Les Guignols d’Info is one of the great pleasures, among the few, of French television. They are there in the best of Spitting Image tradition and all other spinoffs worldwide. Whilst they appear to mainly focus on a parody of the political word, it is far more broadly speaking the world of personality. That is what I am wondering about.
Are we really so bored that the latest news about Kim Kardashian being pregnant really means a thing to anybody? Well, the media seem to think so. So they pack columns, screen time, internet pages and probably hot air balloons with all these world stopping snippets for us all to savour. Yippee. Errrr! Why? What do any of us get out of it? Ms Kardashian is mainly famous for being famous and most of her other ventures in acting, modelling or fashion design are not at all world moving. But she is very rich and does what she does, which appears to be very little in terms of what good, upstanding working people do. I am not picking on her though. Oh no, I am just using her as an example, there are many more. We probably do not need their names, they have already been thrust in front of our faces by their publicists and the media who lack more important things to report like wars, natural disasters, the environment…
As ever, here in France we probably know exactly what time of which day Johnny Hallyday cut his toenails, exactly what length they were and the colour of socks he then put on before donning his carpet slippers. In fact, he has done very little of note for decades bar being a tax and whatever else exile who occasionally pops back into France to be noticed – little else. At present a chap called Depardieu who does not like paying tax, well what he considers too much anyway, and spends a lot of time being drunk and irritating is getting the limelight, before he pushes off to Belgium once and for all. I exaggerate a little perhaps, not much. Just embellish a few details to make it slightly more interesting. Yawn!!
Why, oh why do we care? Actually, do we care? There appear to be many of them. We could do it country by country. In each of those countries these ‘personalities’ are imagined to be enormously important international names. In point of fact, we usually do not know who or what they, nor care either. The internationally well known ones are no better. Some had a hit record in 1972 or a box office smash movie in 1964 and are still riding the crest of that ripple. Many of these people do absolutely nothing except swanning around being rich and either doing things of no consequence or the opposite, such as making porno films that are put on the Web or hitting people, in any case probably ending up in court to be enriched by massive and disproportion settlements or paying out to the victims of their excesses similarly.
How many SFN members can live up to such exemplary standards? Stand up and be counted people, give us materials for our own SFN gossip column. Hmmm, perhaps not, that’s not what this is all about. Give me a network with real people any day, however if any of you does have an important announcement such as having brushed your teeth, I am sure we shall all be enthralled to read it here. Happy New Year!