Celebrities

noun:
1 {C} someone who is famous, especially in the entertainment business
2 {U} the state of being famous

Aah yes, the nations favourite; celebrity culture. Walk into any newsagent and you will be bombarded with a plethora of magazines devoted to the new religion that is celebrity. You can dress like Paris, diet like Nicole (I wouldn't advise it) or shop like Posh. Ask most young girls what they want to do when they grow up and they'll tell you "we want to be famous". When I was 14 I wanted to be a journalist and perhaps be on the news. None of my friends wanted to be "famous". Some of them wanted to be actresses or singers but then these are vocations. Just being famous isn't a vocation.

These days anyone can be famous (and often they are). You can appear on a reality TV show, shag another celebrity, have a famous father or just take your kit off for the lads once or twice. That's all it takes. And what gets me is other people actually look up to these so-called celebs. They buy their "autobiographies", watch their dreadful cable TV shows and spend their money trying hard to look like them.

I have no problem with real bona-fide celebrities - people that have talent and skill. But I do have a very big problem with all those D list celebrities out there who appear half naked in the gossip pages of a magazine you pay less that £1 for. These people are actually quite sad. I was watching an episode of the last Big Brother a few months ago (I was very bored and the contestants fascinate me in a weird way) and one of the inmates said that it was always his ambition to appear on Big Brother. How sad is that? My ambition is to write a best-selling novel that people read because its actually quite good. To actually say that your ambition is to appear on a dreadful TV programme full of sad little wannabes is tragic to say the least.

But sadly there are lots of people out there like this. People who want their 15 minutes of fame (because that's all they're gonna get) and their face (or breasts a lot of the time) in a trashy magazine that you pick up in the hairdressers because you can't be bothered to talk about holidays with the person cutting your hair.

I used to work for a national charity and sometimes these D list celebrities would actually ask to be paid to help promote the work of an organisation that does not make a profit. Nice.

Just because your partner/father is rich or famous doesn't mean that you are a celebrity. You might have a fancy wardrobe but being a clothes horse is not a vocation (OK, it is if you are a model, but you know what I mean).

Did you know that Jordan's (who is actually a very shrewd business woman and knows exactly what celebrity culture means) autobiography is one of the best selling hard-back books ever? Enough said.