Greg Jenner On The History Of Celebrity

Greg Jenner On The History Of Celebrity | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra

"‘I sat down, started reading, started researching. A year and a half later, still couldn't find anyone who’d actually defined it properly in a way that was cohesive and agreed with the next person. So I've had to come up with my own definition, which is obviously quite, quite daunting, quite scary, because you suddenly think, oh, no, I'm, I'm making an argument. I'm not used to making arguments.

So my definition of celebrity is based on a five point checklist, five criteria. A celebrity is someone who is known to strangers. But the stranger, the strangers know who they are, but they don't know who the strangers are. So that's called parasocial intimacy. When you've got a one way, intimacy. They have to be unique. They've got to have a unique personality, something about them that's distinctive and recognizable and iconic. They have to be, have their fame spread through the mass media. So they need to be appearing in newspapers and blogs and telly and radio when it comes to stuff like that. They need to have a private life that is a fascination to the public. So it's not enough for them to be professionally interesting.

So my argument is that Sir David Attenborough is not a celebrity... It is it is very controversial. And I'm sure it's a thing that people will push back on. But I would argue that he is not a celebrity. He is renowned, which is a slightly subtly different category’

‘Because people are interested in his work, but not his life.’

‘Exactly. I don't know anything about his life. I don't know if he's got children. I don't know his marital status. I don't know what car he drives, where he holidays. But I know an enormous amount about his career. So that to me is not celebrity because the personal life has not played a part in why we care about him.

And the fifth thing, perhaps the most important thing of all is the celebrity requires a commercial marketplace based on the celebrity’s fame, and the fact that people want to know about their private life creates, basically a micro economy where other people can make money from them… my argument would be that celebrity begins in the early 1700s. And there are several reasons for that.

The most important really is that you get in Britain or France, you get this sudden surge in what's called the public sphere… this sudden arrival of people realizing that they're part of a wider society and they're wanting to join in. And so it's a kind of aspirational middle class. It's a literate or semi literate society. People wanting to join in with wider discussion. And Habermas said that this was a sort of a learned highbrow kind of thing. People wanted to understand politics and trade and finances. Actually, when we look at what people are interested in, they're interested in sex and scandal and rumour and gossip and who's dating who and what, you know what new play is bombing at the theater and no one's liking it and which actor is, had a sort of scandalous falling out or who's been fighting a duel'...

‘We do have a tendency and the media has a tendency to apply very binary morals, to our celebrities.’

‘Yeah. And it's a thing that happens on twitter at the moment, and this sort of notion that when we discover someone, we can often sort of go, oh, they’re the greatest person ever. They're amazing. They're beautiful, they're glamorous, we love them. They're the perfect, and then someone will uncover tweets. And suddenly it turns out that they're homophobic or they're racist or they're offensive, and then they get demonized and turned into a villain. And that has been happening for centuries. It's been happening since the 1700s at least, perhaps earlier.

Basically, what happens is you get celebrities who are forged into heroes because people need heroes. They need these role models. They need these icons, they need rallying figures. So I talk in the book about people like George Washington, who was turned into a celebrity superhero, as the President. And then his, his sort of brand was mythologized, and by the end of his life, and in biographies they would start to say things like he never lied as a child, you know, he, you know, he cut down an apple tree and he refused it, and of course he did, what you talking about? But he was turned into a saint. And so that would happen to celebrities. They'd be turned into these perfect icons.

Happened to Florence Nightingale, and she hated being famous. She absolutely hated that fame arrived on her doorstep, even though it's actually in many ways a very positive, welcoming, fame. She was heroic, people wrote about her, they named race horses after her, they named ships after her and pubs. People named their daughters Florence, which happened quite a lot with celebrities as well. It's a common thing in the 1700s to name your daughter after a celebrity or your son, but she hated being famous, and she really retreated from it"