Celebrities: supply and demand

Time was when being a celebrity meant that you either had to be good at something that nobody else could do (like excelling at lacrosse), do something that nobody could be bothered to do (like going to the moon), repeatedly play yourself in a number of movies (like Cary Grant), or be a record breaking mutant (like John Merrick). In those golden days, celebrity was something rare and unusual, a goal that could only be attained through sweat, blood and tears or a genetic abnormality.
The intrusion of political correctness has now meant that even the most extraordinarily ordinary person thinks that it is their right to a degree of celebrity, even if they have done nothing more heroic that sit in a house for ten weeks with no television and a group of like-minded retards.
Tonight, ITV will be screening a special shark night (catching up with Discovery after all these years), the highlight of which will involve lowering "celebrities" into the water in a shark cage so that they can be at risk of being eaten. I'm not sure if this will be an interactive programme, where a press of the red button will open a flap and condemn another "actress" to becoming selachimorphic dental floss but we can only hope.

This latest laudable venture follows on a number of attempts to redress the celebrity supply:demand ratio. Following a number of programmes which attempted to bump them off one by one (Lenny Henry in a jungle, Joanna Lumley on a desert island), we heaved a sigh of relief when they started carting them off in groups to an Australian jungle-based concentration camp where they were not only subjected to the prattling of Ant&Dec&Ant but were to be ritually humiliated before the final execution. Somewhat disappointingly, I don't believe that any celebrities have actually suffered in the making of the programme to date but surely its only a matter of time. The Channel 4 programme "The Games" had a more subtle approach: train unfit "celebrities" to take part in sports where they would inevitably damage themselves.

Seizing on the latter format and realising its limitations for celebrity culling, ITV came up with Celebrity Wrestling, where the Z-listers were "trained" by pro-"wrestlers" in advanced physical techniques such as gurning, pointing at your opponent in a particularly hard way, and posing in spandex. Of course all of this was useless in the face of the ludicrous games they were forced to endure, all of which were seemingly designed by torture experts to break little bits of their bodies without actually killing them. This programme wass such a success that in a few short weeks all the original participants had been maimed and all the substitutes had either run-out or run away. With the satisfaction of a job well-done, ITV was able to pull the series well before its planned finale, which I am led to believe may have involved a bear.

Their success in this public service obviously guided ITV to run a second series of the X-Factor. This is effectively a prophylactic device, designed to cut ridiculous dreams of celebrity short beore they can take root in the person's mind and fester like a brain cancer. Week after week it is a delight to watch the stultifyingly untalented cut down to size and told to go back to the jam factory from whence they came. The need for this programme is emphasised in every episode when tone deaf lunatics with an unbelievable self-belief - "...I knows I as the X-Factor, I'm pretty with a good voice and a great personality...", "...that's right, I'm her mum and she sings like an angel..." - are basically told that they are unattractive tone-deaf rubbish. You really start to beleive that these people live in a house where all the mirrors are broken and all their friends and family are deaf.

So we have seen that the media are trying to clear up their own mess and clear up the celebrity supply:demand imbalance they have created. The latest venture, which I overheard on the Christian O'Connell show this week, will be to recreate the trek that the survivors of the Andean plane crash made (the ones that weren't eaten, obviously), as depicted in teh movie "Survival". I can see that this could be the start of great things in the recreation of famous disaster movies (not necessarily depicting real events).
My favourite concept at this time would be a recreation of the Towering Inferno, possibly at Trump Tower. Funding would come via telephone and text votes from the public who could vote on such things as "Who gets to go in the bosun's chair ?" and "Who gets to face the exploding water tank ?". There could also be a weekly challenge of running through a burning, exploding room protected solely by a damp flannel in order to win a family size tube of Savlon. It can't fail.

LargetrouserS: Never knowingly underbold