Have we fallen out of love with celebrities?
Watching Katy Perry gush about her trip into space - ‘I’m so proud of me!’ - turned my stomach. Really, ‘proud of me’, give me a break!
Katy Perry is a gal-pal of Lauren Sanchez, famous for nothing more than her impending marriage to Jeff Bezos the second richest man in the world, allegedly. The other four women on the trip were obviously carefully selected to be racially representative - gotta think of the optics. But frankly, these are women who are rich and successful so really, exactly how representative are they?
Gayle King, a broadcast journalist and presenter on CBS - I’ve never heard of her because I don’t live in America so am unfamiliar with telly and many of their celebrities over there - but, apparently she was ‘disappointed’ by the backlash to the all-women flight crew’s journey into space.
So much to unpack in this reaction that I don’t know where to start!
Let’s begin with ‘flight crew’. None of these six blue-lycra clad women did anything other than strap themselves in for a passenger experience into space. They were passengers!
Then King’s reaction - ‘disappointed’. It’s as if how dare we ordinary mortals, we dreary foot-solider civilians, we drone-nobodies, how dare we, not only be unimpressed, but actually be pissed off and angry at their dumb but extremely expensive joyride. You were ‘disappointed’? The charm of celebrity didn’t work. Oh no!
What normal, ordinary people saw was a bunch of over-privileged women in a variety of racial options, waste a ton of money for the sake of their own self aggrandisement, publicity and monetisation.
How much did it cost? Don’t tell me, probably millions.
How much damage did it do the environment? A heck of a lot more than my weekly drive to the supermarket which I feel guilty about.
But the biggest conclusion I’m driven to by this escapade, fronted by the toothsome and socially tone-deaf Katy Perry is that I’m sick to death of celebrities of any stripe, colour, sex, nationality, large, small, old, young, beautiful or otherwise - flaunting, lecturing and patronising me. Go home. Find something else to do. Spend less time on your brand. Stop taking up more than your fair share of space on the planet.
When Kamala Harris was campaigning to be president of America, I wanted her to win. Fervently, desperately for so many reasons. But there was one moment when I choked. And that was during all those glitzy celebrity-laden stage apperances with the likes of J-Lo, Beyonce and Oprah Winfrey. Suddenly, the celebrity endorsements felt like having my nose rubbed in the dirt.
In comparison to me and millions of others, these women are stratospherically wealthy, all sacrifices, all edicts endorsed by them are done so at zero material or existential cost. They are rich. They are safe. They are not gazing in despair at rising grocery and energy bills. They don’t live in the same world as me, and really, they are frankly on another planet.
But all of this is nothing in comparison to the slow-creep of celebrities taking over every option, every creative space and endeavour. During a thirty year career in broadcast television, factual entertainment to be precise - for the lazy of thinking that means almost everything on telly that isn’t drama, news or hard-core documentary - throughout that time I’ve watched the rise of celebrities presenting everything. You name it and a commissioning editor somewhere will require a face, a celebrity to bring viewers in. We no longer get to discover new people, new personalities, instead we’re debilitated by a steady diet of the usual suspects who help us enjoy our entertainment.
Celebrities start out like this cute and cuddly Gremlin.
Then before you know it, they’ve turned into this menace.
Infiltrating, colonising, destroying any kind of creative endeavour that isn’t their own.
A celebrity presenter generally trivilises almost every programme they front, reducing information and stories down to the personal that is personal to only them. Planet celebrity is all that exists now so that even specialist presenters - historians, travel writers, art critics - must become celebrities or else they won’t be booked on the show.
Richard Osman? Do you really need another gig? Another podcast? Another book deal? Another presenting job on telly?
Lorraine Kelly? Do you really need to write books to pay your gas bill? David Walliams? Celia Imrie? Katie Price? Alison Hammond? On and on. And has been pointed out elsewhere, most of these people are certainly not writing their own books, they’re ghostwritten.
Here on Substack the celebrity infiltration continues. More and more of them turning up like the Gremlins movie. As the trailer says:
‘Number one you’ve got to keep him out of bright light. Number two keep them away from water. And probably the most important thing, don’t ever feed him after midnight.’
I’d like to add: don’t subscribe to them on Substack, don’t let them ‘write’ books, or present tv shows or endorse politicians and most important of all… wait! perhaps this one is ok! - blast them into space so they can start a colony on Mars or the Moon or anywhere but not Earth.
But seriously folks, give yourself, and those in the same boat as you, the chance that multiple, wealthy, over-exposed celebrities don’t need. They already have plenty.
If you haven’t seen Gremlins, it was released in 1984, here is the trailer. Just replace the gremlin with a celebrity of your choice. You have been warned.
https://youtu.be/gd20j2Hb-0Y?feature=shared
©Annette Gordon 2025
Absolutely spot on, Annette. You’ve articulated something a lot of us are feeling but struggling to say aloud. There’s a deep fatigue with celebrity culture—its narcissism, its performative “progress,” and its insatiable need to dominate every platform and conversation. They've colonized every corner of our cultural space, and now even the edge of space itself. And somehow, we’re expected to applaud these stunts while grocery bills climb and public trust erodes. At some point, the spectacle stops being amusing and starts feeling grotesque.
Travelogue writing was an important publishing genre in nineteenth-century England. I am familiar with some of these diaries and memoirs documenting travel in North America. Among the most well-known nineteenth-century travelogues of North America were the works of Frances Trollope, Anthony Trollope (her son), and Charles Dickens. Matilda Houstoun recorded his travels to Texas. What all these writers have in common is having enough financial resources to travel and the time to write about them and publish them later. Most people in England could not afford pleasure travel to North America, so this created a market for those who could afford the vicarious experiences of reading travelogues. Readers were interested in the experiences of people traveling in North America. Like the Trollopes, Dickens, and Houstoun, Katy Perry and Lauren can afford the ride. Like Dickens, Katy Perry is already a household name. Will Perry’s tweetstorms (or whatever the medium) be as compelling as Dickins’ travelogue?