The cult of celebrity is one
of those things that I am quite happy to be ignorant of a lot of the time, I could probably watch
ITV2 shows all day long (if I had a gun to my head) and not recognise a single
person with their own fly-on-the-wall documentary series. The death of a famous
person is something that has only affected me on a handful of occasions; John
Peel, Jim Henson, Ronnie Barker, Eric Sykes, and Joe Strummer come to mind as
deaths that have upset me.
Peaches Geldof’s name was
perhaps only on my radar because of her famous surname, but I can’t say that I
paid any attention to her besides that. I’m not entirely sure what it was that
she did, or if indeed she did anything. The news reports have referred to her
as a writer but I can’t pretend to know what she has written, or if she really
was a writer. On one level it is strange to think that I have something in
common with someone who has had no effect on my life at all.
I remember reading The Autobiography by Paula Yates and finding out about her
life and the difficult upbringing she had. I was a big fan of Paula Yates as I
think I admired her attitude of simply not giving a shit. It is fair to say
that Bob Geldof never really got over losing her to Michael Hutchence, and it
is admirable that he adopted the child that she had with Hutchence. Peaches
Geldof lost her mother when she was eleven years old, old enough to remember it
clearly and for it to have an effect on her. She’s had a period of wild living
but had settled down and motherhood had, in her own words, calmed down to a
life devoted to her children. It is terrible news that those two children, one
is less than a year old, will grow up without a mother. What was nice to see
though, especially in this rather nasty time where people sit at computers
being nasty to people for no reason, is how nicely social media treated the
news. Maybe I only follow nice people, but I didn’t see a single cuntish remark
or speculation about her, just heartfelt messages of support from strangers, wishing
the Geldof family well.
When Princess Diana was killed
in 1997, the outpouring of grief (which is largely responsible for opening
people up emotionally in a way we didn’t behave before) completely overshadowed
the death of Mother Teresa five days later, rendering Elton John’s tribute
single ‘Sandals In The Bin’ a commercial flop. A similar thing happened today
while everyone was paying tribute to Peaches Geldof, legendary actor Mickey
Rooney passed away at the age of 93. His death didn’t make such a dent in the
news, which is sad but at the same time understandable. Aside from a handful of
cameo roles he hadn’t worked properly for a number of years so wasn’t exactly a
major celebrity player. When I think of him the first image in my head is the
racist (although perfectly acceptable at the time I imagine) portrayal of a Chinese
man in Breakfast at Tiffany’s and I struggle
with anything else. The films he made with Judy Garland used to be a fairly
regular Saturday afternoon fixture on television but sadly this isn’t the case
anymore. I watched a few YouTube clips of the two of them together and wondered
why these films aren’t better known today. There are hundreds of television
channels these days that mostly fill their schedules with rubbish, so why isn’t
there room for quality like that? The same question applies to the films of
Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chaplin, The Three Stooges and too many other names
to list. If Mickey Rooney had died forty years ago I’m sure that Hollywood
would have reacted in a much bigger way to the loss, rather than relegating it
to a passage halfway into the newspaper.
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