The tragedy of youth icons is that they must hang around after their moments of glory, sporting faces they no longer own, with leftover lives to kill, writes John Waters
For anyone to whom those opening chords of Pretty Vacant still mean something, Johnny Rotten on I'm a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out Of Here, was going to be a moment of truth. It just couldn't mean what, on the face of it, it seemed to: that Johnny's creator, John Lydon, was past it, down on his luck, lost his sense of irony, turned into yet another self-promoting celeb. No, his appearance was going to be saturated in irony, a classic post-modern moment, an encore for the third millennium. He was going to show them what it had all been about.
Well, he did, even if who "they" are is unclear. Us, I suspect - though, even with those illusions still in place, there was some mystery about what he meant when he said that he'd "changed the world twice" and was going to do it "again".
Once, certainly, he had been at the scene of the incident. The Sex Pistols' achievement was not simply displacing Genesis and Pink Floyd. The impact of Anarchy and Pretty Vacant was that, when you heard them, you had to re-evaluate the continuity of your own life against the messages they carried about something having shifted dramatically somewhere else.
But that was then, and here, from last week, is Johnny's description of fellow celebrity, page 3 girl Jordan, reading like a reprise of Pretty Vacant, though without Glen Matlock's catchy ditty: "It doesn't do anything, and if it does, it nags its way through it. It ain't funny anymore. It doesn't contribute. It's a parasite. It doesn't know how to cook, walk or talk. It's a moron. It's a bicycle pump. What does it do? It's just a pair of blow-up boobs. They're two a penny in any crap disco."
His valedictory piece-to-camera, in which he told us that he couldn't "be beat", warned of how it ends for cultural rebels unless they keep their mouths shut.
Let's not be naïve. Punk was, in essence, a tabloid creation. Malcolm McLaren, a man with a tabloid soul, said: "The media was our helper and our lover, and that, in effect, was the Sex Pistols' success . . . to control our media is to have the power of government, God, or both."
I can see why, a generation on, Lydon might have liked the idea of sending Rotten into the jungle. Reality television is the latest phase in the cartooning of society. To begin, a celebrity was somebody famous, whose life became fair game for public voyeurism. In phase two, the celebrity was reinvented as cartoon figure, whose life was a fictional collaboration between subject and medium.
All around us now are people who are almost entirely the creations of tabloid culture: cartoons, but having the appearance of real people. Now, in the third phase, the celebrity soap opera moves to supplant fiction and turn the world, finally, into soap.
Reality TV is the antithesis of what its name conveys: it presents "real" people in situations to which they respond by being as unreal as is necessary for their "survival".
The problem, in terms of the potentially revolutionary impact of his appearance, was that Rotten had not grown up. Once, he shocked by saying "shit" on TV; now he spits the c-word and everyone smiles indulgently at this terrible tousle-haired throwback. Outrage no longer outrages.
The reasons he gave for withdrawing were that he feared he was going to win and he didn't want to turn into Des O'Connor. This was half an explanation.
Jordan, her alleged bimboism notwithstanding, got the other half: "Deep down, I think he didn't want to be voted out. He'd rather walk himself than someone tell him to walk."
There are no points for being snobbish about reality TV. You can participate or deride, but not both. For Lydon to place his creation in the situation was courageous to begin with, but one assumed he knew what he was doing. Instantly, the cracks began to appear and we could see that he knew s**t.
Rotten had been a one-trick pony: he couldn't sing or play, he looked awful and he went a long way. But he was the creature of minds greater than his creator's, and it showed last week to painful effect.
Lydon walked because of the limits of his character, unable to handle winning or losing. The Rotten we thought we remembered might have been graceful, menopausally wry, avuncular, a greying malcontent whose anger had metamorphosed into something a little subtler. But there was nothing ironic or post-modern about this. Rotten leered, spat and fumed like it was still 1977, and in doing so betrayed that, even then, he'd already been little more than a cartoon.
Compared to this, Des O'Connor is someone to be.