In the scintillating, constantly-changing, tabloid-sponsored, obsession-inducing world of celebrity I’m about as tuned out as a cell phone in a coal mine. To be honest, this state of sublime uselessness is one that I’m pleased to inhabit and one in which I intend to reside for the rest of my days. There are many subjects about which I should know more, and shame on me for my lack of knowledge. Celebrity-spotting is not one of them.
Today – a wet and dreary Tuesday with a blank page in my diary – I decided to test myself in a kind of Mastermind challenge on the subject of celebrity. The questions were set, as it were, by the Femail Today gossip column on the Daily Mail website. I would run down the column, which comprises about forty items on various celebrities – in some cases celebrity couples – and record how many I could identify. I devised in ascending order of familiarity, three celebrity categories: first, those who are so famous that even I’ve heard of them; those whose names do no more than ring a faint bell; and those whose names escape me entirely. The results were instructive.
In the ‘famous’ category – which included such obvious luminaries as Bill and Hillary Clinton, the Beckhams, Kate Winslet and Nigella Lawson – there were thirteen items. In the ‘faint-bell’ group there were five, a small enough number to allow me to list them: Kim Kardashian, Lindsay Lohan, Anne Hathaway, Milla Jovovich and Megan Fox. In the ‘totally unknown’ there were nineteen entries. They included – I’ll randomly name a few so that you can gauge the level of my ignorance – Kim Humphries, Mark Wright, Gary Barlow, Vanessa Hudgens, Nadya Suleman, Amy Childs, Jake Pavelka and Kitty Brucknell.
How did I do? How would you have done? Try it – and if you pass fifty percent, shame on you.
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