Worshipping False Idols

I was chatting to the local vicar recently (she’s loud, round and totally nuts – you’d like her) and she was waxing lyrical about meeting the Archbishop of Canterbury who had graced this remote little English marsh with a visit. The vicar confessed to having a totally inappropriate and passionate crush on His Grace for years, so meeting her icon was her dream come true.

"So how did it feel?" I asked her? She replied that actually she was astounded as to how utterly normal he was. Underneath the glamour and pomp of the English Anglican High Church, when she finally met him she discovered that he was surprisingly a very humble man, ordinary in every way and as flawed as everyone else.

She’s right of course. Rich and I have come across a fair few “celebs” over the years, as no doubt you all have too. The “icons” we have met are hot-stuff in their fields: mainly finance, law and nutrition, I’m afraid, so you probably won’t know them anyway. A few were numpties because their egos had run away with them (reality t.v. stars and Gordon Brown being obvious examples – Rich met him at a local business pow-wow years ago and confirmed that he really is as much a total prat in person as he is on t.v.) but the majority were just regular people, as normal and screwed up as you or I. Most were mildly embarrassed by their infamy and saw it as a sort of necessary evil, and pretty much all of them disliked sycophancy and preferred normal conversations on an equal footing. They shunned the general public where possible because they felt that they were always expected to be something that they were not.

So when I come across a model who is hungry for fame and celebrity, or when I talk to the teenage girls at my teenage son’s school who are completely and utterly obsessed with the celebrity culture, I always sigh in silent sympathy for these “icons” they worship.

I’m not a big fan of icon’s, I’m afraid. A “celeb” pumped up to icon-status is nothing more than a false idol who has been created and harassed by a fame-obsessed modern media which is itself hungry for money and notoriety. If you talk to many of these “stars” yourself, without all the fawning and hero worship, then you’ll find that there is nothing particularly magical or glamorous about them. They are just regular people who have a job to do and who make mistakes like the rest of us. They are also very often lonely people who guard their private lives as zealously as the Beefeaters guard the Crown Jewels. Much of their precious free time is spent hiding from the outside world, although in actual fact they’d probably like nothing better than a cuppa and a chat, just as long as you treat them like real people.

If you don’t believe me then you should try emailing or tweeting your icon one day. You’d be surprised at how often they reply. And if you ever get to meet them in person, please don’t fawn and slobber (unless it’s Uncle Gordy – he likes it.) Talk to them as normally as you would if you were talking to me. Then you might possibly catch a glimpse of the real person under the public persona and you’ll realise that like the media, we too have a responsibility not to put these poor people on a pedestal.

We have a duty to these celebs (whether actors, scientists, models, politicians or archbishops) to remember our humanity and respect them as the ordinary human beings they are, instead of expecting them to be something which exists only in our imagination.

other 1308

Image is of local church. Not a nude - sorry. Can't put archbishops, vicars and nekkid laydeez in the same post. I do have a conscience, you know...