IT’S BEEN two months now and I’m clean. I admit that it took my new newsagent, who for some reason started delivering Gardeners’ World instead of Heat, to make me realise how bad things had got. But now I’m froth free. No more scanning pictures of Jennifer Aniston for signs of post-Brad stress and pretending it’s “for research”; no more examining the hard skin on Liz Hurley’s feet and feigning a medical interest; no more sniggering over Kerry and Brian’s post-divorce survival strategy (lose two stone, have a boob job, get drunk with the mates, throw up, gain two stone, etc) on the pretext that it’s all part of popular culture. These days I’m not doing anything trashier than Vanity Fair, and, obviously, that’s for the serious front-of-book pieces.
To my amazement, life hasn’t ended. And it may seem spooky, but without having watched a single episode of Celebrity Love Island, not even ten minutes while I pretended to be searching for that documentary about arable farming in Hungary on BBC Four, I have found that conversations have not dried up.
This may be because even without my weekly injection of the gossip mags I still appear to know that Tom Cruise loves someone called Katie Holmes, that Katie Holmes loves Tom Cruise and that the entire world wants to spew over the pair of them (how? Am I intravening Cruise bulletins in my sleep?). Far be it from me to decry trivia, which has always been a cornerstone of life’s pleasures. But these days, instead of being a micro activity, trivia has gone macro. There is no select club when it comes to salacious chitchat, no delicious feeling that you’re in on something you shouldn’t be; just the familiar suspicion that you are being spun again. And yes, the stars — and their tiresome antics — have got smaller. Frankly, I don’t give a damn if Charlotte Church has got drunk, Abi Titmuss has a beer gut or Teri Hatcher’s dying for a shag. Nor do I wish to see our political leaders popping up in EastEnders. Where’s the glamour, the — ahem — elegance? The language tells you everything: celebrity gossip is crude and played out. Desperate, indeed.
You think you can handle it in the beginning — a quick peek at Now over someone’s shoulder on the bus, a sneaky scan of Closer at the dentist’s. Before you know it you’re subscribing to PopBitch, reading Grazia on the train and giggling over Heat’s witty captions about Jodi Marsh’s health-endangering use of lipliner.
Oh, the energy we all expend. To adapt freely from Oscar Wilde (by the way, is he, or isn’t he wearing hair extensions in that tired old promo pic his people keep handing out?), “We’re all in the gutter, but 87 per cent of us are looking at the live feed of Big Brother.” Extraordinary though you may find this, even here, alongside the yellowing copies of Hansard, the offices of The Times are lavishly decorated with teetering piles of Hello! and OK! while the odd strangely pristine copy of The New Statesman is draped across an unoccupied desk. I blame it on that hydra-headed tramp called popular culture and a yearning to feel part of a community that chats daily over the global, virtual picket fence.
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To partake in smart metropolitan banter, it is no longer sufficient to keep on top of the West Lothian question, or to vocalise cogent views on the state of Nick Hytner’s autumn programme at the National. You must also to be up to speed on Britney’s “weird pregnancy cravings”, Jordan’s views on contemporary motherhood and Paris Hilton’s monumental sunglasses collection, or risk being classified with those desiccated old judges who didn’t know who Elvis or the Beatles were.
The thing is, if you go cold turkey on Heat you have to put all that other celeb stuff in the deep freeze. This frees up an awful lot of time to do other things, like buy books — and maybe even think about reading them. I’ve re-familiarised myself with Ian McEwan, Seamus Heaney and Ukrainian tractors. I’m thinking of swotting up on the public finance initiative next, delving into a bit of Stephen Hawking and Jean-Paul Sartre. After that, who knows? Maybe one day I’ll make it through a whole episode of Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time. Soon I foresee all those late night intellectual discussions I thought I’d have at university, before I realised that all anyone really wanted to talk about was how much scrumpy they could drink before they fell over. Fluent Italian beckons, as do regular trips to listen to debates. By next year, I hope to be able to go around muttering darkly about the state of civilisation while liberally employing phrases such as “I deplore” and “I despair”. In short, I plan to be French.
It’s not so much that froth is brain rotting but that you could cut off your head, scoop out your last living cell and still have enough intellectual matter to cope with the dross that passes for today’s tittle tattle. There’s no spice, no challenge.
I’ve spent much of my adult life waiting to feel grown-up and as clever as the clever people I was sure were looking out for the rest of us. But clever people also get it wrong. They cock up on economic policies, they mess up on education and, when it comes to the environment, they just don’t know. And they haven’t even got the excuse that they were too busy reading Heat.