common denominator that any noble act is
overlooked. Remember that woman called Gail Trimble on University
Challenge a while back? Clearly an exceptionally knowledgeable young
lady, and it's a raging certainty she had no intention whatsoever of
courting fame through her appearance on a quiz show watched by next to
nobody. But her extraordinary performances began to get noticed by a
wider audience, and in the end, what did she get for her exposure on
TV? Fame.
What's more, it was fame of the worst kind. She was mocked for her
looks. She was berated for being a bit of a know-all and smug with it.
Worst of all, instead of some far sighted company offering her a job
that would make use of her undoubted intelligence and brain power, the
only proposal that came her way was from a lads mag that wanted her to
get her norks out. What a country.
At the other end of the scale there was Jade Goody. A sad case, of
course, as it always is when young people die, but just why were so
many of the track suit wearers so obsessed with her? She made a career
out of being stupid, and worse, actually seemed to revel in, and yes,
even boasted about the fact that she was so ignorant. Ironically,
although she wouldn't have understood the concept of irony, one of the
last things she did was to sell her deathbed story to a magazine to
earn enough money to enable her kids to go to a decent school. In other
words, to get an education that will in all probability mean they earn
much less money, but are infinitely more use to society.
Put the treatment those two women received side by side and you get a
perfect picture of the warped sense of priorities this place now has at
the core of its popular culture. Stupid is good, clever isn't.
Jeez.
TRAINS (yes, again)
We like a survey in this column. Over the years they have provided the
inspiration for dozens of articles, more often than not having great
steaming heaps of ridicule dumped on them for producing a huge report
costing tens of thousands of pounds which actually does nothing more
than state the bleedin' obvious.
Well recently the results of a real lulu of a survey were released.
This just about takes the Noel Edmunds prize for pointlessness in that
it cost £500,000 and at the end produced a lovely document that stated,
in consultant-speak, that commuters don't like the trains they are
forced to use.
Let's repeat that figure. £500,000. That's half a million quid, paid
for by you and me, because it was money from the government. Think what
better use that could have been put to. You could furnish three or four
MP's second homes for that. Or buy a management consultant for a year
to be irrelevant in the NHS. It's enough for one hundred more speed
cameras. Then again, it could actually buy a few extra carriages that
might have eliminated some of the problems the report highlighted.
Even if you forget the truly stupendous sum of money wasted on it, this
particular survey was worse than average on several fronts. Firstly, it
was conducted by an 'under cover' passenger secretly filming his fellow
lab-rats. They, of course, had no option but to be on the train - if
there were an alternative, they wouldn't be on it in the first place.
So apart from the sheer horror that having to use the unreliable,
uncomfortable things twice a day invokes, they were also having their
movements filmed, unbeknown to them, and the images used without their
permission. More in a minute.
Secondly, there seems to have been no purpose to the commissioning of
this particular survey. When you hear what the results were you'll
struggle to find a solitary use for the information provided. So what
was it?
Well, us mugs have been divided into various sub-types. Some of us are
‘Snipers’, apparently. This means hovering next to a seat that you
think might become vacant soon so that you can be first to baggsy it.
Fat chance of that on the 18:05 from Liverpool Street - no bugger gets
off until Chelmsford and, in fact, even more people pile on at
Stratford. Then there are ‘Sentinels’, who make a bee-line for a wall
to lean against because there are no seats, and a leaning place is
considered the next best thing (No shit! Who'd have thought of that?).
There are also ‘Heroes’ who crash and bang up and down the aisle
looking for a non-existent seat. Quite why these people are labelled as
heroes, rather than annoying bastards, isn't explained, but it shows
the surveyors are even more divorced from reality than was previously
thought.
How much of the £500,000 do you reckon it took to come up with the
conclusion that "passengers' positioning is affected by their fellow
passengers' appearance, size and smell"? Well, well, well, who'd have
thought that nobody wants to be sat next to a fat smelly person? Thank
heavens we have clever people around compiling surveys who can point us
in the right direction.
The results also noted that us mug punters, sorry, passengers, are
‘relaxed and happy’ if the train turns up on time and we get a seat.
Say it again? No shit.
This is all so easy to mock, yet it shouldn't be. The people who
collect our taxes should be a bit more careful about how they spend our
money. If we got rid of all the waste, such as this cobblers, and the
recent £300k's worth of consultancy fees that proved beyond reasonable
doubt that ducks do indeed like water, you can bet your arse that
income tax would only be about 10p in the pound. Still, it's only
someone else's money. Plenty more where that came from.
So yet again, it's all Gordon Brown's fault.
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