ACCORDING to a recent survey, 85 per cent of the nation’s teenage girls want to be Paris Hilton when they grow up. Or Katie Price. Or anyone, just so long as they end up in Heat magazine, with a pretty frock and a nice handbag. No one wants to cure cancer or till the soil or make electricity from trees. They just want to be famous. That’s because they think all famous people live in mansions, quaff champagne for breakfast, and feast on peach and peacock till someone calls round with a free Ferrari. I suspect it’s not really like that, though. First of all, you will lose all your friends because they will be jealous of the money the papers say you’re making. And then you will lose your mind. Priory stay ... Susan Boyle It is a fact that, with the possible exception of Moira Stewart, all celebrities are mad. They don’t know they are mad in the same way that performing monkeys at the zoo don’t know they are monkeys. But they are. We saw this with Susan Boyle. The instant she became famous, she started shouting at policemen and going to The Priory. Where she will be surrounded by other “stars” who became famous to get attention, then can’t cope when it arrives. As an anonymous person, you can go to your father’s funeral and grieve in peace. When you are John Cleese, people will pester you for an autograph. And they won’t ever go away. Child having an operation? Having a pee at the urinals? Getting an OBE? Doesn’t matter. There will always be some snot-nosed kid with a wonky biro and no manners demanding you write your name down on a glossy pamphlet. Small wonder that Johnny Morris, the lovable old animal man on television, told me, aged four, to bugger off when I asked for his autograph. Signing autographs takes up ten per cent of a famous person’s day. The rest is spent gurning into someone’s mobile phone while his friend faffs about with the controls for ten hours before eventually taking a picture of their own nose. Meanwhile, everyone you meet at work will be a sycophant who will imagine that because you were “spotted” in Heat magazine last week, you’ve completely forgotten how to hail a cab, make a phone call or even breathe out after breathing in. So he’ll try to do everything for you. This, I’m sure, would be fun for five minutes. But a bore on the bog. You may imagine that if you are famous, you will easily get a table at your favourite restaurant. True. But since your favourite restaurant is likely to be an Indian round the corner, you will quickly realise that you don’t need to be famous to get in there. But that because you are famous, all the food you order will come with some extra ingredients. Bogeys. Wee. That sort of thing. Of course, you imagine that you will be dining all the time with Ben Affleck. But you won’t. Once a year, at an awards ceremony, you might meet Howard from the Halifax, or Piers Morgan. But that’ll be about it. The rest of the time, you’ll be at the shops like everyone else, buying a TV dinner. Except it’ll take hours because you’ll have to sign the cashier’s copy of Heat and pose for 15 minutes while her mate takes a picture of his own eye. Soon, after about a day, you will become very weary with all this. You will crave the greatest gift God bestowed on humanity: Anonymity. You will feel like a freak, like a burns victim, like you are odd. But you cannot sell fame. It’s like herpes. It’ll never go away. Wonky Susan Boyle could live on Rockall for the next ten years but as soon as she comes back to Scotland, someone will be waiting with a phone camera they don’t know how to use. This constant attention will soon make you bad-tempered, which means your fans will then hate you as much as your former friends. Then one day you’ll come out of a urinal having failed to shake the old fella properly. The paps will get a pic of your damp patch and that’ll be the image etched for ever on the public consciousness. You — the man with the wonky prostate. Right up to the moment when you accidentally have sex with a goat. Or a girl sells the pictures of your tiny gentleman’s zone to the internet. And then your family will hate you as well. You’ll be a laughing stock. You’ll get no work. You’ll have no money and every Christmas your kids will buy you nothing but a packet of incontipanties. If that’s what you want, go ahead. Join Big Brother. Sign up for the next X Factor. Find a talent to impress Amanda Holden. Be the next Susan Boyle. If you don’t fancy it, might I suggest a better goal. Try to be a doctor instead.
