A new 'celebrity' weekly is on the way and Hello! is about to open a Dublin office. Yes, puff journalism is alive and well in Ireland, but what does it all mean? asks Eddie Holt
The Ireland of VIP magazine consists of, in a selection of its own descriptions: high flyers, fashion queens, top models, stunning beauties, glamorous revellers, charming eccentrics, boardroom sharks, passionate preservationists, hectic schedules, meteoric rises, jet-hopping lifestyles, trendiest eateries, sparkling parties, great houses and sophisticated taste. "Celebrity" journalism is, of course, a Niagara of froth. Haemorrhaging smarm, it practically incapacitates parody.
With the collapse, in New York, of Tina Brown's Talk magazine in January, it appeared that celebrity journalism might be fatally wounded. Certainly, the mood in the US, especially in New York, was not conducive to frivolous celebrity worship. However, the news that a new, Irish, celebrity-journalism weekly newspaper, Stars on Sunday, is to be launched on St Patrick's Day, and that Hello! magazine is to open a Dublin office later this year, suggests that, in Ireland, puff guff is about to get a second wind.
Whether there will be enough stuff to puff is a crucial question. Buyers of the established magazines already get to see posed pictures of "celebrities" (the gossip trade's favourite "one-size-fits-all" description) and read about these delightful/charming/ distinguish-
ed/ ravishing/ renowned/ eminent/ radiant/ alluring, sometimes even "wonderful" people with their exquisite/ graceful/ sublime taste and all-round fabulous/ fantastic/ success-saturated, thesaurus-exhausting, magnificent lives.
The 1990s created such unlikely creatures as "celebrity chefs", "celebrity lawyers" and "celebrity gardeners". But what next? Celebrity civil servants, celebrity middle-managers in financial institutions, celebrity farm managers? It appears as though you have only to place the word "celebrity" in front of any job-description and the possibilities are created. Perhaps it's the democratisation of celebrity - the Andy Warhol quip coming true.
Yet it doesn't seem like that's the whole story.
Celebrity journalism was probably inevitable in 1990s Ireland. It was the belch of the Tiger when some people were making loads of loot and, predictably, felt very pleased with themselves. Few readers, whatever about the featured "celebrities" themselves, took it all very seriously. But the phenomenon of such journalism should be taken very seriously indeed.
It has generated some significant commercial successes and seeped into mainstream journalism - print and broadcast - albeit often in diluted form.
For a time, it appeared that the Irish craze was primarily a case of the "I-of-the-Tiger" - rampant egotism generating profits for media outlets acting as a part of the PR industry. Every newspaper - national, regional and local, from the scurrilous to the respected - carries some form of "social diary", and given the economics of the media, it's hard to blame them.
But the Niagara of froth, even recycling the same limited list of celebrities, gushes on.
Maybe the egomania of it all is simply a displacement of the old, hectoring, damnation-threatening super-ego, savagely inculcated by the Catholic Church. Then again, maybe not.
There is a common defence that there's a demand for celebrity journalism and those who photograph, write and package it are just filling a gap in the market. After all, it's harmless, so objections to it are evidence of condescension, hypocrisy and even envy. Certainly, it is possible to be condescending, hypocritical and presumably, even envious about the celebrities, their acolytes and their accolades. But it's reasonable to wonder what effects the torrents of verbal and pictorial gush have on society itself.
In one sense, celebrity journalism helps to create and bind a society within society. In another, it's divisive, selecting individuals and traits deemed worthy of being "celebrated". There is, too, the argument that, in an increasingly atomised society, in which people barely even know their neighbours, celebrity gossip, like soap opera, gives readers a kind of vicarious community. You might not know your neighbours, but you can know these celebrities. If that's the case, things are even sadder than we might have feared.
You can't get to know people through their appearances in celebrity journalism. The typically soft stuff, dripping with the praise of aggrandising adjectives, is ludicrous and the sleazy stuff is well . . . sleazy. Like puff or hatchet-job biography, there is no balance in it. It's all either breathless banalities or sordid sensationalism. If this is one of our age's responses to the loss of community, then celebrity journalism is hardly harmless. It's mulch, filling a vacuum and propagating distorted notions of human worth.
It's not either, as the argument is sometimes cast, a simple matter of the values of "vulgar" new money replacing those of "cultured" old money. Certainly, some of the new stuff is objectionably bullish and smarmy, but the old, with its patronising propaganda about noblesse oblige, was just as exploitative and vain. If anything, the old was often worse, at least in terms of condescension and right-to-rule attitudes.(Though like the new, it has produced notable exceptions).
The deepest danger with contemporary celebrity journalism is much graver than vulgarity. Celebrating lives with prose which often makes them as utterly unbelievable as the super-sunny lives of a typical TV commercial, is literally dehumanising. Real people - whether we like or dislike them, approve or disapprove of them, trust or suspect them - are turned into grinning mannequins for public consumption. The fact that many of them are complicit in this transformation doesn't lessen its effects.
Anyway, it's surprising that we are about to be confronted with another dollop of celebrity journalism. It seemed to have reached its peak and to be in welcome decline. Reality television - though it's never "real" when television is involved - appeared to have displaced it and made the cult of "celebrity" more ludicrous than ever. But Stars on Sunday and a Dublin office for Hello! magazine means that some people, at least, believe the market is not yet exhausted.
Readers may or may not be exhausted by the eulogising of money and by people vacuously pleased with themselves (we'll see!), but the very process of people being hollowed-out as subjects and, by extension, as readers, is alarming. It's no coincidence that the putatively glamorous lives of the people featured are routinely described as "fulfilling". Something has to fill the vacuums of hollowed-out people, so Niagara-strength gush is invented to do the job.
The various launch-lizards, habitual party-goers and generally wonderful people who feature repeatedly in celebrity journalism, mirror the fanatically pious confraternity and sodality types so lauded in de Valera's Ireland. Rather than being their opposites, they are, in many respects, their inheritors: too tuned to the moment and slavishly embracing the dominant orthodoxy. Then it was religion and self-denial; now it's money and self-indulgence. Scapular and sparkler are not necessarily that different.
As we've seen with excessive church-worship, we may all pay the price for the aberrations wrought in the national psyche by a glut of celebrity journalism. That it is flourishing and set to expand is dispiriting - especially at a time when Balzac's dictum that "behind every great fortune there is a crime" seems to become more valid in the Ireland of the tribunals.
Sure, if readers want to see pictures of and read inane pap about other people, what the hell? Prurience must be indulged occasionally, even if only in dentists' waiting rooms. But a glut of it is not harmless, whatever else it might be.