Paul Thomas: Fame game must be played both ways

Andy Warhol's dictum that in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes has long since overtaken Henry Ford's "History is bunk" as the war cry of American cultural imperialism.

"Fifteen minutes of fame" is a short-hand term for the celebrity culture that has pervaded the Western World and which is based on the premise that not only does everyone want to be famous, these days everyone can be famous.

It needs to be said straightaway that "fame" and "celebrity" are increasingly loose terms and neither are what they used to be. It wasn't always the case that you could be famous for being famous; once upon a time you actually had to do or achieve something.

Last weekend's canvas magazine had a story about pets which included a section on celebrity pets. The celebrities in question were three actors and two reporters. This quintet have three things in common, apart from the fact that I've never heard of them: they're photogenic, they don't look a day over 25 and they're on TV.

One's first instinct is to harrumph and dismiss the whole exercise as yet another example of contemporary magazine journalism's tendency to inflate and trivialise, often simultaneously. On closer consideration, though, one's forced to concede that the magazine has a point: what is celebrity in its modern manifestation but having your photograph in the print media and your image on TV on a regular basis?

Some years ago I was the hired hand on All Black John Kirwan's autobiography. Kirwan was New Zealand rugby's brightest star but despite his on-field exploits and iconic status in our national game, it wasn't until he fronted a TV advertising campaign (for bananas) that he had to get used to being recognised and button-holed in the street.

Before that he'd had the disconcerting experience of sitting anonymously in a bar or restaurant and overhearing people he'd never set eyes on talk about John Kirwan as if he was their best mate or partner in a recent one-night stand.

The desire to make a name for oneself - rather than to excel or contribute - has infiltrated all walks of life. How else to explain the fact that cricket umpires can no longer give a batsman out by raising their finger in an understated, unfussy way, as umpires have done for 100-odd years?

Now they all have to have their trademark, the distinctive signal that sets them apart. Our very own Billy Bowden is, of course, a trailblazer here but his colleagues are waking up to the fact that Billy's look-at-me quirkiness hasn't done his career any harm.

The downside of celebrity is that you become public property and therefore can't control the timing and circumstances of your exposure.

The media is sometimes accused of building people up in order to cut them down to size.

This can probably be traced back to the Anglo-Canadian press baron Lord Beaverbrook, the Rupert Murdoch of his day, who told Rudyard Kipling that: "What I want is power. Kiss 'em one day and kick 'em the next."

(This brazen declaration caused Kipling to conclude that the press exercised power without responsibility, "the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages".)

In New Zealand we call this the tall poppy syndrome.

While some of the more feral British tabloids and US scandal-sheets like the National Enquirer do take an unholy delight in helping high-fliers to crash and burn, the mainstream media is far less proactive. It simply works on the premise that celebrities are newsworthy, whether they're standing on the red carpet clutching an Oscar or disgracing themselves.

It's news when Lee Tamahori goes off to Hollywood and gets the gig to direct the new Bond movie just as it's news when he's arrested for soliciting.

The tall poppy syndrome is a smokescreen concealing the fact that many of those who do very well out of the fame game want to have it both ways. They happily use the media to develop their profile, advance their careers, bump up their asking price, plug their films and records and products and portray themselves as saviours of a political party or country. Some of them even hawk their wedding photos or baby snaps.

But then when they slip up - when they're discovered in bed with a rent boy or when the fairytale marriage turns out to be a publicity stunt that's outlived its usefulness or when the bouncing baby grows up to be a shop-lifter or a drug-user - they demand that the media averts its gaze.

They cry invasion of privacy and invoke the tall poppy syndrome.

Obviously some of these people are stupid or hypocritical or both. But most of them have fallen into the fame trap which is to believe that they're extraordinary individuals and therefore not subject to the rules and realities that govern the rest of us.

When that happens they conveniently forget that they couldn't have got where they are today without the media and, secondly, that when they set off down the yellow brick road they effectively entered into a Faustian pact.

And they obviously never bothered to find out why fame is sometimes referred to as the Bitch Goddess.