Ignorance of I'm A Celeb critics just drives me wild
TELEVISION Stupidity lies behind all the easy jibes, writes Declan Lynch
In the coming days and weeks, you will hear members of the ruling class on various radio shows, pouring scorn on I'm A Celebrity...
Their response to this show is one of the many interesting things about it, and it usually takes one of two forms. They either claim that they don't watch it, but they still know it's bad; or they come out with what they clearly think is the most clever observation -- "Who are these people ? I've never heard of any of them."
Now the first response is the more valid of the two. Personally, I have often been able to tell that something is bad without actually seeing it. I don't believe, for example, that you'd actually have to watch a bout of professional wrestling, to know that it's not for you. Some sort of a sixth sense just tells you these things.
In fact, that other-wordly intuition not only tells you that something is bad, it can even tell you how bad it is.
But the "who-are-these-people?" line, is more problematic. When you try that one, you assume that it automatically marks you out a person of taste, who has more important things in his head than these ridiculous celebs.
But in fact, it is doing the opposite, confirming you as a person of no taste. Because a person of taste would not need to employ such a dubious device, to prove his credentials with one easy jibe. And it is worse than that.
I checked around, and most people I spoke to, had heard of at least two of this year's I'm A Celebrity... contestants.
Not the same two in every case, but two was the average, rising to three and even four, in my case.
I had heard of Rodney Marsh, Lynne Franks and Cerys Matthews. I'd also heard of Malcolm McLaren, who chickened out of it. And so had my wife.
So I would suggest that if some member of the ruling class -- a top solicitor, or a PR consultant, or any sort of a consultant, claims never to have heard of any of these people, then they shouldn't be boasting about it. Because inadvertently, they're actually admitting to an extreme and quite disgraceful level of ignorance of the world around them.
They are also displaying a form of deep stupidity. Because they are revealing that they have failed to grasp something which is obvious even to the least-educated viewers. Yes, even the most damaged individuals drugged out of their skulls have an instinctive understanding of the fact that it doesn't actually matter if the viewer has heard of the celebrity. What matters here is that the celebrity thinks the viewer has heard of them.
This is the secret, known to the many but not to the few, who usually end up on the radio pontificating uselessly on these matters. As long as the celebrities think that they're celebrities, then this most compelling of light entertainments can proceed.
After all, you probably haven't heard of various top solicitors or consultants or media drones who find their way onto the panel of Questions and Answers, but that's apparently all right.
And do these people not even realise that Ant and Dec are actually funny ? Certainly, on the jokes front, they are operating at a standard which is vastly more sophisticated than anything heard on Q&A since its inception. All of which explains why all of Ireland loves I'm A Celebrity... and appreciates its achievement even more in the light of the recent RTE debacle, Celebrities Go Wild.
Now, not only do we know that it's good, we know just how good it is.
FOR a long time we have known about middle-class people in Ireland taking drugs. I'm sure that this newspaper has been running features about it for the past 18 years or so, but I suppose that for official purposes, that doesn't count.
So when RTE comes along with Justine Delaney-Wilson's High Society, and tries to tell us these things, our reaction is one of total stupefaction.
Gambling, of course, is the hot addiction of our time, so roughly by the year 2020, they'll be all over that one like a cheap suit.
THE John Crown/Late Late Show scandal also brought me back to various radio shows on which I have appeared, which would be about to start when suddenly the phone would ring. It would be a PR consultant insisting that some item in the newspaper article was all wrong, and advising that it would be a really bad idea to repeat this terrible lie on the air.
It worked nine times out of 10.
We don't know exactly what happened on the night Professor Crown was bumped, but we have a vague idea why it was Crown who was bumped, and not, say, Eamonn Dunphy.
Three hours before Late Late lift-off, do you want to break the bad news to Dunphy, or to Crown?
Tough call.
