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Twittering on With Angela Kelly Celebrities? Get them out of here! Don’t you find the word “celebrity” extremely over-used these days? When I was younger, I’m sure that celebrity really meant something. It was someone with Sir or Lady in front of their name, a war hero like Douglas Bader or General Montgomery or an American film star who was so far away from our reality as to be living on another planet. People who appeared on TV were “entertainers”. Quite a different category. They were famous for being funny or being fine actors or for being an important presenter.
TOM JONES
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Sports people were famous for what they did and we admired them for it. If they got a honour as a result, that just added to their fame and our admiration. I don’t remember hearing the word “celebrity” much at all.
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Nothing too surprising about that, I suppose, except that new research shows that we are definitely a fearful nation when it comes to our health and wellbeing. For example, almost a quarter of Brits questioned feared the doctor’s waiting room and 34% confessed to a fear of the dentist’s chair. Perhaps the most unlikely statistic is that 17% admitted that visiting the optician’s made them nervous.
Reality TV show “stars” – that’s just ordinary people who are basically show-offs – are now celebrities and have joined the acclaimed bunch we are supposed to look up to and copy. The sad thing, of course, is that many younger people in particular do look up to these people, they do emulate them, wear what they wear, act as they act.
The top fear-prompter was discovery of a previously unknown health problem; 69% felt frightened about that. Maybe that, along with 22% having had a previous bad experience, explains the statistic that 79% hesitate to seek medical advice.
And if we simply reject that standard, the genuine celebrities – the really worthwhile people who have earned their fame in some amazing way – will start to surface and make that category great again.
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We Brits apparently live in fear of the doctor’s waiting room or the dentist’s chair.
Fast-forward to 2017 and you can’t move for so-called celebrities. Every actor or actress in a TV soap qualifies for the name and the natural respect that goes with it – even if they were only in Emmerdale for three episodes.
I really think we need to re-think our values on what we classify as a “celebrity” because we have definitely devalued the coinage. Personally, I don’t want to either look like or have the lifestyle of Kim Kardashian or even have the online followers of the so-called “social influencers” who also now qualify as celebrities.
JAMES MARTIN'S
Ask the expert not the internet
The daft thing is that we know that seeing an expert makes sense. We know that we should go to the doctor, dentist or optician if there’s a niggling health worry yet we prolong the agony by ignoring it. I’m always shocked, for example, by the number of women who miss their mammogram appointment when it’s just a simple procedure and it can pick up rogue cells so early. I know it’s not something you’d ever do for fun but it’s quick, uncomfortable rather than painful, and it can be a life-saver. It would be interesting to see how we compare in this area with other countries.
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