Tue, Dec 29, 2020
Charting fame in the late noughties, the second episode looks at the ways in which different groups cashed in on what had become a worldwide obsession with fame and the ways in which intimacy was being leveraged, both willingly and unwillingly, to feed the celebrity machine. Young celebrities were commoditised, criticised and discarded by the people who profited from them, until a new breed of celeb emerged, ready to wrest control back for themselves. Some would leverage their celebrity, not for fame but for political capital.
Wed, Dec 30, 2020
A digital revolution was taking place, and celebrities were at its forefront. The old tabloid machinery was losing power, and the Milly Dowler scandal was another blow to an already declining industry. Celebrities who had relied on print media were making the move to the digital press, and those, like Katie Price, who were late to the online party, were coming unstuck. But there was a different form of TV celebrity in the making. What had started off as a repository for quirky cat videos now saw content creators emerge from their day jobs to become celebrity YouTubers like Dan Middleton and Louise Pentland, who have millions of followers and, in some cases, invitations to meet the Pope. Yet the irony was that no-one apart from the YouTubers and their followers knew who they were - this was the most significant generational split since rock 'n' roll, and these people were sidestepping the machinery which lined the traditional routes to fame. This subversion of normal routes of communication wasn't confined to bedroom broadcasters. Trump followed in Obama's footsteps and grasped the digital tools on hand, but went one step further - distilling entire political credos into short, blunt statements.
Thu, Dec 31, 2020
After a tumultuous 15 years for celebrities and the people who profit from them, by 2016 it seemed the celebrities were taking over. Charting the last five tumultuous years, this final episode takes us to the end of 2020 and interrogates the methods used by celebrities to get everything they want. Nothing was out of their reach. By now they had the keys to the White House and Buckingham Palace, they'd influenced the justice system and had come together in numbers to make a stand against abuses in their industry. Having learned how to use social media to sidestep the machinery which for so long offered their only right to reply, celebrities now had the tools to fight back and took charge of their own narrative on social media. They were now the masters of their own destiny.