5
With greater transparency comes greater accountability. As the media exploded, and the traditional respect for privacy and restrictions around reporting on authority began to melt, power fell victim to the truth. Celebrities, once revered beasts of glamour, found themselves exposed as the humans they actually were. Tom Cruise was a cult Scientologist, David Beckham was a suspected adulterer, Jude Law was a wife-swapper, Jennifer Aniston’s marriage was on the rocks. But it wasn’t just the A-listers who were morphing into tragic soap stars in front of our eyes – it was the highest levels of government and those who had once been utterly untouchable, the Royals.
The Monica Lewinsky affair in the States seems incredible even now in the excruciating level of its detail. It was perhaps the last deliberately careless act of an American presidency that relied on secrecy. Back in 1998 Bill Clinton underestimated the growing power of the internet, the scrutiny of an ever more powerful press, the advance of technology in collecting DNA evidence. It was also the moment popular culture took on politics. Clinton’s affair struck at just the moment when technology, science, the press and popular culture came together.
Rumours of the Lewinsky affair first surfaced on the Drudge Report, at that time a fairly insignificant politics blog. Picked up by the Washington Post, it was enough for Clinton to utter the eleven words that were later to bring him down: ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.’ An investigation was set up on the popular satirical sketch show Saturday Night Live. The internet hummed with rumour and speculation. The presidency of the United States was now reduced to a conversation around blowjobs and cigar dildos. And then investigators found DNA evidence on a blue dress. There was to be no cover-up this time. An independent investigator was appointed to ascertain whether the president had lied. Eleven months and acres of media coverage later, both parties were left shamed and broken.
Over here in the UK, we had already witnessed the unravelling of Charles and Diana’s marriage in similarly glorious detail. Charles found himself the victim of a leak of phone tapes, caught red-handed talking to his mistress and expressing a naïve (aristocratic? who knows!) desire to be her tampon. Pretty hard to command future kingly respect following that one. Diana played her hand as the wronged siren, finding lovers in surgical operating theatres and on yachts with the sons of Middle Eastern billionaires, turning up at openings in drop-dead gorgeous designer gear. Charles sought to rescue his credibility with TV confessionals but he was no match for his wife, who was much more in tune with the times.
It was the endgame, as we now know, and as the final acts of both events played out to a watching world, they ended in spectacular tragedy: impeachment for the president and the self-proclaimed prophecy of death for Diana. Diana’s ride around the Med on Dodi Fayed’s gin palaces ended in horror as the paparazzi chased her to her death on a midnight flit from the Ritz in Paris. The gradual erosion of authority that had kicked off the decade had ended it with shame for the British Royal Family and the American political establishment. Nobody believed anything any more about our inherited structures. The old ways were broken. But what did that leave us?
‘We are the first generation for whom the level of media scrutiny has made it impossible for anyone to make a move into political life,’ says Kris Thykier. ‘Until the election of Donald Trump last year, we have only had people in government who have been in politics all their lives – because unless you’re in politics all your life, you haven’t run a life that will allow you to be in politics. It may have been possible in the Sixties and Seventies, even the Eighties. But it stopped being possible in the Nineties.’ The life of JFK was no less colourful than Clinton’s – but that was no impediment, far from it. ‘When Clinton came to power in 1993, the “I didn’t inhale” line was a fudge, an indication of what was to come.’
What followed was two decades of scrutiny on our politicians that has possibly manacled some of the free-wheeling entrepreneurialism and colour that kept the political populous and discourse lively and diverse. While Generation X was busy ushering in a period of intense cultural change, the establishment failed to find an alternative route. The year 2016, however, saw all that turned on its head. Fed up with the status quo, fed up with a government that effects incremental change that seems only to be in the best interest of the elitist few, the British electorate voted themselves out of the European Union, and the American electorate voted in a man who was the antithesis of what we thought was acceptable in a politician. Dismissing liberalisation and globalisation in a great sweep, America now waits to see what kind of change a Trump presidency will bring. And Britain faces years of legal wrangling and paper-pushing as it attempts to disentangle itself from membership of the EU. Where change should and could happen is through politics – perhaps as we head into the latter years of this decade this is where we will begin to see it again. Because for a long time our attention was diverted from the political to the personal – it was, after all, much more fun. After the Clintons came the Osbournes. MTV’s reality series of life at home with a bonkers rock star began the era of ‘Reality’. Svengali of the series was Ozzy’s wife Sharon; portrayed as the long-suffering partner of a drug-addled, unfaithful star, it soon turned out that truth was stranger than fiction when tales of her defecating into a box and leaving it on people’s desks turned out to be leaked by none other than Sharon herself. She was manipulating a willing audience into believing her pantomime family was as off the scale as it appeared.
Hardly anyone who watched The Osbournes could name a single Ozzy song, but it didn’t matter. This lunatic rock musician, famous mostly for biting the head off a bat, now turned out to have a domestic life that was fascinating in its gross absurdity and yet also its mundanity. Celebrity rockers have marriage problems just like the rest of us, and they also have untidy houses and stroppy teenage children. It was a revelation.
‘The Kardashians have got nothing on the Osbournes,’ says Jamie East, founder of gossip site Holy Moly. ‘The Osbournes made us realise we didn’t like the gloss of the celebrity world. What we liked instead was watching Sharon call her husband a bastard and crying about his drugs or the time he threatened to shoot her. People could watch The Osbournes and think, “I had a similar argument with my husband. Okay, he didn’t earn a million quid and he’s not on cocaine but he spent our last 50 quid in the bookies and the kids didn’t have sandwiches in school for a week!” All of a sudden we realised celebrities left skid marks in the bowl just like the rest of us.’
East at this time was a lowly mole working at Sky TV. Celebrities and tasty morsels of gossip used to pass by his desk, and he needed somewhere to pass them on. That place was Popbitch. Starting out as an email newsletter of crude and rudimentary – yet dehabilitatingly hilarious – stories, it rode the wave of media from print to digital.
East saw the opportunity to set up a rival website, Holy Moly. ‘We were riding this wave of snark. Nick Denton was doing it overseas with Gawker, but our remit at Holy Moly was that we would always go where no one else would go – we were blunt.’
The industry that had sprung up around the celebrity class had plenty of leaks, and the really bad behaviour and filthiest secrets needed a platform – Holy Moly would publish where Popbitch wouldn’t dare. ‘It was the make-up artist dobbing in the presenter that asked them for a hand job, it was the runner that got the sack because a famous footballer didn’t like the way he spoke to them,’ says East. ‘It wasn’t about selling the stories, it was about setting the world to rights. The tagline of Holy Moly was “Being a celebrity is a ridiculous way to make a living and it is our job to point that out”. We had entered an era where Kerry Katona was making half a million off Iceland adverts, which is just nonsense. It was the backlash to that reality class – them trying to dress themselves up as having a right to be there. And us knocking them down a peg or two. It was punk.’
With such a willing and broad network of sources, Holy Moly soon had all the best stories. ‘We had a great story about [famous Hollywood actor who everyone knows is gay],’ relates East. ‘He used to go and pull men at Pacha in Ibiza when he was out there filming. He got his special-effects men to make him this mask, and he would go and pull men wearing them. But he got too brave, and started fucking this man in a foam party and all the latex started melting. So this guy turns round and sees over his shoulder this melted face, rips the mask off, reveals [famous actor], and he’s like WTF!’ Needless to say, the story found its way back.
Holy Moly also broke the Madonna divorce story. ‘An ex-neighbour was sat in a beer garden on a table next to a confidant of Guy Ritchie. This guy was a bit pissed and shooting his mouth off,’ says East, illustrating perfectly how the internet had become the digital version of the neighbour’s garden fence. ‘So that night I went back, and hit the button. Everybody called me out on it – the Sun, the News of the World, the Mirror, Madonna’s record company, Warners, her PR who threatened to have my business closed down. I just dug my heels in and turned my phone off, and within a week they’d announced it. That was Holy Moly’s crowning glory.’
What had happened to us, that this was now everything we wanted to hear? The dirtier and more disgusting the better, it seemed. ‘The dotcom boom had just gone bust, people were skint and miserable and wanted to be made to feel better,’ says East. ‘In previous decades we enjoyed rags to riches stories – a period where you revelled in other people’s success. Faye Dunaway, Marilyn Monroe, Lawrence of Arabia – you wanted to be soaked up in their majesty, you wanted Omar Sharif to be a multi-millionaire and a masterful lover and you went to bed dreaming of that and that was your escape. The thing that changed was that people thought, “Fuck you – what gives you the right to be actually a terrible actor, on the front page of all those magazines, and earn all that money? You’re no better than me!”’
As the role of celebrities went from aspiration to identification to victimisation, intrusion began. We didn’t want glamour any more, we wanted flaws. Heat magazine shamed girls’ bodies for post-pregnancy weight, dramatic weight loss or cellulite. In came Big Brother, where members of the public were put under a microscope in a live televised experiment of what would happen if you locked unhinged people up in a house for a month. These unknowns became celebrities as the Sun, Mirror and weekly magazines found a new source of stories and everything evolved again.
‘It was now achievable. Celebrity was something that anyone could achieve and somehow being a celebrity was a goal in itself,’ continues Thykier. ‘That fame as a commodity could be monetised, definitely knocked things forward. The notion of fame was fame.’
‘It changed really quickly – and then it became a bit of a firefight,’ says East. ‘Where I come from in Derby, people in pubs call people a “cunt”. So we launched “Cunts Corner”, and in 48 hours it just took off. It got up to 10,000 submissions a day at one point, of people calling famous people a cunt: “Richard Madeley’s a cunt. That Ali G impression? What a cunt!” They ranged from naff, inarticulate entries to diatribes that were sort of Partridge-esque: “Nick Owen from Central TV opened our school fete in 1982 and knocked my ice cream out of my hand. You cunt!” It was a free for all – “Paul McCartney is a cunt because he once told my mum to get out of his way,” or “Jeremy Clarkson is a cunt because he cut me off on the A38 in 1987”; “The guy from the Bostik advert, he’s a cunt.” We were the spleen for the UK to vent, and there was no holds barred. The celebrity gossip was great but it was very cliquey, it brought very small numbers in. Cunts Corner was for everyone.’
It was, if you like, the beginning of trolling. Now your next-door neighbour could have their say, the guy in the park could make his voice heard, the checkout girl had a public platform. Soon there would be pictures and video, blogs and vlogs – soon the bloggers and vloggers would become the celebrities themselves. But before that, we had to level the playing field. Our celebrities, who had started out as inaccessible, fantastical depictions of talent and glamour, could not survive the scrutiny of the pulsing, heaving, growing media. Cigars, tampons and cellulite had them down.