Kerry Katona On This Morning
Originally published October 24th 2008
I am not an expert on celebrities by any means, primarily because they’re dull. Why, then, you might wonder, have I picked ‘Kerry Katona On This Morning’ as the subject of my second post. Firstly, it’s in the news today, but more primarily, Kerry is symbolic of something that interests me a great deal – in as much as I find it appalling - and that is celebrity culture as a whole.
Just in case you don’t know (and why should you, really, you should have better things to do), Kerry appeared in ‘This Morning’ drunk as an nineteenth century lord on his way from whites to the Hellfire Club. The resulting interview is less exciting than you might expect. She’s certainly less entertaining than Oliver Reed was (I think, though, that Olly actually was a nineteenth century lord who got lost on his way from Whites to the Hellfire Club and ended up somehow on Parkinson). The point is not, however, that I want her to be more outrageous and entertaining, because I really couldn’t care. If I want to be entertained, I can watch a film or put on an album. They’re, like, you know, like, good, and stuff. What I’m more interested in is this – what is Kerry, and can that explain her?
Here is everything I know about Kerry Katona. She used to be in some awful teeny girl band years and years ago that, as I was older than ten at the time, I considered so beneath my notice that I can’t remember the name. She then got married, I seem to recall, to some Irish boy-band clone made in an underground lab by that bloke from x-factor. This made her famous in the heat magazine sense – as in, she’s famous, but not for doing anything. This fame might have been a passing thing, but people got involved with her story. Her manager (who you should probably picture with horns) would have had her court the press a while to cash in. Then there ws some kind of breakup, maybe some children involved, I’m not sure. She became a drug user, I don’t know which, but I’d guess cocaine, and people followed that story too. She started doing Iceland adverts (at which point, it has to be said, I first found out who she was, I’ve picked up the rest of this by cultural osmosis after she started to try and flog me unidentifiable bits of pre-fried fatty meat in breadcrumbs) and is now doing some sort of reality television thing. Oh yeah, and she was in that rubbish jungle program when they make you eat maggots and kangaroo balls and stuff. I’d bet that she’s done some lad’s mag shoots too; it’s the way of things. I think there might be some sex tape thing too, but in order to find out if that’s real or not, I’d have to watch it, and the thought makes me feel a bit ill. I’ve still never recovered from seeing John Leslie’s willy, and when compared to Kerry, that rather plain and homely Abi Titmuss girl is Claudia Schiffer, Cindy Crawford, Cleopatra and all other beautiful women who’s names begin with ‘C’ all rolled into one on a bed of mixed leaves with a balsamic dressing. Oh, and she’s had loads of kids, (which, given the population of the world, makes me want to embark on a rant that will have to wait for a different time).
Kerry clearly can’t cope. People in the public eye tend to develop cocaine and alcohol habits for a reason. People in ‘real life’ often succumb to the same thing for the same reasons too. They feel like they can’t cope, and the pressures upon them to do this and that are too much for them to bear. The do not consider themselves equal to the task, and so will use anything that will make them feel equal to the task. Cocaine is the best example of this, as it simply makes you feel like you are great -equal to any task, in fact. Alcohol tends to be more conciliatory, a way to hide your psyche from the world, but this is an aside. In essence, Kerry’s drug addiction is a symptom of her inability to cope with the attention of the press. This is a problem, because essentially, that’s her job.
Kerry is just famous for being Kerry. Where Oliver Reed could have just, at least in theory, disappeared into his craft, or George Best could have concentrated on football and simply been so dull in their everyday lives that the lenses of the cameras sopped pointing their way. Of course they didn’t do that, but they could have done and still carried on their careers. But for Kerry, having the cameras pointing at her is what she does. It’s all she does. She appears in magazines, she appears in This Morning, she makes reality TV, and they (which is to say, ultimately, ‘we’) pay her for it – to live her life in the spotlight. So intense is his glare that she’s more famous than people we send to space.
The horribly sick thing about this situation is that the very reason she holds our attention is that she withers under it. Watching her constantly fail to keep it together is what keeps us watching. You might say that Kerry brings a lot of this upon herself, and you’d be right. George Best or Oliver Reed were famous after the event – they didn’t really bring it all upon themselves, at least at the start. Kerry has made a career out of flogging herself as a product and trying to draw as much attention as possible. Jordan is probably the best example of this – Kerry is a bit of an amateur at it compared to that girl, but still. It’s possibly the single most worthless way to make money that I can think of. Kerry, Jordan, Jade bloody Goodie, any of those idiots from ‘Big Brother’, in fact, that horrible mixture of pig intestines and plastic that is Tara-Palmer Thompkinson, they all do this. The miracle, for them, I suppose is that we let them. They are all unutterably worthless individuals who should be ignored. I’m sure that some of them perhaps have talents and skills that might be developed (even Jade, who has the intellect of a gerbil coupled to the craven viciousness of a dingo and the social grace of a squaddie on a tequila-bender, might make a good cleaner or checkout girl). Tara Twiddly-Tooposhtobereal can play the piano, my mum tells me. Good. Do that instead of doing nothing and expecting me to be interested. If you don’t want to do anything, that’s fine too, but at least have the good grace to do it in private. The thing is, though, they won’t, because we validate them all the time. Jade couldn’t even get out of the system by demonstrating that she is a horrible bully and a racist on national television. What do they have to do to make us dismiss them? Be dull for awhile, don’t do interviews, don’t get pissed and flash your genital s at a row of cameras or release a sex tape – that should do it. They won’t do that, though, whilst we keep throwing big chunks of cash at them for carrying on. Worse than this, though, they are our playthings, to be abused at our whim as a cat might toy with a mouse, or Kerry herself might taunt a fishfinger.
It’s become a bit of a national sport to take the piss out of Kerry. Adverts on E4 ridicule her intellect, even her womb was the target of Frankie Boyle recently. It’s was pretty funny, actually, and I encourage Frankie Boyle and all other comedians to carry on. In fact. I don’t know why we don’t take the piss out of the Heat magazine set constantly, twenty-four hours a day. I am fairly confident that most of these people are as dumb as a bag of lobotomised spanners (has anybody heard peter Andre talk? Ye gods, nobody’s home, the lights aren’t on, and the mail’s been piling up for thirty years… ). In many ways, these people are famous because they’re stupid. Just look at the guy who won Big Brother the other year – Brian. Essentially he won because the British public found his stupidity entertaining. And people say the Romans were cruel. I have been told that he is ‘nice’ too, but in that tone that people use when describing the nature of their pets. In the face of this ludicrous situation, who can blame us for a little cruelty? So why do they put up with it? Why not just retreat from the world?
Fame is addictive, they tell me. I can appreciate this a little, but really all fame is lest we forget, is a situation where more people know you than you know. It has massively negative consequences. Your life is not your own, and you are a target, not just for contempt, jealousy and ridicule, but every obsessive fan and madman in the world. The adulation of your ‘fans’ is an empty reward, for they do not know you. In order to keep them onside you have to constantly lie about your life, manipulate your image and hide your real feelings and intentions behind a mask of PR spin. I’d imagine it’d be awful. Yet it is the only thing that our society seems to value. (Apart from money, that is, but in a way that’s just a way of measuring what we value, and the can of worms that continuing this discussion will present will have to be opened the another day). Being famous is the primary goal that children have. We are constantly in contact with the media nowadays. Media is a way of presenting the world to you, and the information it delivers is manipulated both consciously and unconsciously. It is informed by culture, and sympathetic to it, but also defines it. In a feedback loop – a circle that might at some times be virtuous or vicious – the media both responds to what we value and then comes to define it. Because of the way this system has operate in recent years, Kerry and the rest of her pathetic, greedy sorority are honestly led to believe that what they do is in some way important.
I am not saying that this circle should be broken (to be honest, I don’t think that it could be, in any but the most extreme circumstances), but I am saying that it is, in essence, to blame, and that some of this blame must fall to each of us. People are simple, really, in a much as their value judgements are based upon what they are told is valuable. Fortunately, we also do have a self-conscious faculty, too, though, a critical faculty. Only by means of this does culture make any advancements. We need to decide for ourselves if the circle we’ve created with regard to fame is vicious or virtuous. Kerry Katona, for all her inherent awfulness, is really just a silly girl caught in the middle of the circle. You might laugh, but I honestly think that this system might kill her. I’d say the circle was vicious, you’ll have to decide for yourself. I will say this, though. If you buy heat magazine, you should really rethink your life.