Or the headline could read:

"Z list celeb story helps fill empty headline space"

An Alternative headline

Non celebrity widower of non celebrity used by media to perpetuate the idea of celebrity is a worthwhile alternative to your s h i t nothing life.

YOu know, when something like this comes up, I have a similar reaction. Then the following thought enters my mind: is this real stuff going on, or are we watching a very carefully orchestrated soap opera? When you take the whole “celebrity” machine into play, and you see the high profile divorces, spats and other dramatics which keep Hello!, Heat, OK et al in gravy, it starts to make some kind of perverted sense if you look at it as pure theatre rather than real people.

Take the whole Jordan divorce. I felt it was so coincidental that Peter André had a single out when this news broke. They both started acting like some daytime pulp drama, and somehow the media lapped it up.

Does Max Clifford have a script somewhere? If not a script, then a pathway along which to push his characters.

If this is some massive pan-media made up drama, then I salute the creators. It’s not my cup of tea, but it seems to be well coordinated and orchestrated. If it’s just a lot of random attention seeking saddos washing their laundry in public, then I say “yah, boo!” and I’ll go back to my Star Trek DVDs.

I was chatting to my boyfriend the other day about old bands like Banarama, Duran Duran and Spandau and we never heard of them falling out of clubs pissed or scandlaous stories splattered all over the media.

We've become a country that applauds people who are famous for doing nothing and behave badly in public. What came first though? The people clamouring for attention by the media or the media thrusting them in our faces?

There's always been news about slebs. If you go back to Napoleonic times, look at the scandals surrounding Nelson and Mrs Hamilton, or even the state of the monarchy.

In the 1920s, thousands of women attended Rudolf Valentino's funeral, all dressed in mourning and crying their eyes out. Liz Taylor and Richard Burton were hot topics in the 1950s and 1960s. Marilyn Monroe and any number of other movie stars were always in the gossip columns. There's a memorable story from the 1950s when Liberace took a gossip columnist to court over libel and defamation for claiming he was homosexual.

As celebrity spread from the silver screen and into radio and television, more and more people have begun to use it to try to fill their empty lives with a bit of glamour. With so much airtime to fill, and a seemingly insatiable desire to know whether so-and-so is pregnant, or such-and-such has a relationship with doodah, it can only be ordinary people still trying to lift their drudgery of everyday life by living the sleb lifestyle vicariously through tittle-tattle and gossip.

I hate it. It's got out of control. The problem is now, some see becoming famous as an end in itself. They don't seem to think they might actually have to do something to become famous. It just happens.

*sigh*

Totally agree with you Heather, there's always been celeb gossip but it's gone mad over the last decade or so.

Celebs photographed coming out of supermarkets / taking kids to school / walking down the street - why is that interesting?? lol

In addition to that, I hate the culture of the medias need to try every-which-way to show c-lebs in the worst possible light, as though pulling them down to 'only human' level is a particular boon. I steer clear of all of that tosh.

I'm glad you girls feel that way, cos I'm surrounded by by the very people you describe, lapping up the latest nonsense about the usual suspects

I don't think many people do, seriously. Ask someone if they want to be destitute and famous, not many would say yes.

Fame and Fortune is not a recent desire. I believe the phrase was coined hundreds of years ago; it's just that even the poorest people are richer today than most people were back then and both sides of the media are vastly more accessible. Basically, our incredibly wealthy society has created a lot of people with nothing better to worry about.