Are we that obsessed with people who are in reality minor achievers? (From Watford Observer)

Are we that obsessed with people who are in reality minor achievers?

6:51am Thursday 15th December 2011

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THE revelations that Charlotte Church was asked to sing at a Maxwell wedding and was offered either £100,000, or a newspaper commitment towards positive publicity, caused me to wonder how far journalism has sunk.

Then again, I did reflect that the old adage of scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours has been the cornerstone of business and commerce since the dawn of time and many a criminal has been asked to name names in exchange for reduced punishment. Yet plea bargaining in the interest of justice could be said to serve the end with justifiable means. I am uncertain as to how far the Maxwell deal was of benefit to civilisation.

I know I am completely out of step in that I do not share this obsession with so-called celebrity and even if I started watching Coronation Street regularly, I cannot imagine being enticed to buy a paper that informed us one of the bit-part actresses was a slave to orgasms.

Dentist and doctor’s waiting rooms are awash with magazines informing us that a “star”, of whom I have never heard, is safely ensconced in a luxury house with her beau and has agreed to a full photo-spread.

I go on the internet every morning to look at the national newspapers and am told on some front pages that someone has been “voted out” or two people, who were never celebrities to my mind, are getting close in the jungle. I do accept that people love “I was almost a celebrity and hoping for a second chance get me out of here” and “X-factor” but are the outcomes really sufficiently significant to make the lead stories on tabloids? Surely there is something more riveting and weighty, such as a former “star” of Grange Hill having sex five times a night.

I jest of course, yet I have believed for years we have the Press we deserve but are we really that fascinated with minor, bit-part performers and do we buy into the belief they are in fact celebrities? It is a self-perpetuating obsession with so-called celebrity and each newspaper appears to be hell bent to outdo their rivals. So, in the process, there are corners cut and casualties made with little regard for morality.

One wonders where it is all heading and I was amused yet not totally surprised when a group of under-8s were canvassed about what is or has been great about Britain and many cited X-Factor. Over-wrought publicity and the limits of modern education are jointly responsible for such banalities.

I could be argued by the anti-press lobby that every Pressman, who knocks on a door or uses the phone legitimately and asks the owner for a comment, is guilty of intrusion but there are ways of doing it, politely. Phone hacking, walking round to the back door and into the kitchen or dogging the subject at every turn, are degrees too far.

I know a former colleague witnessed a conversation on a red-top sports desk in which it was suggested as Chelsea had left out player ‘A’ from the team, they might phone the individual and provoke a reaction. If none was forthcoming, they might insinuate the manager was quite critical of the player, which would cause the player to sound off. Then they encouraged the manager to reply to this unprovoked attack and the back page lead story was duly “manufactured!”

My point is that I would never have been able to cut it as a hack on national newspapers. I might have been able to follow the likes of my former trainees Malcolm Vallerius, Alan Lee and Michael Calvin, but even they had to go through, albeit briefly, the dog-eats-dog world in order to gain their well-deserved reputations.

They did it by actually keeping out of the mainstream. There is such a thing as the “Fleet Street mafia”, a collection of reporters from rival newspapers, who cover similar fields and protect themselves and each other by swapping information and quotes. That way they are never scooped and their reputation hinges on the treatment of the facts.

None of the three former trainees took that path and fair play to them.

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