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I'm a Celebrity - Worship!Dateline: 18th May, 2003One in three people in Britain is suffering from Celebrity Worship Syndrome after becoming obsessed with their screen idol: so says research from the Psychology department of the University of Leicester, published last week. One in four of the 700 respondents aged between 18 and 60 was so obsessed with their idol that it affected their daily life. An interesting sidelight on last week's feature! The worst "sufferers" admitted that they would lie, steal or worse if the object of their admiration asked them to do so. Clearly we are talking about pathological levels of obsession here, the kind of thing which leads to stalking. I can understand teenagers' obsessions with their idols - David Beckham is the focus of worship of many teenage boys I know and I have one former student (a teenage girl) who admits to worshipping Jason Durr (of the TV series Heartbeat) - but these people were adults, some as old as sixty! Perhaps - and I am merely speculating here - they feel their own lives are so mundane that they need some connection to glamour. What the research calls "intermediate levels" of the syndrome are characterised by the sufferers' feeling that they have some kind of bond with the object of their worship. They feel, perhaps, that they "know" them and it is but a short step from there to feeling that they are known by them in return. Sports, film and TV stars are the most common recipients of this kind of worship, but even Tony Blair was mentioned as an object of desire! It strikes me that this is just one - quite frightening, I think - aspect of our society's obsession with celebrity. It explains the popularity of TV shows such as I'm a Celebrity - Get Me Out of Here! and why so many people are willing to take part in programmes such as Big Brother. Celebrity, being the object of admiration of others, or even just being known by others, is seen as a desirable thing in itself. It lies, I suspect, behind graffiti, putting one's "tag" - one's identity - where it can be seen by thousands of people. There was a time when people defined themselves by what they did, by their jobs. Look at that beautiful car - I made that! Your houses are heated by the coal I dug. I built the house in which you live. Now so many people are out of work and many of those in work feel that they are faceless parts of an automatic process, a machine. TV and film show us that there is a glamorous world in which we have no part and so we must find some way of making our lives seem important. This sense of feeling that we are of no importance lies behind so much antisocial behaviour: I am not intellectual, I am not glamorous, I am not rich and famous, but I am strong and can beat people up - that's what I do. Have we moved too far away from theatre? from what this website is about? Possibly, but perhaps we should wonder just why we have so deep an interest in this world of make-believe. Articles Indices:
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