This Is Your Life (36 page)

‘Not you – Mum. When did you get your navel pierced?'

‘I thought you'd like it.'

‘Urgh, no. It's awful.'

Nancy pulled her T-shirt down to cover her midriff and we sat up in bed sipping the tea, and flicking through the Sunday papers.

‘Yuk! What is Kylie wearing!' said Nancy.

‘Yeah, but look at Mel Gibson. He's put on weight, hasn't he?'

Eventually I chucked the papers to the side and stared at the ceiling. I think I had disappeared into this mystery tour hoping that I would earn the love and respect of the people I knew by becoming somebody special for all the people that I didn't. At last I no longer craved the love of millions of strangers, now that I was confident I had the real love of just one person right beside me. Because although you can get a certain type of instant synthetic love from an audience, it's not the dependable, forgiving, deep-rooted love that we all really need.

You can't leave your pants on the floor in front of an audience. You can't sit on the toilet and casually chat about what sort of day they had as your fans brush their teeth before bed. You can't be grumpy and monosyllabic with an audience and expect them to work out why you're sulking. You can't row and make up with the general public. You can't take them a cup of tea on Sunday morning and say sorry and lie in bed and chat about nothing for a bit. You can't have a sexual relationship with all your fans, even if a few rock stars might have attempted it. In any case, the public don't really love
you
, they love an invented image of you and a lifestyle they
fantasize about having for themselves.
Hello!
magazine doesn't feature photographs of celebrities' homes with all last night's washing-up piled high around the sink, with an unshaven Julio Iglesias yawning and staggering into the kitchen with his willy swinging about under the crumpled T-shirt he wears in bed. You cannot be yourself to the public, and so even if you were adored by millions, you would still feel empty and hollow. There can't be anything lonelier than getting that much phoney love.

Nancy had shown me that there were greater riches in this life than the overvalued currency of celebrity. Every human being is a hero in one way or another, whether it is bringing up a kid on your own or helping Edna Moore understand the prices in the Mr One Pound shop. That is what she had shown us all when she organized that haphazard night of nostalgic tributes in the back room of a pub. It was such an inspired idea. It made me think that everyone deserved a night like that just once in their life. In fact, that would make a really good television programme: a
This Is Your Life
for the common man. I'm sure she wouldn't mind me offering that idea into the BBC: a weekly entertainment show that made heroes out of ordinary people and proved you don't need to be famous to be special.

I decided I should send it in because it was a message that needed to be heard; a programme like that might become the antidote to the celebrity-obsessed culture that was distorting what really mattered in this world. I was going to send it in because it was time some of the real heroes of our society got some credit. I was going to send it in because people had to see that celebrities aren't important;
people
are important.

And anyway, you never know, I thought. They might even let me present it. . .

Thanks are due to Bill Scott-Kerr, Georgia Garrett, Mark Burton, Pete Sinclair, John McNally and, most of all, Jackie O'Farrell. With apologies to the real Betty, a slightly less mad Border collie.

JO'F 2002