pop will eat itself

The latest series of Celebrity Big Brother has just finished over here. We didn’t watch it, not least of all because of the 12 or so ‘celebrities’ featured, there was only one we had even heard of before. The British love their celebrities: everyone from the A-list right through to the Z-list (Big Brother draws its cast largely from the bottom end of the alphabet). Tellingly, the only ‘celebrity’ we did know wasn’t even a local one, being American ex-basketballer/ general weirdo Dennis Rodman.

Saturday morning TV repeated the grand finale episode and everyone could have saved themselves the effort of sitting through three weeks of the show by tuning into this collected highlights package.

The twist for the series was that amongst the celebrities was a ‘nobody from Essex’ called Chantelle. Her task was to convince the ‘real celebrities’ that she was actually a celebrity too, specifically a member of the fictitious five-strong girl band Kandyfloss (‘With a K!’). They showed a clip of her singing their supposed hit single and despite the fact that she had no singing ability whatsoever, the other housemates were all easily convinced and she was allowed to stay and compete for the Celebrity Big Brother title.

In real life Chantelle worked as an office temp/ Paris Hilton impersonator, a look she maintained in the house, with her super short outfits and constant flicking of waist-length blonde hair extensions. So here she is pretending to be someone famous, largely by imitating someone famous, who is famous primarily for nothing more than being famous. And she did a pretty good job of it too; because she actually went on to win the show with over 50 percent of the vote.

I think my favourite bit was when an older celebrity, realising her obvious popularity on the outside as one of the few remaining competitors, said to her in a serious and encouraging mentor-like tone, ‘You know, if you want to make the most of this, you’ve got it in you to become a celebrity’. Yes that’s right, he wasn’t encouraging her to pursue a singing career or an acting career or any career at all for that matter, but as someone who knows, he felt that she had already proven that she was good at being a celebrity - a job that clearly doesn’t require any special skills at all.

With a logic that makes my brain hurt, as the only person on the show without the actual celebrity credential she really did deserve to emerge victorious as everyone’s favourite celebrity.