I have my bawse face on while writing this blog post. You will just have to believe me. You see I am sick to the back teeth of having celebrities hijack every facet of life. While the rest of us experience mental and physical ailments, see children leave home and cry endlessly for months on end or suffer from the midlife crisis, none of this is a useful contribution to society in terms of sharing the rawness or coping strategies.
Our stories are nil point until a celebrity turns up. Then, shazam, you find yourself nodding along in agreement to the interview and almost forgetting that you got there first. The celebrity culture attaches to your brain and twists things around so you actually end up feeling validated for being a miserable old hag when your daughter packed her bags and left home because, well, that celebrity on Lorraine went through the same. Never mind that I had to hire a confidence coach to help me put myself back together again in the early days of being an empty nester.
The everyday person’s experience of milestones in life e.g menopause or empty nest syndrome is an non-validated experience till a famous face fronts our TV screens. I present Davina Mccall as my first case in point. The menopause? Davina made a whole documentary about it and, shazam (again), people started talking about it. That is, apart from the hundreds of women on social media who had been taking about the menopause for years and putting out coping strategies in their quest to help others.
Midlife crisis? Not an acknowledged thing till celebrities like Elizabeth Hurley make jocular references about it.
The everyday person’s life experience is always so frustratingly hijacked by celebrities. It’s not about appearing on TV, it’s about elevating everyday people’s experiences too.
So this is me turning the tables by hijacking a celebrity situation. I am jumping on the celebrity bandwagon shamelessly. I was graciously interviewed by Holly Willoughby and Phillip Schofield in March 2019 for being in a reality TV show. After more than a week of reading about ‘Queuegate’ I feel entitled to swoop in and make hay by posting a picture of me with Holly and Phil taken after my interview with them on their ‘This Morning’ show.
Call me petty or mad but doing this feels good. It’s a marker of my fleeting moment of fame when my story mattered too.
I wish Holly and Phil all the best. They were very nice and made my appearance an extremely memorable experience. ‘Queuegate’ doesn’t bother me. From a personal perspective, I have lost 3 members of my family within 3 months and have known grief and depression like never before. Post recovery, I am now endlessly worrying about the cost of living crisis which has ratcheted up given the pound’s fall. These are my woes.
In all seriousness the point of this post is to highlight that everyday stories matter and I do wish that the media wouldn’t seize on celebrities all the time to highlight rites of passage stories. Following the pandemic, there is a real appetite for human stories. People want to hear about the nobodies as well as the celebrities.
Here is another bandwagon picture:
